Posted on 10/25/2005 9:12:26 PM PDT by churchillbuff
President George W. Bush may have no military exit strategy for Iraq, but the “neocons” who convinced him to go to war there have developed one of their own—a political one: Blame the Administration. Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.
The flight of the neocons—just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about —is one of only many indications that the long-predicted “conservative crackup” is at hand.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
That way, Kristol hopes, Kristol won't get blamed for the mess in Iraq, even though Kristol's crowd said victory would be easy and we would find caches of WMDs
The world according to Howard Fineman.
The only point Howie has is on the top of his head.
Kristol is a weasel and who cares what he says
NewsWEAK strikes again.
Kristol is a Mole, always has been, Fineman is an overly emotional wimp
You wrote:
"..That way, Kristol hopes, Kristol won't get blamed for the mess in Iraq, even though Kristol's crowd said victory would be easy and we would find caches of WMDs"
I guess the New York Times and Washington Post crowd is a bunch of Neo-Cons as well...because after 911 they were gunning for Saddam's head too!! Don't be a tool. (wink)
I know what u mean about Krystal...but don't bite the bait being throw over in bloody waters by the left in this country..swim deeper....lol
As long as the terrorists are willing to show up in Iraq and fight there, we don't need an exit strategy.
BINGO, so very true
Kristol got beat up on the playground when he was little, and now he wants to be invited back out to restaurants again with his "smart" pals. What has he ever done in life?
Nope..Fineman is a TOOL!! I once had a live online debate with him. It was brief..but he was stumbling out of the 'door' when I left him looking all stuck on stupid...lol!! My personal best in a brush with 'NOT SO GREAT..NESS"...lol
As reported in our local newspaper, this is what a national guardsman now deployed to Iraq told his mother prior to leaving:
"Mom, no matter what happens, this is something that has to be done. Remember I volunteered to be in the National Guard, nobody made me. This is my job, this is my choice, because it’s something that has to be done for our country. We all feel that way or we wouldn’t be here saying goodbye to our families now. It can be fought there, or here. I choose to fight there."
Turned on everyone he has ever disagreed with, INCLUDING Ronald Reagan
Try not to confuse the Lad, he is limited to the DNC talking points
Good Post! by the way :-)
HE's a hero. I don't happen to agree with the policy that sent him to Iraq, but he's doing his duty and he's a patriot. I support him, along with all our marvelous troops.
Thank you. :)
Uh, maybe you mean Osama? He's the one who masterminded 9-11. Even Bush admits that Saddam didn't have anything to do with it.
Kristol is not popular in a lot of conservative circles, but this article is complete crap. The Weekly Standard's biggest complaint for a long time has been that troop numbers were too low. They have hammered on this for a year. Otherwise, they have defended the war well, including an article by Christopher Hitchens awhile back that just kicked the ass of Mother Sheehan and company.
It's a toss up as to who is more loathesome to me, Kristol or Fineman..LOL
In the past I've speculated that no more than 20% of the so-called "neo-conservatives" are registered Republicans. Does anyone know Bill Kristol's party affiliation?
One minor point..the 'weapons we sold' were never WMDS. This is a 'talking point lie' of the left. We sold Sadaam weapons..but not WMDS!! Get your facts straight before u get the ZOT or at least give us a clue that u r being flippant as a zot on the zotties!
I'll bet nobody at the Weekly Standard has anyone in their family tree who ever served in the military. I'd also point out that it was the "neo-conservatives" themselves -- not the political side of the Bush administration -- who had long suggested that the U.S. could win the Iraq war with minimal troop levels.
So..u r a tool...lol. Nope..right after 911..the Lame Stream Press started gunnin for Saddam!! I was there! If u don't have access to Lexus Nexus or even ur last brain cell..call home to momma..cause I can't help u!...LOL
I thought that was the case. But for whatever reason, they didn't wait too long to start clamoring for more troops.
As for military members in the Weekly Standard family tree, I don't know. I suspect you are right.
Bush: No Iraq link to 9/11 found
President says Saddam had ties to al-Qaida, but apparently not to attacks
By SCOTT SHEPARD
COX NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- President Bush, having repeatedly linked Saddam Hussein to the terrorist organization behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said yesterday there is no evidence that the deposed Iraqi leader had a hand in those attacks, in contrast to the belief of most Americans.
The president's comments came in response to a reporter's question about Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion Sunday on NBC's "Meet The Press" program that Iraq was the "geographic base" of the terrorists behind the attacks on New York and Washington.
Bush said yesterday there was no attempt by the administration to try to confuse people about any link between Saddam and Sept. 11.
"No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," Bush said. "What the vice president said was is that he (Saddam) has been involved with al-Qaida.
"And al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaida operative, was in Baghdad. He's the guy that ordered the killing of a U.S. diplomat. ... There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties."
Most of the administration's public assertions have focused on the man Bush mentioned, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a senior Osama bin Laden associate whom officials have accused of trying to train terrorists in the use of poison for possible attacks in Europe, running a terrorist haven in northern Iraq -- an area outside Saddam's control -- and organizing an attack that killed an American aid executive in Jordan last year.
