Posted on 05/13/2004 9:38:13 PM PDT by quidnunc
We've all heard those classic myths of the Iraq debate that just won't go away. First, President Bush is said to have called Iraq under Saddam Hussein an "imminent" threat and, second, the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda has never been substantiated. Both are laughably false. And now there are more myths about the Iraq war, more subjective than the two classics, but still untrue.
Let's start with de-Baathification, the barring from the government of the new Iraq of the top officials of Saddam's murderous Baath party. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, made this decision shortly after Saddam was toppled in April 2003. It was an critical step toward creating a new Iraq. Now, the myth is that de-Baathification was a horrible mistake because it kept out of government the very officials who know how things work in Iraq.
The truth is de-Baathification was necessary. Without it, there would almost certainly have been a civil war in Iraq with Kurds and the Shia — 80 percent of Iraqis — fighting Sunni Baathists who had dominated and persecuted them for decades. Without ostracizing the Baathists, the United States would have had no credibility with the Shia or the Kurds. And the Baathists weren't indispensable anyway. Now Bremer is allowing a trickle of Baathists to return to government once they clear an appeals process and prove they aren't Saddam loyalists. This is the wise way to treat Baathists, not by totally reversing de-Baathification.
Another myth has been lingering for several months: that Bremer was wrong to disband the Iraqi army. The fact is the army disintegrated on its own in the face of the American invasion. …
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
Myth #4. The turkey was fake.
De-mythologizing the situation in Iraq is going to be hard if for no other reason than the liberal media has a head start on the truth. They will always react violently to the shock of the light of truth. Mainly because the dems are so accustomed to preaching in the dark. One other problem is that since way back before the first Gulf War we have had no idea what was going on in the Middle East...and a lot of the Near East for that matter... Our intel was non-existent and the State Dept was worthless as well.(Witness the Carter administrations stumbling about in '79) So now we are playing catch up. We'll get there, but not as surely had we maintained any kind of understanding of what that blank space on the map was about.
It was an Al Queda training camp in Iraq before the war.
It blows in the wind now.
Whenever I read Fred Barnes' pieces, I use his voice in my mind.
Good post. If for no other reason our presence in the heart of the ME will be positive. W building the largest consulate in the world in Baghdad, and big ears in Afghanistan makes the cost of the wars, to future intel worth it. Rest assured we will not caught fat, dumb, and happy as was the result of the Toon years.
Zot~~~~~~~ Ban this pig.
I just hope someone posts "The Myths of Excerpting"...
bump
Give him a chance. Let's see what else he does. Thus far, even if a bit "loud" his posts haven't been lefty or disruptive.
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