World's media focus on US 'credibility gap

Little more than a week after David Kay, who recently resigned as the chief US weapons inspector in charge of the Iraq Survey Group, announced that Iraq did not have large stockpiles of WMD in the leadup to the war, US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced separately that their countries would launch investigations as to the failures of prewar intelligence on Iraq. Regardless of the results, media around the world increasingly suggest the US now faces a credibility gap detrimental to its ability to conduct foreign policy.

"America confronts a crisis of credibility" reads the headline of an opinion piece by former US President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, published in the Australian daily The Age:

"America is preponderant in the world today, but it is not omnipotent. Thus America must have the capacity, when needed, to mobilize the genuine and sincere support of other countries, particularly of its closest allies. It can do so only if it is trusted. ... Trust is an essential ingredient of power, and its loss bears directly on America's long-term national security. An America that is preponderant but distrusted is an America internationally weakened."

As the BBC reports, the Foreign Affairs Committee, an influential group of members of the British Parliament, argues that "the continued failure of the coalition to find WMD in Iraq has damaged the credibility of the US and UK in their conduct of the war against terrorism." Although the committee welcomed the capture of Saddam Hussein after the war, the MPs also expressed concern that "that the war in Iraq has possibly made terrorist attacks against British nationals and British interests more likely in the short term."

The Associated Press reports that lawmakers from both parties are saying that US credibility is "being undermined by uncertainty over flawed intelligence that led the United States into war in Iraq."

David Kay, after previously refusing to comment on US policy decisions, said Sunday, "If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence, that is credible to the American people and others abroad, you can't have a policy of preemption."

Agence-France Presse leads a report with the following provocative question it suggested may be posed to US diplomats in East Asia: "If the United States did get it 'all wrong' on Iraq's non-existent arsenal, why should the world trust its intelligence on North Korea's nuclear drive which sparked a diplomatic meltdown with Pyongyang?" The article discusses Chinese and South Korean doubts about the US assertion that North Korea has an enriched uranium program.

Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, asserted in a piece published last week by The Christian Science Monitor that the highest costs to US credibility would be felt with regard to North Korea.

Seeds of doubt sown in Iraq over US intelligence now have countries in East Asia, including close US allies, openly doubting US intelligence about North Korea's nuclear program. These doubts may enable North Korea to divide the US from its allies in the region and reduce the chances for a peaceful termination of North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions.

In an interview with Newsweek, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei said: "I think the sanctions worked, and more importantly, the inspections worked. A combination of sanctions and inspections managed to disarm Iraq." Kay, who was outspoken in his view that Iraq possessed WMD before the war, also indicated in his interim report last October that the UN sanctions and inspections worked.

A Japan Times editorial suggests that the "blow to US credibility" based on the flawed intelligence about Iraq's WMD will not be easily repaired.

Mr. Bush argued for the need to go to war because Iraq's possession of WMD posed an urgent danger. No such claim can be leveled against "WMD-related programs." The US must discover why that gap existed and explain to the world why it acted on the basis of faulty intelligence. Failure to do so will ensure that doubts arise every time the US tries to marshal international support for action in the future.

The editorial also ends by saying that "the crisis on the Korean Peninsula renders the process (of the US WMD invesigation) more urgent."