Iraq: let's quit confusing

Jewish World Review ^ | August 30, 2005 | David Limbaugh

[conservativecorner]

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | It's easy to blame President Bush for failing sufficiently to articulate his case for the war against Iraq, but he does have a nation to lead and a war to fight. Plus, he already made the case for attacking Iraq at the time it mattered — before we attacked.

He convinced Congress — overwhelmingly — and the American people. Instead of our insisting that he spend all his time responding to the Left's distractions over this, more of us should do a better job coming to his aid on the issue.

The antiwar Left has finally succeeded in turning public opinion against the war in Iraq with their endless assaults and distortions. The war's supporters, in our defensiveness, have unintentionally taken on a greater burden of proof than, by rights, we should bear.

The truth is that we were morally and strategically justified in attacking Iraq, based on the information we had available at the time of the attack. Conversely, the wisdom and propriety of our decision to remain until our mission is complete — which we must — and the president's conduct of the war, depend on facts now in existence. But by all means, let's keep the issues separate.

That is, even if we conclude we were wrong to have attacked Iraq — which we certainly were not — our decision is done and can't be retracted, even by withdrawing. Our decision to remain or withdraw must be based on what is going on today and the likely consequences of remaining or withdrawing.

[Puppage]

It's easy to blame President Bush for failing sufficiently to articulate his case for the war against Iraq

12 years & ultimately 18 resolutions.

That's 18 LEGAL REASONS for going to war.

[facedown]

Rush's younger, smarter brother bump. 8^)

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

even if we conclude we were wrong to have attacked Iraq — which we certainly were not — our decision is done and can't be retracted, even by withdrawing. Our decision to remain or withdraw must be based on what is going on today and the likely consequences of remaining or withdrawing.

The problem is that the antiwar Left has conflated these issues . . .

. . . with the exception of a few of their extremists, they (including all of their legitimate presidential hopefuls) know we can't legitimately talk about withdrawing, which is why they are not offering — not even pretending to offer — any alternative plans.

In a level playing field debate, the left has not the slightest possibility of defeating a conservative; the left has to hide its agenda - and always has. The left uses euphemisms for things it cannot say out loud - essentially it uses the words "public" or "social" when it actually means nothing else but "government." Thus "socialism" is really just a euphemism for "governmentism" - which, all too clearly, is a synonym for tyranny.

But a conventional TV "debate" is not a level playing field at all. They are really competitive joint news conferences. And although both maintain the fiction that the distinction is meaningful, there has really been no political difference between a Democratic politican and a journalist for the past three decades. In the 1968 transformation of the Democratic Party into its present cheap talk, antivalor configuration, Democratic poiticians divested themselves of any principle other than the idea that nothing matters except PR.

So the moderated TV "debate" is not the solution to the problem of enabling the public to select good presidents. There is no reason at all that the candidates could not debate equally publicly but on a far more level playing field. If all you cared about was enabling the public to understand what the issues are, you would give the candidates 3-hour blocks of radio time, and a chess timer to control whose microphone was live. The two candidates would not be required to be in a common location, so that there would be minimum impact on their schedules - and there would be five such debates.

With that much exposure I would expect that the voters would know who was on offer, and would make a more prudent choice than is currently to be counted on.

[CBart95]

Faith Dear David. We are fully engaged in this war.
Many ,in fact most of us who support our Commander-in-Chief, our troops and our government hate the very thought of war. Our loyalty to our flag and to our way of life and to our duty unifies us.
That our enemy has infiltrated our media and universities deters us not at all. We hate it but we are loyal and undeterred.
God Bless America.

[OESY]

Sand Trap: Mig Buried in Sand

Claim: Photographs show Iraqi fighter planes found buried in the desert.

Status: True.


This has been out [since August 2003], and I'll bet you haven't seen anything about it in the liberal news media.

No WMD’s, huh? Stand by!


For photos, go to: Four Photos of Exhumation


Origins: The al Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad in Iraq, a sandy wasteland surrounded by high dunes off the main Baghdad-to-Jordan highway, was the focus of intense search-and-destroy activity after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003; its vast desert spaces were thought to be a likely location for missile launchers or aircraft from which chemical or biological strikes against U.S. troops might be launched.

What military search teams eventually found at al Taqqadum, in July 2003, were remnants of the Iraqi Air Force as pictured above: a reported 30 to 40 planes, including several MiG-25 and Su-25 ground attack jets, buried more than 10 feet beneath tons of soil and covered with camouflage netting. According to the Pentagon, at least one of the MiG-25s was found because searchers spotted its twin tail fins protruding from the sand. Some of the planes had been wrapped in plastic sheeting to protect their electronics and machinery from the sand (and some had had their wings removed), but others were interred with little or no protection from the sand or the elements. The recovery teams had to use large earth-moving equipment to uncover the aircraft.

The discovery at al Taqqadum was not announced to the public until a month later, in a press briefing delivered by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld:


WASHINGTON, Aug. 6, 2003 — American forces have found Russian fighter jets buried in the Iraqi desert, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an Aug. 5 press briefing.

"We'd heard a great many things had been buried, but we had not known where they were, and we'd been operating in that immediate vicinity for weeks and weeks and weeks . . . 12, 13 weeks, and didn't know they were (there)," Rumsfeld said.

The secretary said he wasn't sure how many such aircraft had been found, but noted, "It wasn't one or two."

He said it's a "classic example" of the challenges the Iraqi Survey Group is facing in finding weapons of mass destruction in the country.

"Something as big as an airplane that's within . . . a stone's throw of where you're functioning, and you don't know it's there because you don't run around digging into everything on a discovery process," Rumsfeld explained. "So until you find somebody who tells you where to look, or until nature clears some sand away and exposes something over time, we're simply not going to know.

"But, as we all know," he added, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

-- http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/sandplanes.asp#photo01

[OESY]

Photos referenced above:











COMMENT: If Saddam could hide 30-40 MiGs in the Iraqi desert, he certainly had the time, motive, means and opportunity to bury other WMD that his 30,000 employees in the industry were working on. If you recall, SecDef Cohen went on the PBS News Hour with Lehrer circa 1998 and held up a clear plastic bag containing white powder about the size of a softball. Cohen declared that, if the powder were ricin (or other chemical poison), it could kill everyone on the face of the earth. Saddam could have easily hidden such a small amount. Democrats were right to say Saddam had WMD--before they were wrong.