America 'most feared threat'
2004-07-01 14:45
New York - The last US ambassador to serve in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's regime said that the Bush administration's foreign policy has made America "the most feared threat to global security around the world."
The US-led invasion of Iraq was unnecessary because Saddam's regime posed no immediate threat to American national security, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson said on Wednesday during a discussion at the New York Society of Ethical Culture.
Wilson also derided the individuals who leaked to the media the name of his wife - undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame - as "un-American" and "punks."
Investigators want to know who leaked Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak last July. Disclosure of an undercover officer's identity can be a federal crime.
President George W Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top administration officials have been questioned in the investigation.
Wilson has said he believes his wife's identity was disclosed to undermine his credibility.
American political and moral support "evaporated" once the war started, Wilson said, adding that the failure of the coalition to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction or solid evidence of collaborative links between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network has hurt US credibility worldwide.
"The widespread view is that American leadership is something to be feared, not embraced," Wilson, citing international polls, told a crowd of more than 500 people.
The Iraqi invasion was the brainchild of neoconservatives and members of the religious right within the Bush administration, said Wilson, a career diplomat who worked in both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Wilson denounced the Bush administration for claiming that Iraq, under Saddam, had tried to obtain uranium from the African nation of Niger. Wilson went to Niger for the CIA to investigate and he found the allegation, which Bush mentioned in a State of the Union address, to be highly unlikely.
- AP