Security analysts, however, say al-Zarqawi made his way to Iraq, where his leg was amputated. . Unconfirmed reports claim he then visited northern Iraq, where a militant Islamic group affiliated with al-Qaida is encamped not far from the border with Iran.
The group, however, far from being an ally of Saddam, sought to replace his secular government with an Islamic regime.
A senior intelligence official, who asked not to be identified, said the information linking the group, Ansar al Islam, to Saddam comes "almost exclusively from defectors produced by the Iraqi opposition. They are not uniformly credible."
Bush's statement was the latest in a series by administration officials this week that appeared to distance the White House from the widely held public perception that Saddam was a key figure in the attacks.
Publicly, at least, Bush has not explicitly blamed the attacks on Saddam. In speech after speech, however, the president has strongly linked Saddam and al-Qaida, the terrorist organization of bin Laden, the renegade Saudi whose followers hijacked jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania.
In his May 1 declaration of military victory in Iraq from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, Bush said, "We have removed an ally of al-Qaida and cut off a source of terrorist funding." He also said, "The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror."
Two months earlier, in a speech aimed at mustering public support for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, Bush said, "The attacks of September 11th, 2001, showed what the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction."
Critics have said the steady drumbeat of that message has tied Saddam to the attacks in the mind of the public. A recent poll by The Washington Post found that nearly seven Americans out of 10 believe Saddam played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks, a notion the administration has done little to tamp down.
But retired NATO commander Wesley Clark, in a little noticed appearance on NBC's "Meet The Press" on June 15, charged that "a concerted effort ... to pin 9/11" on Saddam began in the fall of 2001, and "it came from people around the White House." Clark, who declared his campaign for president yesterday, did not identify anyone by name.
It was just weeks after the terrorist attacks that the first link between Saddam and al-Qaida was alleged by the administration. It came from Cheney, who said it had been "pretty well confirmed" that Mohamed Atta, the man held responsible for masterminding the Sept. 11 hijackings, had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in April 2000, an allegation congressional investigators later dismissed.
Sunday, Cheney began the group of Bush administration officials denying any ties between Saddam and Sept. 11. He said "we don't know" whether Saddam was connected to the attacks, but admitted, "It's not surprising that people make that connection."
The vice president also said: "If we are successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good, representative government in Iraq that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it's not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it's not a safe haven for terrorists, we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
White House National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, in an interview aired late Tuesday on ABC's "Nightline," said one of the reasons Bush went to war against Saddam was because he posed a threat in "a region from which the 9/11 threat emerged." But she insisted, "We have never claimed that Saddam Hussein had either direction or control of 9/11."
Her remarks echoed those of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a briefing for reporters at the Pentagon earlier Tuesday. Asked if Saddam was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, Rumsfeld replied, "I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that."
White House spokesman Scott McClellan reiterated to reporters yesterday that the administration never directly linked Saddam to the Sept. 11 strikes.
"If you're talking specifically about the September 11th attacks, we never made that claim," McClellan said. "We do know that there is a long history of Saddam Hussein and his regime and ties to terrorism, including al-Qaida."
The only people to blame for the mess in Iraq all speak Arabic.
LOL!
You're the "tool" - of ignorance. I've just cited you an article quoting Bush saying Saddam wasn't behind 9-11. Cite me an article where the MSM was gunning for Saddam, as you put it, after 9-11. Everybody recognized that the culprit was Osama. The neocons, however, wanted to get Saddam - a goal they'd had before 9-11, so they leveraged this event to their purpose.
What's VERY interesting to me is that 3 years after Saddam's WMD disappeared, Iran now has a nuke weapons program...
Remember where the Iraqi jets went during Gulf War I?
I wonder if he's paid by the thread?
"If you're talking specifically about the September 11th attacks, we never made that claim," McClellan said. "We do know that there is a long history of Saddam Hussein and his regime and ties to terrorism, including al-Qaida."
CASE CLOSED...typical for the LSM..last paragragh..last sentence. Go back to the DU..TOOL!!
Bush and the liberal media are pushing that line, but there are strong indications that Saddam might have bankrolled 9/11. Proof is harder to find, especially when no one in power wants it found.
Another Fineman overreaching analysis. These MSM types will say and do anything to take down the Reps. They keep on trying to replay Vietnam and Watergate.
THat's my point - but you said 9-11, so you were implying there's a link with 9-11. There's a lot of bad guys in the world - starting with Castro, China, North Korea, Mugabe, and Saddam. But just because they're bad doesn't link them to 9-11, or make it appropriate for us to respond to 9-11 by sending troops to die invading their countries. China is a far bigger threat to us than any other country on the face of the earth, but we're trading with them, not invading them. The Iraq invasion was a needless waste of young American lives. Just like Clinton's "nation building" expeditions with the military were.
This is another made up conflict in the MSM.
