WTF Is It Now?!?

The world press on the missing WMDs

India (Outlook India): The U.S. won the Iraq war easily. It may win a war against Iran almost as easily. But what it has lost is incomparably more important and more precious. This is the moral leadership of the world. To use a term coined last August by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former president Carter's secretary of state, America is perilously close to becoming a Global Gangster. We are all the losers from this, because as he also pointed out, "without a respected and legitimate law enforcer global security could be in serious jeopardy."

Russia (Pravda): There was no justification whatsoever for the illegal and murderous campaign unleashed by the Bush administration against Iraq. If this was the case, and everything indicates that it was, where was the justification for the wholesale slaughter of Iraq's civilians?... If people are killed in a war which is unjustifiable under international law, the act is a war crime and those responsible are war criminals, meaning that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are murderers.

Saudi Arabia (Arab News): [A]fter countless sorties and thousands of bombs, and thousands of lives, estimates that range anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 civilians and military personnel dead in Iraq, there still is no WMD ... Instead there is oil. Oil that the U.S. and the British quickly claimed as their own in their brazen resolution put forth at the U.N., allowing them to disperse of it as they saw fit "in the interest of rebuilding Iraq." This is not a democracy here, but a disguised dictatorship, with spoils going to the victors. From blatantly ignoring calls for restraint by the U.N. to allowing the mess that is Iraq today to develop, the occupiers have indeed made most of us forget what it was all about... Did the end justify the means? Or are the occupiers no better than the oppressors they replaced?

United Kingdom (the Guardian): Transcripts of a private conversation between Jack Straw and Colin Powell expressing serious doubts about the reliability of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons program are being circulated in western government circles where there is a growing feeling that officials were deceived into supporting the Iraq war.

United Arab Emirates (Gulf News): The American and British governments appear to have misled the world with their claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This failure of truth will now give both governments a serious challenge when they ask the Arab world to trust them in their efforts to rebuild Iraq or to find peace in Israel. Why should the Arabs believe governments that treat the truth so lightly?

- Snipped from Salon.