Posted on 02/25/2004 7:58:55 AM PST by jwalburg
In early December of 1998, the House Judiciary Committee sent four articles of impeachment to the House of Representatives. On Dec. 17, the House as a whole would decide whether or not William Jefferson Clinton would be the first president since Andrew Johnson to be impeached. But, all of a sudden, the vote had to be delayed. On Dec. 16, the eve of what would have been his impeachment, President Clinton ordered a series of bombing attacks on Iraq, a campaign to be called Operation Desert Fox.
The attack was launched without warning and without any direct U.N. authorization. Clinton critics on the left and right were suspicious, most of them agreeing with Republican Sen. Trent Lott's comment that "both the timing and the policy are subject to question." China, Russia, and France immediately condemned the air strikes. Anti-American riots erupted throughout the Middle East, one rioter waving a bra with Monica Lewinsky's name on it.
But Clinton emphatically maintained that his sole motivation was to free the world from the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, "Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons . . . The international community had little doubt then, and I have no doubt today, that left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again."
Nizar Hamdoon, Iraq's U.N. ambassador, was outraged, "The exaggerated uproar over the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is nothing more than a big lie."
It appears now that Hamdoon may have been right. It's been more than five years, and we still haven't found any evidence that Hussein had the weapons of mass destruction the Clinton administration so emphatically insisted he had.
Unsympathetic critics would be tempted to dismiss Desert Fox as just one more example of Clinton's reckless and self-serving foreign policy, another aspirin-factory bombing. They might suggest also that Clinton's need to cover his tracks led him to put irresistible pressure on the CIA to manufacture evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that it did not in fact have.
In Clinton's defense, however, it should be noted that it is notoriously difficult to gather reliable intelligence on conditions within a totalitarian regime. In August of 1939, for instance, Albert Einstein wrote to Franklin Roosevelt about his concern that Germany might be working on an atomic bomb, and suggesting the need for America to develop a bomb of its own. Throughout World War II, American scientists working on the Manhattan Project were convinced they were in a race with the Nazis, and that the fate of the world hung on their reaching the goal first. And the Nazis were trying to build a bomb. But how close were they?
For years after the war, military experts and historians debated the status of the Nazi nuclear project. Could the Nazis have built an A-bomb? How soon?
We're still debating. There is still no consensus among historians on the Nazi bomb. Why? Because the German leaders and scientists themselves, locked in a system where truth could be dangerous, weren't really sure of the status of the bomb.
"How's that bomb coming along, Dr. Heisenberg?" And if you're Heisenberg, already under suspicion for "Jewish" science, what do you say? And, remember, you're in a society where failure may mean death.
And if you're a scientist working for Saddam Hussein, what do you say when you're asked for a status report on the progress of your anthrax research? And, remember, you're in a society where failure may mean getting fed into a plastic shredder.
If President Bush's newly formed investigative committee does its job well, we may learn some important things about intelligence failure. Perhaps we'll learn exactly why Clinton appointees like Les Aspin (Defense Secretary) and James Wolsey (CIA director) resigned. But if Iraqi scientists and leaders were themselves uncertain of the true state of Iraqi armaments, the weapons of mass destruction questions are likely to prove as insoluble as questions about Hitler's bomb.
In the end, we didn't need to use the bomb against Nazi Germany. But it brought the war with Japan to a faster conclusion and probably saved millions of lives on both sides. The Iraq WMD issue is similar - whether or not WMDs were a viable threat (and Saddam gave us ample reasons to believe he never destroyed them), we've taken out a ruthless tyrant and changed the Middle East and Pan-Arab nationalism forever.
BILL CLINTON
You get what you pay for and unfortunately the rest of the world still plays by the original rules.
You get what you pay for and unfortunately the rest of the world still plays by the original rules.
If President Bush's newly formed investigative committee does its job well, we may learn some important things about intelligence failure. Perhaps we'll learn exactly why Clinton appointees like Les Aspin (Defense Secretary) and James Wolsey (CIA director) resigned.
If it's possible to finger the single most important facet of our degraded intelligence capabilities, this is it. Satellites and other electronic surveillance are good for getting an overall picture and lay of the land, but personnel assets are what is needed for the detailed work. A satellite can't tell you what another person is saying, or looking like, or doing in secret. You need spies and moles to ferret that stuff out.
I'll never forget how I was debating with the one lady who is our building custodian just before the Iraq war was launched about the limitations of remote surveillance. She had bought into the U.N.-Rat line, of course, of how we could manage the situation with Saddam just by "watching him like a hawk". How, if we've got no one in there (the inspectors had been kicked out before, and would likely be again). Well, with satellites. Well, what about if its rainy or cloudy or there's a sandstorm? Oh, hummmm, well.... And what if Saddam's guys just cover something over so you can't see it? Oh, well, ummmmm... And what if they're doing something inside a building, can the satellite see in there? Well, no, errrrr.... And what about underground storage or buildings? Can the satellite see into those? Well, no, I guess not, ummmmm....
This line of reasoning is pretty elementary, don't you think? It never ceases to amaze me how intellectually vapid and lazy so many people seem to be.
Unfortunately for most of these people Hollywierd is real, not special effects. They don't even realize that clouds can blind optics and that a polar orbit satellite will only coincide with a target area rarely more than once a day.
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