US embassy cable - 03OTTAWA2129

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 OTTAWA 002129 
 
SIPDIS 
 
STATE FOR WHA/CAN, WHA/PDA 
WHITE HOUSE PASS NSC/WEUROPE, NSC/WHA 
 
E.O. 12958:  N/A 
TAGS: KPAO, KMDR, OIIP, OPRC, CA, TFUS01, TFUS02, TFUS03 
SUBJECT:  MEDIA REACTION: IRAQ; MIDDLE EAST 
 
 
IRAQ 
1.   "Bush's 16 words" 
The conservative National Post opined (7/22): "...As 
things stand, the pro-and anti-Bush camps sit at a sort 
of stalemate, both sides waiting for the leak that will 
definitively vindicate their version of events. But it 
is more likely the brouhaha will end with an 
inconclusive anticlimax, one whose ultimate effect is 
to vindicate the President. Far from being a scandal 
'worse than Watergate,' or an effort to deliberately 
'mislead' the public, the State of the Union glitch 
seems to have resulted in large part from the interplay 
between an overzealous, but well-intentioned, White 
House staffer and an insufficiently assertive, but 
equally well-intentioned, CIA analyst.... [T]here is 
every reason to expect the false scandal surrounding 
Mr. Bush's January speech will subside. Enemies of the 
President may find an 
issue to bring him down in the 2004 election. But it 
won't be this one." 
 
2.   "The tragic cost of a rash Iraq war" 
The liberal Toronto Star editorialized (7/22): "British 
scientist David Kelly should be alive today. But like 
thousands of others, he has become a casualty of the 
American/British rush to make war on Iraq.... Blair has 
ordered a judicial probe of this tragedy, seeking to 
absolve his government of blame. But he already has 
lost the public's confidence.... In Washington, U.S. 
President George Bush is also under siege for 
exaggerating Saddam's nuclear ambitions to justify war. 
His support is fading. There is a savage 
irony in this postwar blame game. Tragic as his death 
is, Kelly is just one victim of Bush's obsession with 
'regime change' in Baghdad, and Blair's eager 
compliance. Some 275 American and British troops have 
also died, along with more than 8,500 Iraqi civilians 
and military. They are the other casualties in Bush's 
drive to 'save' the world from weapons of mass 
destruction that Washington has yet to produce. The 
American taxpayer, meanwhile, is on the hook for more 
than $60 billion for the war and $1 billion a week 
since.... This is a mess, and a fearsome price for a 
war that U.N. inspectors cautioned against from the 
start. They loathed Saddam's vicious regime. But they 
believed, rightly, that sanctions were working. That 
Baghdad was contained. That there was no need to rush 
to war. They were right." 
 
3.   "Through the fog of war" 
Contributing foreign editor Eric Margolis observed in 
the conservative tabloid Ottawa Sun (7/20): "...As the 
furor in Washington grows over Bush's admission of now- 
discredited claims about Iraqi uranium imports from 
Africa in his keynote state of the union address, 
administration officials are viciously blaming one 
another... Blame rightly belongs to Bush himself, and 
to his woefully inadequate national security adviser, 
Condoleezza Rice. Either they knew the uranium story 
was false, or they were unfit for high office. For one 
thing, uranium ore is no more threatening than cake 
mix.... Bush's crusade against Iraq was designed to 
assuage Americans' fury and fear over 9/11 by making 
Saddam Hussein a whipping boy for the attack in which 
he had no part. The jolly little wars against 
Afghanistan and Iraq were also designed to make 
Americans forget the Bush White House had been caught 
with its pants down by 9/11, and was asleep at the 
switch in the Enron financial disaster. Who now 
remembers that Attorney General John Ashcroft actually 
cut spending on anti-terrorism before 9/11, or that 
Washington was giving millions to the Taliban until 
four months before 9/11? How better to get Americans to 
support a war than by insinuating, as did Bush, that 
Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and claiming Saddam was 
about to attack the U.S. with weapons of mass 
destruction? A pre-emptive attack on Iraq was urgent to 
save America, insisted Bush. A weak-kneed Congress and 
credulous public went along with White House 
warmongering, while the spineless UN secretary 
general, Kofi Annan, and UN arms inspector Hans Blix 
wriggled like jellyfish. Most Democrats, including some 
presidential candidates, joined Bush's lynch mob.... A 
torrent of lies poured from the administration, all 
aimed at justifying a war of aggression, thwarting the 
UN Security Council, 
ending UN inspections in Iraq and grabbing Iraq's oil 
riches. Virtually all administration claims about 
Iraq's weapons had been disproved by UN inspectors 
before Bush went to war.... And the biggest canard of 
all: Bush's absurd claims there was 'no doubt that the 
Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of 
the most lethal weapons ever devised,' and that it 
'threatened all mankind.' Thanks to the shameful 
complicity of the U.S. media, which amplified White 
House propaganda, Americans were led to believe 
Iraq attacked the U.S. on 9/11, and was in league with 
al-Qaida. Bush's faux war on terrorism was redirected, 
by clever White House spin, into a hugely popular 
campaign against Iraq. The failure to kill terrorist 
leader Osama bin Laden was covered up by the rush to 
kill Saddam. The litany of lies produced by the White 
House and its neo-con allies would be farcical were it 
not for the deaths of so many Americans and Iraqis. Of 
course, all politicians lie. But lying to get one's 
country into an unnecessary war is an outrage, and 
ought to be an impeachable offence." 
 
