Seems to me that Dean's position is similar to that espoused in this article...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/0...ion/
07KRIS.html
However , either he could be a bit more clear, or the reporting is mangling his position.
This sounds pretty bad for Dean. If Bush wages a successful war in Iraq - a war which Dean will appear to have opposed - that's going to be a mighty cudgel in 2004.
I do not think that Howard Dean backed himself into a corner. He just simply stated that he found no evidence that makes Iraq a direct threat to the United States. This is with or without so-called weapons development. I admire the fact that after Colin Powel's presentation, he is still the only Democrat with government experiece to oppose this retarted war on Iraq.
I think Dean was entirely on point. He was saying, in essence: Powell made the case to the security council that Iraq is dangerous, but did not make the case that they have to be taken out right this minute, by us, unilaterally.
Remember, Al Qaeda took out our countrymen with box cutters. A motivated enemy will not necessarily wait for WMDs to do what they want.
In other words, this is the wrong war. We need to focus our attention on Al Qaeda. And maybe even North Korea.
We all know how bullies on the playground pick their targets. Seems we are doing that.
If the only reason to go to war is "non-compliance with UN resolutions" it's a pretty damn low bar.
What's appalling is seeing TNR, once again, give Bush a pass here, in favor of turning on a Democrat. And notice it's unsigned as well, cowards.
Dean has said over and over that Bush has not made the case for invading Iraq. No matter how much the warmongers want to make-believe their imaginative fears are real enough to cast aside the historical role of US Foreign Policy, Dean remains true to America's ideals.
Bush hasn't made the case, the nation is split. This is basically a Republican-led war, with a few Democrats in DC, that don't have a clue as to what they stand for, enabled into the scheme.
And Dean continues to be right, distinguishing himself from the other "fall in line" Dems.
Look, there go all the dems, tripping over themselves to say what a wonderful job has been done by this administration. Heaven for fend that one of the dems point out that Powell failed to make a case for a unilateral strike by the US.
Just yet another reason that Dean is the only option!
Considering that the next day we found out that UK Intel dossier that a significant portion of the data Powell based his presentataion on was plagerized from a graduate student's essay and that essay was based on 10 year old historical data, Dean not only doesn't look bad, he looks like a genius to question Powell's facts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/
S...,890916,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/...aq-
Dossier.html
The Nation's take on the UK Intel Dossier plagerism mess...
Speaking to the United Nations on Wednesday, in an address that was broadly portrayed as a case for war with Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that, "Iraq today is actively using its considerable intelligence capabilities to hide its illicit activities." To support that claim, Powell said, "I would call my colleagues attention to the fine paper that United Kingdom distributed yesterday, which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities."
It turns out, however, that much of that "fine paper" – a dossier distributed by the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair under the title, "Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation" – was not a fresh accounting of information based on new "intelligence" about Iraqi attempts to thwart UN weapons inspections. Rather, the document has been exposed by Britain's ITN television network as a cut-and-paste collection of previously published academic articles, some of which were based on dated material.
Substantial portions of the report that Powell used to support his critique of Iraq were lifted from an article written by a postgraduate student who works not in Baghdad but in Monterey, California, and who based much of his research on materials left in Kuwait more than a dozen years ago by Iraqi security services..."
"... To the extent that changes were made, they appear to have been inserted to increase the shock value of the information. Though he said that most of the information that was swiped from his article was reproduced accurately, al-Marashi told BBC's Newsnight program that the British dossier included "cosmetic changes." For instance, he noted, "I said that (Iraqi intelligence operatives) support organizations in what Iraq considers hostile regimes, whereas the UK document refers to it as 'supporting terrorist organizations in hostile regimes'."