Destroying and repelling those who promote evil and chaos has always been a mission of civilization. "Neo-con" is not and never was a new, unusual ideology.
For a while we simply forgot that bad people will kill us, if we let them. 9/11 reminded the nation that we needed to get back to work.
You've never gotten what the war on terror is all about, have you? Pity.
And there's plenty of evidence that at the very least, Saddam knew OBL was planning 9/11, as evidenced by Iraq's own newspaper article published in July 2001.
It's really a shame that you keep forgetting this little tidbit:
In its 1998 indictment of bin Laden for the East African embassy bombings, the Clinton administration claimed: “Al-Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.”
Maybe :-)
Yeah, "blame" the Administration for the fact that Saddam Hussein is in a cell, Uday Hussein and Qusay Hussein are in a morgue, Iraq has held democratic elections and approved a Constitution which guarantees fundamental freedoms unheard-of in the Arab world. Let's make good and sure the Administration gets every drop of "blame" for this.
That way, Kristol hopes, Kristol won't get blamed for the mess in Iraq...
What mess in Iraq? Have you been listening to the mainstream media again?
Things in Iraq aren't perfect. But they've been consistently improving, regardless of the media's ceaseless accentuation of the negative.
even though Kristol's crowd said victory would be easy and we would find caches of WMDs
I suppose you're counting Hillary and Bill Clinton, Tom Daschle, Wesley Clark, Sandy Berger, Robert Byrd, et al as part of "Kristol's crowd" who claimed we'd find caches of WMDs?
And I got news for you... victory was easy. Fewer Americans die each day in Iraq than die from falling down the stairs. The casualty rate in Iraq is utterly minuscule compared to other armed conflicts the United States has engaged in. The victory in Iraq was a breathtaking display of staggering military competence that will be studied in schools of war for centuries.
If there's one thing I fault the Administration for, it's for being too passive in the face of extremely well-coordinated opposition, and for failing to make the obvious case that Iraq is a success.
You keep forgetting this too:
Meanwhile, new evidence continues to trickle out of Iraq. In December 2003, the Iraqi Governing Council uncovered a document from July 2001 in which the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, describes arranging for 9/11 plotter Mohamad Atta to obtain three days of training in Baghdad by the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, under the “direct supervision” of the IIS.
And this probably isn't of any interest to you either:
Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.
Your 'POINT' seems to be a MOVEON.ORG TARGET!..LOL. Hey pal..we don't need target practice around here! Been there..debated that. Move on down the road.
Oh, and those WMD that didn't exist:
The congressional resolution that gave Bush authority to launch the war, that so many Dems voted for, stated that Iraq had "the capacity to possess" WMD, a little fact that the media and Dem'Rats leave out of their rhetoric. So, ask her to prove that Bush ever said they actually had them. He and Powell, Cheney, etc., all talked about BW and CW that Iraq possessed in the past and remained unaccounted for, as U.N. mandates and the cease-fire resolution from the first Gulf War required.
Also, remind her that Bush never said that the WMD were an imminent threat, but rather that we were acting in a pre-eminent manner in order to prevent them from becoming as such.
Then we have the findings of the Iraq Survey Group; the quotes below are all taken from the "Statement On The Interim Progress Report On The Activities Of The Iraq Survey Group, 10/2/03," by David Kay:
“We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002.”
“A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW [Chemical and Biological Weapons] research.”
“A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW [Biological Weapons] agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.”
“Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.”
“New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.”
“Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists’ homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).”
“A line of UAV’s [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.”
“Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.”
“Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.”
“Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.”
“With regard to Iraq’s nuclear program, the testimony we have obtained from Iraqi scientists and senior government officials should clear up any doubts about whether Saddam still wanted to obtain nuclear weapons. They have told ISG [Iraq Survey Group] that Saddam [Hussein] remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons.”
“In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work.”
Oh, and you asked another freeper for a list of how the MSM connected Saddam to 9/11 and pressed for action, well here you go:
But if reporters really want to know why Americans see ties between Baghdad and 9/11, they need look no further than their own archives, where they'll find repeated and as yet undisputed reports documenting compelling evidence of Iraq's role in the attacks
A Lexis Nexis search for the three months after 9/11 turned up no fewer than 85 mainstream news reports describing, for instance, activities at the terrorist training camp Salman Pak.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/984758/posts
If I was president after 9/11, and I had the same information Bush had, I would have made the same Saddam connection he did. Al Queda training camps in Mosul would have been a big indicator.
Osama came suddenly into a lot of money in 1998 after his leutenants met with Iraqi Intelligence (remember this was long after his rich Saudi family cut him off), it is very likely this is the same money he used to fund 9/11. This was also right in the middle of Saddam's rape of the Oil for Food program, so Saddam definately had the money.
Too many coindences to rule out Saddam's involvement in 9/11 yet, despite what the liberal media and Bush have said.
Oh, and you've forgotten that Saddam was behind the first WTC attack, haven't you. You really need to work on that memory.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/984758/posts
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