War / Peace

Maverick ex-soldier David Hackworth believed the Bush administration's claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction until recently, but now he's steamed. "A whole bunch of folks here in the USA and around this beat-up globe are all worked up over George W. Bush's 16 shifty words in his 'Let's Do Saddam' State of the Union speech when they should be taking a harder look at the president's judgment on the most critical matter to a state: war," Hackworth writes. "Don't have heartburn over those 16 words.

The Bush and Blair governments, straining to answer critics of the Iraq invasion, are pushing a new campaign. "The 'big impact' plan is designed to overwhelm and silence critics who have sought to put pressure on Tony Blair and George Bush," the Independent's Andrew Buncombe writes. "At the same time both men are working to lower the burden of proof - from finding weapons to finding evidence that there were programs to develop them, even if they lay dormant since the 1980s." Key to this new effort is former U.N.

Columnists for the Washington Times write that "the Pentagon adopted a new strategy in its search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It is called the 'big impact' plan. The plan calls for gathering and holding on to all the information now being collected about the weapons. Rather than releasing its findings piecemeal, defense officials will release a comprehensive report on the arms, perhaps six months from now.

The photographs released by the Bush Administration of Uday and Qusay Hussein's dead bodies have provoked strong reactions throughout the world. The Guardian's Mark Borkowski writes in his column Stuntwatch: "What was the Bush administration's motivation in making the images public and how did the outcomes relate to the stated objectives? Since this is war, this is PR and the Uday and Qusay photograph incident, planned as a surgical media strike, has turned mucky (both in media and military terms) because no one had the sense to think through the PR implications properly.