Posted on 07/07/2005 11:42:24 AM PDT by paulat
Thursday, July 7, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
Editorial
Exit without apologies
Saddam Hussein is toppled from power. The fundamental aim of the Iraq war is accomplished. Now is the time to plan to leave and bring American forces home.
As noted in a series of editorials that began on Sunday and ends today, the passage of time only erodes confidence in an enterprise we initially supported. Successive layers of President Bush's rationales for the war were stripped bare. No weapons of mass destruction were found, no prewar terrorist havens or links to Sept. 11, 2001.
The war caused untold suffering in Iraq and it has taken its own toll at home in grieving families, mourning communities and a loss of confidence in our elected leaders.
Our military, a mix of regular and reserve forces, did all that was asked of them. Too often, they were ill-served by failures to adequately equip and prepare them for the war and its aftermath. They were failed by civilian leadership that did not understand Iraq's culture and history, and the complexity of the mission.
The Iraq war lingers on the home front through the Patriot Act, with its disturbing invasions of privacy and intrusions upon civil liberties. American values were further assaulted by military prison scandals and isolation of prisoners outside the law.
U.S. taxpayers await an honest accounting of the war's costs and the financial obligations for postwar reconstruction.
Questions remain, but the U.S. can exit Iraq without apologies.
Saddam sits in jail. Iraqis are free to decide their own future. More than 1,700 American lives were sacrificed to help create that opportunity.
The Iraq war is over. Thank our allies, and bring U.S. troops home.
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
(excerpt)That thishis pro-American momentwas the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications.
Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible.
Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome.
Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.)
In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time.
After that same invasion was repelledSaddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many morethe Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.)
Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country.
In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews.
And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war.
On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reportedand the David Kay report had establishedthat Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)
More nonsense from the Islamic terrorist propagandists.
Too bad we can't just "Zot" Editorialist.
You can't have enough security. I could list a thousand easy ways they could devastate us. We don't want murderers walking the streets. Why? It's impossible to anticipate their every move. Same with terrorists.
IF we could have policy debates without the liberals taking advantage of it, we could discuss the pros and cons. I might support a pullout IF Iraq wasn't surrounded by Syria and Iran. But with those two terrorist haven enemies, Iraq will certainly be destabilized and made to join the terror group.
OTOH it seems to me we should be actively planning to wipe out the terrorists in Iran and Syria. Our army is better suited to offensive campaigns than doing police duty.
Times editorial page poohbah James Vesely should just stick his finger back up his fat ass. I wrote him a long letter last week, and I regret I deleted the expletives before I sent it.
Outstanding. Thanks.
Same here. If NY subways were hit this afternoon, killing thousands, how do you plan on fighting them here anyway, other than securing our borders and implementing real immigration reform?
You can't have enough security.
I agree and we don't have enough. Just the other day, 49 people were found wandering around a U.S. Airforce base. All of them were in this country illegally. Does this sound like security to you?
perfect timing by the Seattle Times editorial board, wouldn't you say? Is it any wonder all these newspapers' subscription rates have tanked in recent memory?
Why? It was never proposed, prior to the invasion, that the US stay in Iraq indefinitely. If it was, please cite me the quote from the president or anyone else in authority.
You are correct that we need safer borders. But what Bush said is generally true: we need to take the war to enemy territory. If you are in a completely defensive mode, you will lose every time.
I kept the original's paragraphing. I respect the rights of the author. ;)
If we pull out like they want, the terrorists will rule Iraq as they once ruled in Afghanistan. They will do what the "insurgents" did in London today on normal basis. This is a war on terrorism in Iraq. The terrorists do in Iraq what they did in London all the time. No decent person calls them insurgents when they do mass murder in London, but when they do it in Iraq the smart set in morally ambivalent.
We owe it to Iraq to stick it out at least until the final Constitution is written and the first post-Constitution elections are held.
Calling for a pullout even after this? What kind of a message does that send to the Brits? They knew this could happen if they helped in Iraq. They went anyway. You want to just cut and run now?
Except for a few chemical warheads, not that anyone at the Seattle Times would be educated-enough to know.
I don't see a link, symbolic or otherwise. What today's terrorist blasts HAVE shown is that the silly rhetoric about "better to fight terrorists in Iraq than in our streets" is ridiculous. If terrorists want to bomb in America, they aren't going to go to Iraq to fight our foreign troops -- they're going to come straight here, without any stopoff in Iraq. They're going to come through our open borders. The fact that we have an open-border policy means we're not serious about defending against terror. As for Iraq, it's more in chaos than when we arrived; we got rid of Saddam, but I'm not sure that's made us safer - he didn't have WMDs and his tyranny was keeping a lot of the creeps in his country under control. He was a bastard, but so is Castro, so is the ruler of China, so is the ruler of Zimbabwe, so is the ruler of Korea. We can't go everywhere toppling dictatotrs. We should protect our people by protecting our borders.
Now we owe it to England to do even more. They paid for their support in Iraq with civilian blood. We cannot ease up now.
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