Posted on 06/02/2003 12:18:29 AM PDT by kattracks
ASHINGTON
Quick what was the biggest intelligence misjudgment of Gulf War II?
It was the nearly unanimous opinion of the intelligence community, backed by the U.S. and British military, that the 50,000 elite soldiers of Saddam's well-trained, well-equipped Special Republican Guard would put up a fierce battle for Baghdad.
Our military plan was based on this cautious assessment. That presumption of a bloody, last-ditch defense was also the basis for objections to the war: in street fighting, opponents argued, coalition casualties would be horrific, and tens of thousands of civilians would be sacrificed.
Happily, our best assessment was mistaken. Saddam's supposed diehards cut and ran. Though Baghdad's power and water were cut off, civilians were spared and our losses were even fewer than in Gulf War I.
What if our planners had believed Kurdish leaders who predicted that Saddam's super-loyalists would quickly collapse? We would have sent fewer combat troops and more engineers, civilian administrators and military police. But the C.I.A. and the Pentagon had no way of being certain that the information about the Republican Guard's poor morale and weak discipline provided by Kurds and Iraqi opposition leaders was accurate.
With thousands of lives at stake, optimism was not an option. Sensibly, we based our strategy on the greater likelihood of fierce resistance. That decision was as right when made as it was mistaken in retrospect.
Turn now to the charge heard ever more stridently that U.S. and British leaders, in their eagerness to overthrow Saddam and to turn the tide of terror in the Middle East, "hyped" the intelligence that Iraq possessed germ and poison-gas weapons.
"Hype" means "exaggerate." As used by those who were prepared to let Saddam remain in power, it is prelude to a harsh accusation: "You lied to us. You pretended to have evidence that you never had; you twisted dubious intelligence to suit your imperialistic ends, so we were morally right and you were morally wrong."
Never mind the mass graves now being unearthed of an estimated 300,000 victims, which together with the million deaths in his wars make Saddam the biggest mass murderer of Muslims in all history. Never mind his undisputed financing of suicide bombers and harboring of terrorists, from Al Qaeda's Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi to the veteran killer Abu Nidal (the only "suicide" with three bullets in his head, dispatched in Baghdad probably because he knew too much.)
And never mind our discovery of two mobile laboratories designed to produce biological and chemical agents capable of causing mass hysteria and death in any city in the world. Future discoveries will be dismissed as "dual use" or planted by us.
No; the opponents of this genocidal maniac's removal now accuse President Bush and Prime Minister Blair of a colossal hoax. Because Saddam didn't use germs or gas on our troops, they say, that proves Iraq never had them. If we cannot find them right away, they don't exist. They believe Saddam sacrificed tens of billions in oil revenues for no reason at all.
A strong majority of Americans believe he did have a dangerous program running, as he did before. Long before the C.I.A. dispatched agents to northern Iraq, Kurdish sources were quoted in this space about terrorist operations of Ansar al-Islam, whose 600 members included about 150 "Afghan Arabs" trained by Al Qaeda; after our belated bombing, some escaped to Iran.
As reassured Iraqi technicians and nurses come forward and as Baathist war criminals seek to save their skins, we will learn much more about Saddam's terrorist connections and his weaponry. It took seven years to catch the Olympic bombing suspect in North Carolina and 18 years to catch the Unabomber; the location of Saddam and Osama bin Laden won't remain a mystery forever.
In the meantime, as the crowd that bitterly resents America's mission to root out the sources of terror whips up its intelligence-hoax hype, remember the wise "mistake" we made in overestimating the fighting spirit of Saddam's uniformed bully-boys.
When weighing the murky evidence of an aggressive tyranny's weapons, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair were obliged to take no chances. The burden on proof was on Saddam. By his contempt, he invited invasion; by its response, the coalition established the credibility of its resolve. There was no "intelligence hoax."
The story about the Marines who found an underground site with radioactivity that jumped off the charts (Torowetha or some name like that) came and went very quickly. There's got to be more to that story. There was speculation that many of Iraq's nuclear scientists had gone to Libya to work in Libya's under-mountain nuclear weapons lab.
There are a lot of suspicious leads and my guess is that we're following them out of Iraq to wherever they lead. Too much publicity about what we've actually found in Iraq will dry up the leads.
Gotta play our cards close to the vest for a while, I think.
This is the Dim's campaign theme, for '08 as well as '04.
Hearing this talk you'd think Bush went over there and kicked their asses by himself. He might have I suppose. But why and how did he convince half of the world to join in?
Maybe they didn't...yet. I for one am very happy that we didn't wait for a smoking nuclear gun before we decided to do something about it. Helllloooo?
It's not why we took out Saddam, but an assasination attempt against a U.S. President, current or former, is justification in and of itself. Clinton should have taken care of this when it happened.
If you can pull the troops, money and global political support out your anal orifice to implement your genius plan, then we'll take it seriously. For now, it's a great hardship on our people in just Iraq to remain there for just these months. And politically, we stopped just short of making China, Russia and France nuclear protected covert safe havens for anti American terrorists.
Please tell me what voting for a third party, or not voting at all, will do other than electing real dems?
