This is probably not what John Kerry had in mind when he exhorted the president to seek more support from our allies:
Russian President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites), in comments sure to help President Bush (news - web sites), declared Friday that Russia knew Iraq (news - web sites)'s Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) had planned terror attacks on U.S. soil and had warned Washington.
Putin said Russian intelligence had been told on several occasions that Saddam's special forces were preparing to attack U.S. targets inside and outside the United States.
"After the events of September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received information that the official services of the Saddam regime were preparing 'terrorist acts' on the United States and beyond its borders," he told reporters.
"This information was passed on to our American colleagues," he said. He added, however, that Russian intelligence had no proof that Saddam's agents had been involved in any particular attack.
The Kremlin leader's comments were certain to bolster Bush, whose campaign for re-election in November is under pressure from the Iraq crisis.
Ok, we have no trouble thinking of reasons for Putin to, hmm, mislead us about this. But it is certainly puzzling.
And the real kicker would be for Chirac to chime in - the French presumably had some spies mingled in with their commercial contacts.
UPDATE: No, this is probably not what John Kerry had in mind when he advocated multilateral diplomacy either:
NINE MONTHS AGO, as a confrontation loomed between Iran and the United Nations over Iran's illicit nuclear programs, three European governments staged a preemptive operation. Flying to Tehran, the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany struck a deal with Iran's Islamic regime: The Europeans would block a referral of Iran's violations to the U.N. Security Council and provide technical cooperation, and in exchange Iran would stop its work on uranium enrichment, fully disclose its nuclear programs and accept a new U.N. protocol giving inspectors greater access.
...This week, with the world's attention focused on the troubled situation in Iraq, the European version of preemption is yielding its own bitter -- if less bloody -- result. Inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency have reported that Iran never honored its agreement;
...there can be no disguising the fact that the European strategy for handling one of the world's most dangerous proliferation problems is proving feckless. It has not produced the daily casualties and chaos now seen in Iraq. But it could, within a year or two, lead to an outcome as bad as or worse than any now foreseen in Baghdad...
Fine, after a moment of gloating, and a quick trip to the dictionary to find the French word for schadenfreude, I'll admit that this is terrible news - obviously we all hoped that diplomacy would succeed, and the Righteous Right would have trumpeted it as a success for George "Bad Cop" Bush anyway.
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