We need Bush and not Saddam calling the shots

The cartoons all tell the same story. Whenever they depict the President of the United States the same props reinforce the same message. We’ve got ourselves a cowboy in the White House.

George W. Bush is a trigger-happy, ten gallon-hatted, good ole boy who just won’t listen to his more civilized friends. Who does he think he is planning to take on the bad guys when wiser heads counsel caution? Gary Cooper? Let’s hope so. Because we are perilously close to High Noon.

As the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, pointed out on Monday night, we are running out of time to deal with President Saddam Hussein. He is racing to acquire a nuclear capability and enhance his other weapons of mass destruction. He has no moral compunction about their use, to attack his neighbors, to blackmail the West or to strengthen the radical Islamist terrorist organizations with whom he has worked.

Experts may differ about precisely how close Saddam is to possessing the most terrifying threat of all, nuclear weaponry, but the record does not give cause for comfort. As Mr. Cheney recalled, “prior to the Gulf War America’s top intelligence analysts would tell me that Saddam Hussein was at least five, or perhaps even ten, years away from having a nuclear weapon. After the war we learnt that he had been much closer than that, perhaps within a year of acquiring such a weapon.”

No responsible Western leader can afford to discount the consequences of Saddam possessing deliverable weapons of mass destruction. He is a practiced mass murderer with unassuaged territorial ambitions towards his neighbors. He is an unstable tyrant who aspires to hegemony over the Arab world by providing its most radical elements with political leadership and military support. Terrorists who menace Israel and have operated throughout the West have been trained, financed and armed by him.

Defectors have warned us of the camps in which his confederates practice the hijacking of airliners. The $25,000 he gives to suicide bombers in the Palestinian Authority helps to ensure that terror’s cutting edge remains bloodied.

Possessed of suitable weaponry, Saddam would create geopolitical chaos of a kind more dangerous than any we have known since the fall of communism. He would be able to destabilize the entire Middle East to the detriment of all its peoples and he could then place his boot on the world’s windpipe by threatening its oil supplies.

Possessed of suitable weaponry, Saddam would threaten Western democracies as no murderous tyrant has done since the Thirties. He could directly threaten the security of the Jewish people as no one has done since Hitler. And he could hold Europe and the US, our interests, people and values, to ransom. For he would be able to equip terrorists with the means to unleash attacks more devastating than those visited on America on September 11.

The danger posed by Saddam existed long before last September. Indeed, I have argued on this page for his removal for many years now. But the World Trade Center attack brought home, in the most horrific fashion, the requirement for action to protect the West from threats it had neglected or had believed could be managed by diplomacy and containment.

Saddam’s record, pathology and allies require a response from the West wholly different from the doctrine of deterrence that governed Western security thinking for 50 years. They also force us to rethink our inherited, and proper, respect for the principle of non-intervention in the affairs of sovereign states. As Henry Kissinger pointed out earlier this month, “policies that deterred the Soviet Union are unlikely to work against Iraq’s capacity to co-operate with terrorist groups. Suicide bombing has shown that the calculations of jihad fighters are not those of the Cold War principals.”

The international order has hitherto depended on the principle that national borders are sacrosanct and, however unattractive a tyrant, military action to remove a regime can be justified only by it’s breaching another state’s sovereignty. But, as Dr Kissinger has noted, Iraq’s imminent acquisition of weapons of mass destruction challenges that doctrine at root. For not only is Saddam’s program to acquire such weapons in breach of treaty accords and the international order, it also gives him the potential to threaten global security at will, possessed of the means of inflicting irretrievable damage on other states and peoples. Saddam, and his terrorist allies, would be horrifically empowered. Our capacity to protect our citizens, and interests, would be grotesquely weakened.

The scale, and imminence, of the threat we face requires action of a kind it has become hard to contemplate. We have no alternative but to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to prevent Saddam completing his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Massive military force must be deployed to remove Saddam’s regime. Such an action will inevitably lead to significant casualties, both Western and Iraqi. No reasonable, or moral, human being can regard such a course with equanimity. But reason, and morality, tells us that there is no alternative.

Because the costs inherent in such a course are great, and because it would mark a departure from the paths with which diplomatic elites are comfortable, powerful voices argue for other strategies. There is no doubting their sincerity, or seniority. But then those who practiced appeasement in the 1930s and detente in the 1970s were honorable men. It was never their intention to give tyrannies time and space to extend the reach of their oppression. Although that was the inevitable consequence of their inaction.

