Powell Completely Flops

Colin Powell, in his U.N. speech earlier this week, referred to several pieces of evidence of Iraq's threat to its neighbors and the U.S., but none of the evidence presented to the U.N was shown to be serious enough to warrant an invasion by Bush. In fact, most of the evidence was outdated or just plain wrong.

"Indeed, chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has rejected many of Powell's claims. For example, the respected Swedish diplomat has insisted that there is no evidence of mobile biological weapons laboratories, of Iraq trying to foil inspectors by moving equipment before his teams arrived, or that his organization has been infiltrated by Iraqi spies. The weakest part of Powell's presentation was his effort to link the decidedly secular Iraqi regime with the fundamentalist al Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden has referred to Saddam as "an apostate, an infidel, and a traitor to Islam." Reports cited by Powell attempting to link Saddam to affiliated groups like Ansar al Islam have come almost exclusively from anti-Saddam Iraqis in exile hoping that establishing such a link could encourage U.S. military action to oust the dictator; as a result, they are not generally considered credible. In reality, Ansar al Islam's stated goal is to overthrow the secular Baathist regime in Baghdad and replace it with an Islamist state. The efforts to tie alleged al Qaeda figure Abu Musab Al Zarqawi to the Iraqi regime have also been based largely on unattributed sources. That he received medical treatment in Baghdad is no more proof of direct involvement by the Iraqi regime in his activities than the presence of scores of al Qaeda leaders in allied countries like Saudi Arabia is proof of state collusion either. Ansar al Islam fighters and their al Qaeda supporters have been seen only in autonomous Kurdish areas beyond Iraqi government control. Indeed, Powell's claim that there had been "decades" of contact between Saddam and al Qaeda was particularly odd, given that the terrorist network is less than ten years old. Furthermore, none of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi, none of al Qaeda's leaders are Iraqi, and none of the money trail has been traced to Iraq. (The same cannot be said of Saudi Arabia, but the kingdom is considered an important U.S. ally.)"

One especially embarrassing consequence of Powell's speech was the section where he "praised the UK document as "a fine paper... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities". "The British government's latest report on Iraq's non-compliance with weapons inspections, which claims to draw on 'intelligence material', has been revealed as a wholesale plagiarism of three old and publicly-available articles, one of them by a graduate student in California," according to an assessment by Cambridge analyst Glen Rangwala that circulated yesterday. HERE is a complete analysis of the supposedly fine British document.

My son Will responds to all this with his own plagarized comment: "All work and no plagarism makes for a dull read." (Taken from F*E*G, by Robin Hirsch.)