What U.S. newspapers are saying
www.upi.com From the National Desk Published 3/1/2003 10:06 AM View printer-friendly version
New York Times
Nothing so far has shamed President Bush into adopting a more aggressive policy toward the threat of global warming. He has been denounced by mainstream scientists, deserted by his progressive friends in industry and sued by seven states. Still he clings stubbornly to a voluntary policy aimed at merely slowing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, despite an overwhelming body of evidence that only binding targets and a firm timetable will do the job.
Now there is fresh criticism from sources Mr. Bush may find harder to ignore. Last week Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Mr. Bush's most loyal ally in the debate over Iraq, gently but firmly rebuked the president for abandoning the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global climate change and for succumbing to the insupportable notion that fighting global warming will impede economic growth. ...
The prime minister's approach is everything Mr. Bush's is not. It conveys a sense of urgency, calls for common sacrifice and offers a coherent vision of how to get from here to there. It is, in short, a recipe for the leadership that until not too long ago the world had been looking to America to provide. -0-
Washington Times
President Bush's Wednesday night speech on his vision for the post-war Middle East revealed an American president fully seized of a classic Wilsonian passion to nurture -- nay, force -- democratic government on a troubled world. It also revealed a president coldly determined to disarm rogue states of their weapons of mass destruction.
In the chancelleries of Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea and other rogue states, policy planners will surely be studying closely the president's words: "Across the world we are hunting down the killers ... And we are opposing the greatest danger in the war on terror -- outlaw regimes arming with weapons of mass destruction. ... The passing of Saddam Hussein's regime will deprive terrorists networks of a wealthy patron ... And other regimes will be given a clear warning that support for terror will not be tolerated." Whether those words induce change or defiance in the threatened states, the next year or two are likely to be over-brimming with international high drama, change -- and possibly conflict.
For any American president, the threatened release of such military violence can only be justified -- both internally in his conscience, and externally by the public -- if it is premised on a high moral cause. And it is in President Bush's speech that we saw last Wednesday one of the highest American presidential expressions of belief in the universality and imminence of Democracy: "It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life ... freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror." ...
President Bush is not a man for whom words are particularly friendly or an end in themselves; he uses them only for the truth of the matter stated. But he may be our most stubborn, determined and action-oriented president since Andy Jackson. Intellectuals talk breezily about democracy, and then talk about something else. We suspect that having said these words this week, President Bush intends to go about the practical business of trying to implement them. It will be stunning if he succeeds, a bloody mess if he fails, and not many alternatives in between. -0-
Washington Post
U.S. OFFICIALS long sought to play down the danger that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez poses by pointing out that his acts rarely matched his words. Mr. Chavez, who was elected president after promising a socialist revolution for Venezuela's poor majority, might talk about confiscating property, supporting leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia or admiring Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein, but in practice he mostly remained within democratic boundaries.
Yet now the gap between Mr. Chavez's inflammatory rhetoric and his actions is narrowing. Having survived a strike by his opposition, Mr. Chavez has proclaimed 2003 the "year of the offensive"; so far he has taken steps to bring the economy under state control, eliminate independent media and decapitate the opposition. ...
Spain recently joined with the United States, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Portugal to support a negotiated political solution to the crisis through the mediation of Cesar Gaviria, the secretary general of the Organization of American States and a former president of Colombia. The opposition, which at times has supported anti-democratic means of ousting Mr. Chavez, now endorses Mr. Gaviria's proposal for a new presidential election or a referendum on Mr. Chavez's recall. The current constitution would allow for a referendum to be held as early as August; that may be the easiest and best way out. But Mr. Chavez knows he would very likely lose a fair vote, and he will likely do everything possible to prevent it. That's why it is essential that the Bush administration join with the "group of friends" to insist that Mr. Chavez release his political prisoners, stop his revolutionary "offensive" and commit to a decisive vote. It may be democracy's last chance. -0-
Boston Globe
Saddam Hussein's last-minute acquiescence to the UN inspectors' demand that he begin destroying more than 120 Samoud 2 surface-to-surface missiles falls far short of compliance with the UN Security Council's terms for full and complete disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Conversely, if Saddam refused to destroy his Samoud 2 missiles, that act of defiance by itself would not justify the use of military force to disarm the Iraqi dictator.
The Samoud 2 missiles are proscribed weapons because in test firings they traveled beyond the limit of 150 kilometers, or 93 miles, permitted in the UN cease-fire resolutions that Saddam accepted in 1991. The sound reason for limiting the range of Saddam's missiles was to protect Iraq's neighbors from a serial aggressor.
Spokesmen for Saddam have a point -- however technical -- when they complain that the missiles were tested without warheads or guidance systems. Their argument is that the Samouds' range might not have exceeded 150 kilometers if they had been carrying the extra weight of warheads and guidance systems, which they would carry if fired in a combat situation.
More important, the missiles are not weapons of mass destruction, even if they may qualify as potential delivery systems for such weapons within a short range.
This distinction is worth making because the core of the case for forcing Saddam either to comply with the Security Council's demands or be disarmed by force rests upon the danger of allowing this particular mass murderer, with his history of cruelty against his own people and recklessness, to hoard stores of anthrax, botulinum toxin, VX nerve gas, Sarin, and mustard gas. ...
It is because of this threat -- not his Samoud 2 missiles -- that Saddam must be disarmed. In the report he will present in public next week, the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, laments that Saddam's response to his disarmament obligations has been ''very limited.'' If Saddam is to be disarmed without a war, he will have to open his underground tunnels and bunkers to the weapons inspectors and lead them to his instruments of mass murder so they can be destroyed, much as the inspectors are planning to destroy his short-range missiles. -0-
Rocky Mountain News
Terrorists and the rogue states that support them will stop at nothing to take innocent lives and destroy democracy. This is a lesson our nation and the world learned on Sept. 11, 2001. It is also why the work the United States does to secure nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Russia is the first line of defense preventing such weapons from falling into the hands of the terrorists and states that would harm us.
This security imperative is embedded in the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, an act of the U.S. Congress, that over the past decade has evolved to include a wide range of nonproliferation, disarmament and demilitarization projects in Russia. It was reaffirmed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in two U.S.-Russian summits and the G8 communiques last year.
But as Rocky Mountain News reporter Ann Imse has shown us in her revealing three-part series on the public health disaster at Mayak, the former Soviet nuclear weapons production facility, such efforts are unlikely to succeed unless the Kremlin moves out of the woods of autocracy instead of deeper into them. ...
Mayak is a grim microcosm of totalitarian socialism's many failures. Which is why, in poll after poll, Russians continue to value democratic ideals and practices. They know truth, as symbolized in the gold- crowned tooth of Mayak worker Gennady Krasnov, is easier found wherever liberty flourishes. -0- (Compiled by United Press International)