So, today, those who argue that we should wait until it can be proven that Saddam actually possesses a nuclear capability are wrong. By then the costs of action would be hugely greater. And those who argue, like Jack Straw, that we should rely upon UN weapons inspectors to neutralize the threat are wrong. Saddam is a past master at frustrating the efforts of the best of them. As Mr. Cheney again pointed out on Monday, “during the spring of 1995 inspectors were on the verge of declaring that Saddam’s programs to develop chemical weapons and longer-range ballistic missiles had been fully accounted for and shut down. Then Saddam’s son-in-law defected. Within days the inspectors discovered that Saddam had kept them in the dark about the extent of his program to produce VX, one of the deadliest chemicals known to man, and far from having shut down Iraq’s prohibited missile programs they found that Saddam had continued to test such missiles. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatever of Saddam’s compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box.”

The faith placed in the UN, in inspectors, in containment, in all the tools of the old diplomacy, reflects the world-view of men such as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft who see foreign policy as an exercise in managing, rather than confronting, dangers. But the age upon which we have entered requires, like the 1930s and 1980s, a relinquishing of false comforts and a clear-eyed confrontation with evil.

It also requires a recognition that the traditional diplomacy which placed stability above morality only succeeded in compromising both. The realpolitik that led Republicans, and Tories, in the past to acquiesce in the propping up of regimes in Baghdad, and Riyadh, has not bought us security. It has allowed evil to incubate. And we have been forced to pay, in the innocent blood shed on September 11, for that folly.

Now, however, America is determined to ensure that danger is defeated by liberating those whom its past policies have betrayed. It is an irony, and one perhaps not welcome among the old Left or the old Right, that morality has been restored to international affairs by a conservative American President. Just as it was in the 1940s by a Conservative British Prime Minister. While Europe stands irresolute and divided, while America’s old managerialists cavil, while the Left temporizes in the face of tyranny, the White House recognizes that Western democracy’s future depends on democracy taking root in Iraq.

Cynics might call it cowboy diplomacy, but putting its faith in freedom is how the West has always won.

To lily-livered poltroons and turn-tail apologists for Saddam Hussein, Vice President Dick Cheney's powerful rejoinder Monday in Nashville felt like a scathing indictment.
In witheringly forceful language, the blunt-speaking, sharp-witted Veep cut right to the chase, piercing through the bosh and drivel like a jackknife, laying out the case, step-by-step, for pre-emptively moving against Saddam -- before it's too late.
Suddenly, the Scowcrofts and Eagleburgers -- rightful nominees for the Neville Chamberlain award as craven appeasers -- are on the defensive, their quixotic, 'hands-across-the-world', 'let's-all-get-along-and-sing-kumbaya-ism discredited as hopelessly naive.
Scowcroft & Eagleburger, dumb and dumber, just the crowd to lecture us on Iraq, right? Yeah, right.
With clearness of thought and purpose, Cheney gave a national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars the true lowdown on Saddam, to wit, that he seeks "domination of the entire Middle East", "control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies" and to "threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States ... to nuclear blackmail."
"Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or a murderous dictator, or the two working together, constitutes a grave threat as can be imagined", declared the Vice President.
Cheney noted this war began on September 11th, when 3,000 of our fellow citizens were savagely massacred -- the most barbaric act of domestic terrorism in American history.
"Wars are never won on the defensive", Cheney observed. "We must take the battle to the enemy."
He deemed "deeply flawed" suggestions from some to wait till Saddam acquires nuclear weapons before pre-emptive action is taken.
"Saddam would simply be emboldened, and it would become even harder for us to gather friends and allies to oppose him", said Cheney.
In response to skeptics who say the risks are too high, Cheney turns the tables, noting this is a 'heads-I-win, tails-you-lose' sort of "argument". If attacking Iraq is too dangerous today, imagine what quislings will say once Saddam acquires the bomb?
Cheney's theme, from start to finish, was glaring: Get on board, or get the heck out of the way. While critics smugly take pot shots from the peanut gallery, this White House makes no apologies -- Saddam Hussein must go.
In short, the speech was a master stroke of strategic thinking, a bold blueprint for phase II of the War on Terror, per the Bush Doctrine, and a pointed rebuke of officials from the former Bush administration who botched Iraq foolishly the first time around.
To them, the message from Cheney is: Put a sock in it, boys, this time, we're going to do it right.
Responding to suggestions from former Sec. James Baker III that the U.S. seek U.N. blessing for military action, Cheney says, you've got to be kidding (or words to that effect).
Besides, America need not beg permission from Chi-Com China to defend her interests.
To long-suffering Iraqis, the victims of Saddam's monstrous tyranny, Cheney says 'help is on the way'.
The reaction from pundits? If Chris Matthews is any indicator, Democrats are in deep doo-doo. Monday the Hardball host ranted and raved, flailing away like a madman -- more than the usual. Like many Democrats, Matthews is lip-locked to Saddam, and gets his nose out of joint if you dare -- dare! -- hint support for military action.
When Matthews is smoldering angry, rest assured this White House is doing it right.
Democrats, never wont to place terribly high value on national security, are a party precariously in disarray in this post-9/11 world.

