The View From the UK:

Here is the latest dispatch from our Senior UK correspondent:

Things are going well in the United Kingdom, it's paper writing season,
so that's why I've been mum for a while. I have this to report:

I attended a lecture at the
University of Edinburgh given by Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons
inspector. His talk was "The means of reducing the spread of weapons
of mass destruction" wherein he advocated the use of apolitical,
multinational weapons inspectors as an appropriate route to detecting
weapons. He was impressively dispassionate and reasonable for a man
who had been ousted from his job, despite pleas for more time, and who
was eventually vindicated in his claims that there was no evidence that
Iraq had WMD.

Despite my obvious antipathy towards Bush, I would like to adopt Dr.
Blix's reasonable dispassionate and suggest this strategy for to Tyler for
casting his vote. I believe that the War in Iraq (and by extension the
war on terror) is central to deciding whether to re-hire Bush as
president, just as he does himself. My thinking is this:

In retrospect it seems that we were totally wrong in our stated
motivation for the invasion: that Iraq presented an immediate danger to
the USA. There are only two reasons why this could be. Either:
1# The Bush Administration manipulated the intelligence that they were
presented with in order to justify a war that they wanted for their own
ends, or
2# Intelligence was wildly inaccurate.

From these two reasons I draw the following conclusions.
If #1 is true, then Bush should not be re-elected.
$100,000,000,000 in taxpayer costs plus 500+ US casualties is not in
any way justifiable, and we should not trust this man to make future
decisions.
If #2 is true, and we do have inherently flawed intelligence in the
most important of matters, then it does not matter who the
commander-in-chief is. No matter how gung-ho our leader is he will not
be able to fight the war on terror any better than anyone else. In
which case we need to turn to other issues, like the economy.
I therefore conclude that Bush is either not fit to run the
country, or no more fit than John Kerry. Ergo, John Kerry is the safer
bet.