The early spin of the news that Russian President
Putin warned Mr. Bush of Iraqi plans of terror strikes against the US is that perhaps this is a justification for war.
However, that is probably not the case. Since Putin himself gave Bush the information and Putin is also disclosing the fact that he did, we can be reasonably certain that there is something to this. However, there are no details about what stages any planning was at or exactly what it entailed.
Obviously, Putin wasn't alarmed. He gave Bush the information and then opposed the US invasion. He said again today that his position on the US invasion of Iraq is unchanged. Had Saddam's terrorist plans merited something more than vigilance, Putin's attitude toward a potential US invasion of Iraq would not doubt have been quite different.
It also seems that Bush and his lieutenants thought little of Putin's information. At the time, they were using everything thing they could to drum up support for the invasion; their arguments that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al Qaida were shaky then and completely discredited now. Why did Bush and his neocon friends not use this fact -- perhaps even, unlike the others, a real fact -- to drum up support for their war?
The most likely answer is that whatever information Putin passed to Bush, it fell short of being the kind of immediate threat that would justify a war.
The White House spin doctors and their neoconservative allies in the press will no doubt try to say otherwise, but there appears no reason for those of us who opposed the invasion and continue to oppose the occupation to rethink our position.