In addition to the sections taken from al-Marashi's article, according to the Guardian, "The content of six more pages (of the dossier) relies heavily on articles by Sean Boyne and Ken Gause that appeared in Jane's Intelligence Review in 1997 and last November. None of these sources is acknowledged...."
http://www.thenation.com/thebeat...l?bid=1&pid=374
Here's the case for Gov. Dean's stance on Iraq
Different Man, Different Moment
By ADLAI E. STEVENSON III
Talking about the differences between between what Colin Powell said and what Stevenson's father did in 1962--He waged peace
(go to the op-ed page of today's nytimes.com)
CHICAGO —
...After all, his entire adult life had been defined by seeing to it that the Soviet threat was contained — preventing it from erupting into war. My father, President Kennedy and others remembered the lessons learned from the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke and his wife in 1914. Serbian nationalists behind the killings expected a reaction. But they did not expect to bring down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Politically motivated terrorists are fanatics, not fools. Yet the empire delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, bringing on World War I and its own demise.
My father visited the military cemeteries in Europe as a young man. France lost a quarter of its men between the ages of 18 and 30 during World War I. He remembered Woodrow Wilson's efforts to create a world order that preserved the peace, and the hopes destroyed by the old guard in the Senate, which defeated that League of Nations.
Veterans of World War II, men like my father and Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, went on to pick up where Wilson had failed. The old guard was defeated. The United Nations was established. A new world order contained the Soviet Union, controlled the strategic arms race and preserved peace. America was a real superpower then, its embassies the outposts of hope and security.
Clearly, we live in a different world now. But would going to war truly make it a safer one? A contained Saddam Hussein would remain a pariah in the Middle East. A Saddam Hussein under attack would win sympathy on behalf of his long-suffering people and perhaps the support of terrorists inflamed by the mighty reach of the United States. A war could also set back Iraq's oil production and destabilize other oil-producing states. The economic consequences of war and reconstruction are incalculable; the federal budget is already plunging into deficit from surplus at the fastest rate in history, without even provision for war.
Why, then, the enthusiasm for war? Even top officials at the Central Intelligence Agency have acknowledged that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction are only a threat if Iraq is attacked. And Iraq's government, after all, is the same Baathist regime aided by the Reagan administration when Baghdad used chemical weapons in its bloody war against Iran. If anything, Iraq was stronger and more dangerous then. (I first became acquainted with this regime in 1976 when its minions tore toenails from the feet of my driver, a Kurd, in Baghdad — apparently for having been insufficiently forthcoming during a periodic interrogation).
Many curious explanations are circulating for suddenly making this infamous regime a unilateral casus belli of the United States while North Korea — which may take advantage of the administration's preoccupation with Iraq to develop more nuclear weapons — is an object of relative indifference. Maybe the most plausible is Iraq's purported link to terrorism.
In 1978, I led the first in-depth Congressional study into the growing threat of terrorism and how to combat it. Such a threat reaches far back into history, beyond the label of terrorism. In 1962, President Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman's book "The Guns of August," a history of the unintended chain of consequences that led to the devastation of World War I. He wanted to avoid similar missteps.
The Bush administration would benefit by the same lesson. Sept. 11 was not all that different from Sarajevo at the turn of the century. The 19 men armed with box cutters did not expect to bring down all of America. Only America can do that. They expected a reaction. The one they should get is to be treated as criminals, hunted down and brought to justice. Bringing war only confirms complaints that the United States is waging a war against Islam. It can also give terrorists the reaction they seek.
Whether made by Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, today's threats require a multidimensional response, including efforts to address the widening gap between the haves and the have nots, the horrible conditions in which most people around the world struggle to survive. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a good place to begin. The United States loses credibility when perceived as supporting terror in one part of the Mideast, while professing to fight it elsewhere.
I like to think that if my father were in Secretary Powell's shoes, he would have presented proof of an aggressive deployment of weapons of mass destruction and evidence that Iraq was closer to obtaining nuclear arms — a claim the administration made not so long ago. The Bush administration would have supported the United Nations, its inspectors and international containmen
DavidNYC - I'm not sure you're right on this one.
The way I see it, this is a winning position for Dean, and he should remain cautiously against war in Iraq without sounding like a hopeless dove. Questioning our national security priorities, rather than the war itself, seems to be a good way to do this. We have to remember he's still a longshot and this distinction between him and other candidates may be a worthwhile gamble, if you see it in purely political terms (for the moment I'm ignoring moral/ideological aspects).
