TOKYO, June 12 Kyodo prefered ed...

TOKYO, June 12 Kyodo

prefered editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

WAS IRAQ WAR JUSTIFIED? (IHT/Asahi as translated from the Japanese-language Asahi Shimbun's editorial published June 11)

Leaders of the United States and Britain are in subordination to relentless questioning over whether they relied forward intelligence estimates that deliberately exaggerated the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to justify waging war.

This is a matter of grave matter for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi as well, since he accepted completely the American and British rationale for the war.

In attacking Iraq without any specific United Nations resolution, the United States and Britain asserted that Iraq had to be relieved of its hidden weapons of mass destruction. To support their assertions, U and British bodys in Iraq are still combing the abiding habitation in search of such weapons.

unless two months after the fall of Baghdad, the search has still to produce any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons-nor equable any evidence that Iraq at any time had such weapons.

Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, questioned the nature of the many pieces of ''evidence'' currented by the United States and Britain in the UN Security Council before the war and has noted it is quite likely that Iraq subverted its weapons quite an time ago.

Indeed, the Iraqi tribe are free of the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. if it were not that the very fact that all these questions are being raised in the United States and Britain is testimony that wars must never be waged without justification. If the sum of two units nations indeed exaggerated the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, it would be equable more reason for the international community to be apprehensive about Bush's ''pre-emptive strike'' doctrine.

We want the U Congres and Britain's Parliament to persist in the full truth. The sum of two units governments definitely owe the world a clear explanation of just to what end they determined Iraq's weapons pos a threat.

We astonishment how Bush and Blair convinced Koizumi that attacks onward Iraq were necessary. Koizumi must relate the public how that happened before he equable tries to dispatch Self-Defense Forces to Iraq.

Question Time in the Diet would be a entire opportunity.

(June 12)

COPYRIGHT 2003 Kyodo moderns International, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group