The worst criticism of Bush's foreign policy yet
A seemingly mild, non-partisan critique in the New York Times.
even the best intelligence can turn out to be mistaken, and the likelihood that this was the case in Iraq shows why pre-emptive war, the Bush administration’s strategy since 9/11, is so ill conceived as a foundation for security policy. If intelligence and risk assessment are sketchy — and when are they not? — using them as the basis for pre-emptive war poses enormous dangers.
It’s one thing to criticise the invasion of Iraq on the basis of faulty evidence, like Howard Dean does. It’s another matter altogether to say that, even if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was behind the September 11th attacks - instead of having destroyed all of them in panic, then pretended it still had them, God knows why; oh, and let us remember that Al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan, not Iraq - then, even if the Bush administration was right, their policy of pre-emptive intervention was still fundamentally risky and flawed.
One last snippet from the New York Times:
This is clearly an uncomfortable question for the Bush administration. Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Times editors. Asked whether Americans would have supported this war if weapons of mass destruction had not been at issue, Mr. Powell said the question was too hypothetical to answer. Asked if he, personally, would have supported it, he smiled, thrust his hand out and said, “It was good to meet you.”