CANADA

CANADA
The Toronto Star, Toronto, Feb. 3: So now we know. The father of Pakistan's H-Bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, may be a national hero, but he's also a greedy fellow who for 15 years has been running a sleazy weapons bazaar on the side.
That's the picture President Gen. Pervez Musharraf wants to draw, at any rate, now that Khan stands accused of selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
The truth is likely to be darker, and may well implicate Pakistan's senior political and military echelons in proliferation-for-profit.
Nightmare weapons
Successive Pakistan regimes tolerated, if not encouraged, a culture where top scientists felt free to flog nuclear secrets to some of the world's most problematic countries, increasing the risk that terrorists might one day lay their hands on nightmare weapons.
Without American moral leadership, this threat will not recede. Yet Bush is singularly ill-placed to preach restraint. He made it clear in his Nuclear Posture Review of 2002 that he's prepared to use nukes first, even against a non-nuclear adversary. He's funding new "tactical" nukes, has budgeted for more fissile materials and wants a test site readied.
In short, he's making the unthinkable, thinkable, by lowing the bar to using nuclear weapons.
ISRAEL
Haaretz, Tel Aviv, Feb. 3: With all due respect to the importance ascribed to the fence by Israeli security officials, deep inside Palestinian territory is not the proper place to put it.
A fence that carves up Palestinian communities, imprisons entire villages or prevents their residents from reaching their lands to farm them properly, might block terrorist cells but only at the price of deepening and disseminating even further the hatred of Israel in otherwise peaceful populations. The long term destruction could overshadow the immediate gains.
Property rights
Israel's need to defend itself from terror can sometimes lead to depriving individual Palestinians of their property rights or their right to freedom of movement.
But if the harm to the lives of the citizenry turns into damage on a wide scale, and if the route on which the fence is going up is blatantly not meant only to prevent terror but to prevent the Palestinians from ever establishing a viable state of their own with territorial contiguity, then Israel is acting in clear contravention of its own interests.
ITALY
La Repubblica, Rome, Feb. 2: It was Feb. 5, 2003 ... "Dear colleagues," said Colin Powell to the Security Council, "each statement I will pronounce here in front of you today is backed by facts, solid facts, supported by many sources."
One year later, these are the solid facts:
1. Terror persists on civil international air traffic, throwing it into confusion, and in Iraq the slaughter is spreading to previously calm areas.
2. Regarding arms of mass destruction, "we were completely wrong," says the head of 1,400 CIA inspectors, David Kay.
3. The shadow of the humiliating intelligence fiasco ... is growing over the re-election chances of George Bush, now obliged to accept a commission of inquiry, "to discover the facts," he says.
Ruling group
This is a new and difficult situation for a ruling group whose winning strategy has been that of attack.
The White House, on the defensive, is wavering.
And now it must hope and pray that the nameless and faceless daily guerrilla fighting ... will be defeated before the dead reach a critical mass that influences the electorate.