On many levels, the Democrats are a profile of a party mired in crisis. Its credibility battered, Democrats struggle mightily against a tide of national unity and feelings of patriotism in the aftermath of 9/11.
After months of ripping the President as a liar, a crook and a traitor, Democrats seem oddly chagrin that polls show voters still firmly in Bush's camp, with nearly 7 in 10 approving his job performance. Clearly, the public has tuned out the critics completely -- the reason Democrats have failed to lay a glove on Bush politically. Like hurling Jello-O against a wall, nothing seems to stick.
Even on corporate reform, hailed for months by the media as an area where Bush seemed 'vulnerable', el hombre de Tejas decisively smoked out the Democrats.
On the War on Terror, arguably the pre-eminent issue of our time, Democrats are dangerously on defense, the growing party splits and schisms threatening their hold of the Senate as November approaches. Long-shot hopes of recapturing the House now appear more elusive than ever. Rep. Cynthia McKinney's primary defeat in Georgia last week exacerbates these tensions. The McKinney camp sees a "Jewish plot" behind her humiliating loss to upstart challenger Denise Majette, a former State Judge whose outspoken support for Israel drives party militants climbing up the wall. Growing anti-Jewish sentiment among prominent black Democrats in Congress alienates party moderates, specifically Jewish voters, a traditionally bedrock constituency of a once-vaunted Democrat coalition.
An angry Rep. Bernice Johnson, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, blasted Jews for "putting millions [of dollars] into a race to unseat one of our leaders", strongly insinuating 'Jewish money' plays an inordinate role in 'picking' leaders of the black community. "J-E-W-S" are to blame for his daughter's troubles, said veteran Georgia state Rep. Billy McKinney, spelling the word out on Atlanta TV on the eve of elections. He accused the Jews of 'buying' 'everybody'.
Black U.S. Rep. Earl F Hillard (D-Alabama), another anti-Jewish firebrand, this year was similarly defeated by a black primary challenger attracting strong Jewish support.
Mixed messages from Democrats on Saddam Hussein reveal deep fissures in the party, and remind voters why they trust Republicans far more on issues of war and peace, foreign policy and defense, issues likely to rank high on voters' mind as they head to the polls this November.
The press, hoping to thwart U.S. plans to topple Saddam, in recent weeks went to great lengths to soften public attitudes regarding Iraq, pulling out all the stops to swing sentiment decidedly against military action, all to little effect, however.
The public knows proof out the wazoo exists linking Saddam to global terrorism, and that, as Vice President Cheney so eloquently enunciated in Nashville on Monday, his Weapons of Mass Destruction programs pose a mortal threat to the United States and to our vital interests abroad.
The Scowcroft gambit, supposedly the media's ace up its sleeve, ended with hardly a ripple, illustrating once again how alienated from most Americans Democrats have become.
Sensing futility, Democrats like Chris Matthews are lashing out, loudly accusing the "neo-cons" of "pushing" the U.S. to war. Given that prominent leaders of neo-conservatism are proudly Jewish, some ponder what really motivates Matthews and Co. Is his stance purely a matter of principle, or is his animus towards "neo-cons" shaped by latent anti-Semitism? His antics leave many stunned observers wondering. Mr. Matthews seemed close to the edge Monday night, after Cheney's speech.
As election day draws nigh, Democrats, indeed, have reason to worry.
Anyway, that's....
My two cents...
"JohnHuang2"

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