It's not that I totally disagree with you on the Constitutional issues, but considering that in the last presidential election half of the nation voted for "real dems" and half voted for "dem lite" - and IIRC less than 5% voted for "real conservatives".....
I'd like to know if you have a constructive strategy on changing the mindset of the voters, if you have a suggestion about a 'real conservative who could both get elected AND accomplish something, or if you're basically planning on 'taking your ball and going home.'
Recent Iraqi defectors provide additional details of Saddam Husseins support of international terrorism through the 1990s. The documentary program Frontline, has interviewed former Iraqi intelligence and army officers with first-hand accounts of highly secret installations run by an international terrorist known to Iraqi staffers only as the Ghost. 36 The Ghost is reportedly Abdel Hussein, the chief trainer at the camp and responsible for conducting assassinations outside Iraq to support Saddam Husseins regime. 37 The facility contained a Boeing 707 jet fuselage used to practice hijacking scenarios. UN inspectors independently confirmed the existence of the terrorist training camps. 38
Satellite images of a facility near Baghdad show an airliner that Iraqi defectors say is used to train terrorists in the art of hijacking. Space Imaging, which operates the Ikonos civilian surveillance satellite, was prompted to look for the aircraft in existing photos after a ''Frontline'' television show interviewed two Iraqi defectors who described the hijacker training and the aircraft used for the mock attacks. One of them drew a map of the Salman Pak training area, and Space Imaging was able to find the facility and the aircraft in photographs taken on Apr. 25, 2000, of an area about 15 mi. southeast of Baghdad on the Tigris River. The zoomed-in photograph is a close match to the hand-drawn map, lending credence to the defector's story. He is Sabah Khodada, and said he worked at the secret Salman Pak complex for about six months as an administrator. The facility is run by the Iraqi secret service, and is used to teach assassination, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, buses and trains and other terrorist operations, Khodada said. ''This camp is specialized in exporting terrorism to the whole world.''
Iraq's Tie to Al-Qaeda Terrorists, Airline Hijackings
So...these defectors were able to draw a map of the place and then the exact location was confirmed by an independent imaging company, which proves the credibility of the defector's stories...what is suspect about that? Oh and you might be interested in the following link as well with even more info:
Mylroie: Clintonized CIA Blocking Iraq-9/11 Evidence
Terrorists that targeted Israel and not the United States.
Ummm, excuse me but isn't there a war on terrorism going on? Terrorism is terrorism, no matter who the victim. We were justified in taking out Saddam for that reason alone.
The Iraqi government did not control this part of northern Iraq
Oh puhleeeeeze...Saddam kept control of Northern Iraq through Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam.
In northern Iraq Tuesday, U.S. special forces rooting out the al Qaeda-linked extremist group Ansar al-Islam seized manuals on the production of deadly poison gases, chemical masks and other documentation in raids on the Islamic militants' camps. The raids in Sargat and elsewhere in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq also turned up the names of several militants believed to be living in the United States. ABCNEWS' Jim Sciutto, who is embedded with the special forces units, described the documents seized as "significant." Atropine injectors the antidote for nerve gas and possible al Qaeda manuals were also taken. Sciutto said the documents included information on how to blow up buildings using diagrams of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which were bombed by al Qaeda in 1998, killing 224 people. There were also lists of names and phone numbers that U.S. intelligence officials were checking against lists of known al Qaeda operatives, Sciutto said. The raids were launched on Saturday against the Ansar al-Islam positions after missile and bomb attacks, and have been ongoing with the support of local Kurdish fighters. Secretary of State Colin Powell cited Ansar al-Islam as one of the justifications for taking action against Iraq in a February speech to the U.N. Security Council.
See also:
Al Qaeda Terrorists Target Iraqi Kurds
And a flashback for you to 1996...
In their struggle for power, KDP and PUK sought aid from Baghdad and Tehran respectively. That increased the tension in the Kurdish area and was negatively viewed by many Kurds. The interference of these countries along with Turkey into the Iraqi-Kurdish political situation could only complicate the Kurdish issue and increase the suffering of the Kurds. In the absence of a national and unified goal among the Kurdish political organizations in Iraq, one would not be surprised in seeing alignment between a Kurdish party and a neighbor state to achieve short-lived goals.
So yes, Saddam has power in Northern Iraq, albeit through other entitites.
Alnick is correct regardless. Former President Bush was targeted because of his Presidency, which makes the assassination attempt our business. As a matter of fact, if he'd been targeted merely because he was a U.S. citizen, it makes it our business.
Being targeted as an oil company executive, or randomly, might not make it U.S. government business, but under the circumstances, it was, and Clinton should have done something about it.
He did, didn't he? IIRC, he bravely ordered our troops to press the launch buttons on a few Tomhawks...
One side comment. You have set up a scenario where the US cannot prove anything to you because we have an ax to grind. Even if the UN went back in and found weapons, it could be claimed that we planted them there. I am a believer that the government has lied to us on a regular basis, but do you see a way for them to prove anything to you regarding WMD? What do you make of the trucks with the chemical kitchens found two weeks ago?
Additionally, who, in your opinion, is a viable candidate for the Presidency in 2004? By viable, I mean has a chance to win.
I know a lot of well intentioned Perot voters that painfully regret throwing their vote away.
so, which 3rd place loser gets your wasted vote?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.