Powells Irak-Märchenstunde revisited

--- Die New York Times legt mal wieder den Finger in die Wunder der gespinnten Geheimdienstinformationen, mit denen die USA vor einem Jahr den Irak-Krieg begründeten. In einem langen Lesestück widmet sie sich dieses Mal der Märchenstunde von US-Außenminister Collin Powells vor den Vereinten Nationen vor einem Jahr: A year later, some of the statements made by Mr. Powell have been confirmed, but many of his gravest findings have been upended by David A. Kay, who until Jan. 23 was Washington's chief weapons inspector. Doubts had surrounded much of the evidence ever since American inspectors arrived in Iraq. Yet in the days since Dr. Kay definitively declared that Iraq had no significant stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons when the invasion began in March, Washington has been seized by the question of how and why such an intelligence gap happened. Even some Republican lawmakers are talking about a failure of egregious proportions — akin, some think, to the failure to grasp the forces pulling apart the Soviet Union in the late 1980's.

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