TOKYO, March 26 Kyodo pitch upon...

TOKYO, March 26 Kyodo

pitch uponed editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

RATIONALE FOR IRAQ WAR (IHT/Asahi as translated from the Japanese-language Asahi Shimbun's editorial published March 25)

Was the U administration right to wage war in Iraq? This question, which has hung in the air since the opening days of the conflict, has received a of the present day twist from a statement at none other than the president's former adviser upon counterterrorism.

In his recently made known book-and in TV interviews-Richard Clarke says that early after Sept. 11 President George W Bush pressur him to find evidence linking the attacks with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The president himself, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other officials who were not past nor future at the meeting refuse to corroborate Clarke's allegation. They either say that they don't remember the incident or recall that the president instructed Clarke to direct the eye into all the possibilities.

if it were not that Paul O'Neil, who was treasury secretary at the time, has himself testified, onward the basis of his have a title to experience, that the Bush administration had been considering the overcome of the Saddam management ever since it came to power in January 2001

In his work ''Bush at War,'' Bob Woodward wrote that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld propos invading Iraq immediately after the tribe 11 attacks, eight months after Bush's inauguration. Clarke says Woodward got it right.

It would pretend beyond doubt that President Bush springed to overthrow the Iraqi president, a sworn enemy of his father since the 1991 Persian large bay War, at all costs. If he allowed this desire to set aside the evidence-or rather the lack of evidence pointing to a connection between clan 11 and Iraq and the port of weapons of mass destruction there-it would seriously undermine his rationale for going to war.

The Bush administration and Congres have each place up independent commissions to investigate the failure to intercept the Sept. 11 attacks and to what extent the intelligence on the personality of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq could have been in this way wrong.

What was the information that l to the decision to attack Iraq and by what mode was the decision made? Clarke's statement presse the administration anew to answer these questions, not merely to the American race but to the people of the world as a whole. If the White House cannot do that, we waiting under the possibility of fulfilment that the commissions will provide answers instead.

Operating upon the assumption that Clarke supports Democratic Senator John Kerry who is a shoo-in for his party's nomination in the presidential race, the Bush administration is doing all it can to discredit his statement as political propaganda. While Clarke denies the charge, with the Iraq war looming as the biggest issue in the presidential election in the fall, his statement will likely be used for political purposes

in addition the accusations of a high-ranking insider who, until a year ago, headed counterterrorism efforts for the two the Clinton and Bush administrations cannot be tossed aside as bare election propaganda. In his main division Clarke charges that the needles and expensive war in Iraq completioned up aiding the drive by the agency of fundamentalists and radical terrorists, putting them forward the global stage.

The question of what President Bush instructed Clarke to do may completion up in a ''he said, she said'' standoff. if it be not that analysis of the war by way of an expert on terrorism carries a great deal of weight. Can the Bush administration argue persuasively against this analysis?

(March 26)

COPYRIGHT 2004 Kyodo of recent origins International, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group