Bush, Kerry Square Off on the War in Iraq
While President George W. Bush pledged that Iraq would enjoy a new birth of freedom now that the U.S.-led coalition had removed dictator Saddam Hussein from power, the Democrats' Senator John Kerry pointed to a classified National Intelligence Estimate that paints a bleak picture of Iraq's prospects over the next year-and-a-half. Do you think the election could turn on the war in Iraq?
President Bush on Thursday told an audience in Minnesota that Iraq "is headed toward democracy." He said the country has "a strong prime minister," a national council, "and national elections are scheduled for January."
Contrasting this with the country's history over the last several decades, President Bush reminded his audience that "It wasn't all that long ago that Saddam Hussein was in power with his torture chambers and mass graves."
That picture was in stark contrast to the one drawn a few hours later by Senator Kerry, who spoke to the same audience of National Guard conferees in Las Vegas that Mr. Bush had addressed earlier in the week.
Mr. Bush was continuing to assert that freedom in Iraq "is on the march," as Senator Kerry and his campaign staff circulated information said to be from a classified intelligence assessment of the prospects for the Iraq war over the next 18 months.
Citing Iraq's lack of a democratic governmental infrastructure or solid basis upon which to build, the sixty-page report by the National Intelligence Council painted a bleak near-term picture for that country, particularly in the most pessimistic of three scenarios forecast in the document.
Of three likely outcomes, the classified intelligence estimate said the best that could be hoped for was a sort of "tenuous" stability. At the other end of the three possibilities was civil war.
Speaking to his audience at the conference in Las Vegas, Senator Kerry seized on the negative intelligence report's findings, which were prepared in July but not released to the public.
Responding to Senator Kerry's charges, White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed the reported intelligence estimate as a statement of the "obvious" and decried "naysayers" taking a negative outlook on the war.
Do you think the election could turn on the war in Iraq?
[Views expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of CompuServe, the Forum or any government, agency or news organization.]
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Do you think he'll even be THREATENED with any repercussions? If they pulled his clearance, he'ld be blaming the Bush White House, instead of his own big mouth!