4.   "Intelligence blunder" 
Under the sub-heading, "War in Iraq was justified, but 
misleading public was not," the right-of-center Calgary 
Herald commented (7/22): "The fact that weapons of mass 
destruction have not yet been found in post-war Iraq is 
a sore spot for those who supported the war. But the 
recent public furor in the U.S. and Britain over 
inaccurate intelligence reports shows that half the 
truth is worse than a whole lie....  Historians may 
forgive Bush's and Blair's use of hyped-up intelligence 
reports, but voters tend to be far less forgiving. It 
is not yet clear whether the world is a safer place now 
with Saddam out of Iraq, but Americans and Britons have 
good reason to be less trusting of their leaders." 
 
5.   "Where are WMDs?" 
The conservative tabloid Winnipeg Sun (7/15) remarked: 
"It's a simple question for U.S. President George Bush 
to answer: Where are Iraq's weapons of mass destruction 
(WMD) - whether nuclear, chemical or biological?... 
Iraq's WMD - not its WMD program, a word now starting 
to enter the Bush/Blair vocabulary - was the main 
justification for this war. We believed it was a valid 
one.... The moral justification the coalition gave for 
invading Iraq was that it was, in effect, an act of 
self-defence because of Iraq's WMD, Saddam's proven 
willingness to use them and his known support of 
terrorism. If the coalition cannot produce convincing 
evidence of the WMD it said Iraq had, the moral case 
for launching a pre-emptive war will have been fatally 
undermined." 
 
MIDDLE EAST 
6.   "The real 'road map' lies behind the scenes" 
Ottawa Citizen contributor David Warren wrote in the 
conservative National Post (7/19): "...The Israel- 
Palestine negotiations are a U.S. State Department 
task, and the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is the 
chief ball-carrier. But the team behind him is 
remarkable, both for its informality and small size. 
President Bush's idea was to keep it this way on 
purpose: to avoid creating the kind of institutional 
force field that pushes problems further away as it 
advances toward them, keeping them insoluble. He 
has instead created the diplomatic equivalent of one of 
the Pentagon's special forces, which go in and out of 
hot spots without embedded reporters.... The sort of 
real problems that are being dealt with behind the 
scenes, by truly tireless multi-person shuttle 
diplomacy, include the intifada legacy of Palestinian 
terror cells and media incitement, on the one 
side; and specific, over-visible Israeli security 
measures, on the other. It is less like a 
constitutional progression toward a new Palestinian 
state, and more like a protracted mutual disarmament 
and disengagement between two already existing 
governments. The point is to snuff out the intifada, 
and the Israeli response to the intifada, while 
building a new, and co-operative, security arrangement 
between the two sides, modelled specifically on that 
which already exists between Israel and Jordan. While 
I'm going out on a limb to write this, I think the 
grander, operatic questions of border drawing and 
refugee settlements are already answered, or 
more precisely, mutually assumed.... It remains, 
unfortunately, in Yasser Arafat's interest to wait for 
his moment to blow everything up - since his own power 
increases with conflict and diminishes with peace. It 
is an elaborate game getting him and keeping him 
sidelined - one that's still being played. And the 
Europeans, led by the French, continue to indulge the 
soft-headed and immodest policy of throwing him 
diplomatic lifelines, by publicly recognizing him in 
defiance of U.S. pressure. That is the chief external 
thing getting in the way." 
 
CELLUCCI