Wonder what allies this refers to? Those wonderful allies that did everything they could to stall and block us in the UN over the Iraq war? He's worried about those wonderful 'allies'?
Oil for food folks.
"Wonder what allies this refers to? Those wonderful allies that did everything they could to stall and block us in the UN over the Iraq war? He's worried about those wonderful 'allies'?"
That's the real question.
All of our flaws with regard to Iraq have been exposed - the intelligence issues, the political in fighting etc.
If people calling themselves our allies were secretly helping Sadaam should that stay secret? Talk about a double standard.
Yes, I'm sure he's referring to our European allies (France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, etc.) I think there's two big reasons why more evidence of WMD and WMD programs in Iraq has not been released: 1) Saddam did a good clean-up job before the invasion and he destroyed a lot of WMD material and research/production equipment, and 2) Much of the research and production equipment for Iraq's WMD programs was purchased from our wonderful European allies, especially France and Germany. Much of the construction work on underground weapons labs was also done by European companies. So even if we just bring the media down to look at Saddam's former weapons labs below Baghdad (with most lab equipment probably removed by Saddam's people), the press is still going to be asking "who did the construction work on this lab?" The answer is an embarassment to some of our allies.
As recent events have demonstrated, we need our European allies with us in a united effort to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program. So there is certainly a strong strategic justification for covering for our European allies and not embarassing them any more than necessary. But at the same time, as the war has continued on for three years the cost to us in blood and treasure has increased to big numbers. So I think our policy is out of balance right now in favor of keeping the NATO alliance together and not embarassing our allies. The Bush administration is sliding in the approval polls largely because it has not released sufficient evidence to justify a long and costly war. I'll say it again--our policy is out of balance. We must release more evidence to justify the war in Iraq, but do so in a way that minimizes damage to the NATO alliance. That means avoiding explicit mention of France, Germany, Belgium, etc. in audio tapes and Iraqi government documents, and avoiding pictures of chemical weapons equipment and nuclear lab equipment that contain the corporate brand names of European companies.
I think Negroponte needs to take some time to carefully select the evidence to release: select evidence that provides the maximum justification for the war, while avoiding specific embarassment to our European allies whenever possible. Just put a little black square over the corporate brand names of European companies and explicitly state that our intention is to show what Iraq was doing without specifically embarassing our allies. Don't do anything sneaky like Photoshopping the pictures to remove brand names; just black them out and maintain the integrity of the evidence against msm attacks. The msm is going to hate the release of this evidence because many of them have been foolishly claiming that Iraq had no WMD programs for years. This is going to ruffle some feathers in the msm to say the least, so we need unassailable evidence with no covert trickery to protect our allies. This isn't an emergency, but we need to get this evidence out to the public in the next two months. This is a democracy, and the people need to know why we took out Saddam's brutal regime.