For starters, Dean will probably attract people who feel strongly against the war, which will most likely remain an important subgroup of the Democratic voting block during primaries. There will almost certainly be a voting population that will feel alienated by all the other candidates for supporting a preemptive war, and if Dean is their only choice, they'll be a significant unified block if other voters are split between several candidates.
In terms of the wider voting population, here are the most likely outcomes of a war in Iraq, as I see them:
1. Most likely outcome - it will go mostly as expected, but will never be an overwhelmingly popular victory. Bush's approval jump will end up being brief in this scenario. People may come to support it, but it won't translate into a major voting issue, even less so than Gulf I. Criticism of Dean on this issue just won't make that much of a difference, especially if domestic issues are prominent.
2. Second most likely outcome - It'll be a somewhat popular war and hurt Dean.
3. Third most likely outcome - something moderately unpopular will happen during/after the war and Dean will score some points.
4. This is least likely on my list, but I do think there is a real possibility that this will turn out to be quite onpopular, most likely for reasons we can't anticipate. Dean will become the ONLY major candidate to have opposed it.
The way I see it, assuming he's somewhat of a longshot candidate, the odds are for his current position. Understand that my argument is not one of whether or not invading Iraq is good foreign policy. You may have good reasons to think that it is, or is not. Most of the reasons _for_ war are ones that will come to fruition beyond the political time range of the nomination process. The gut reaction to the war will predict its immediate popularity, and I'm not sure a swift victory here will play out the same as it did in '91. In '91 we had the following circumstances: 1. the most recent major ground war was Vietnam -people were ashamed that we lost that, and that we treated troops disrespectfully. It was an opportunity to move past that. 2. We freed an invaded country and moved out. Sounds honorable and clean. 3. We were coming off the Cold War, not the more united world community of the '90's; the war increased our solidarity with the world, rather than weaken it. 4. We didn't have to sport the bill for the war, allies paid us for it. 5. We had no other real threat - we do now.
My feeling is that this one will play out very differently from Gulf I or Afghanistan, from a public perception standpoint.
CTDem2 - I'm definitely not sure I'm right about this one, so that makes two of us. 
My greatest concern is more along the line of your #2. Namely, Bush wins a very popular war (creepy term that, "popular war") - along the lines of Gulf War I - and Dean is painted to look hopelessly anti-war.
Now, having said that, we all know that Bush the Elder didn't manage to coast to victory on the strength of his Gulf War popularity. However, Bill Clinton was not easily characterized as some naive dove. Then again, Clinton successfully shifted the subject of the debate to the economy, stupid. If that doesn't get better, and Dean is as skillful as Clinton, then the war issue might get taken off the table. (This is all assuming, of course, that Dean wins the Dem nod.)
Jerome - You called TNR cowardly for not signing the blog entry that was critical of Dean. I'm not sure I can agree with that. I don't consider Tapped or the New York Times editorial page cowardly when I disagree with an attack of theirs. (Maybe wrong or dumb, but not cowardly.) Which inspires me to ask a question... when & why did newspaper editorial boards decide not to sign their editorials, especially when op-ed columnists always sign theirs?
bush got off too easy with afghanistan. we never see anything in the press about what the hell is going on there now and what actually happened when they were bombing the hell out of the caves. i wanna see geraldo standing on "hallow" ground.
dean made a statement about the energy policy and the gao decided not to appeal the ruling on cheney's top secret meetings. the ap reported only 7 senators and congressmen supported david walker's case. i'm going to write walker and find out which 7 because the rest of these democrats need to be called on the carpet. they had better start acting like the opposition or think about retiring. as the resident says, "you are either with us or against us" - it's time the democrats remember who they work for.
"when & why did newspaper editorial boards decide not to sign their editorials, especially when op-ed columnists always sign theirs?"
It's similar to the court opinions. When they don't want their fingerprints upon the matter. That piece by TNR was a hit-job, no one would write that sort of thing with their name on it, and that's why I called it cowardly.