Posted on 06/03/2003 8:35:53 AM PDT by F_Cohen
No WMDs? Let's Give Iraq Back!
By Lowell Phillips
Toogood Reports
June 03, 2003
I was in a relationship some years back with a woman against whom it was utterly impossible to win an argument. Yeah, yeah, I know: you're not supposed to "win" arguments in relationships. I am no fan of such things, but some issues are so important and their implications so clear that a "compromise" is asinine. But patience, logic and facts were all futile, because her reasoning was in constant flux. If cornered, she would make something else the focus, claim not to have said what she had, that I hadn't said what I had, or that I'd said something I hadn't.
Toward the end, I began to wonder if I was developing a hearing loss and a faulty memory. But after talking to others (her friends, siblings and parents), I was reassured that it wasn't me at all, but rather a seemingly pathological refusal by the woman in question to accept that she might be wrong. I don't care for it either, but I don't take flight to avoid it.
Thankfully that situation is history, but I frequently experience something similar when watching the ebb and flow of politics. In that realm, hypocrisy is a matter of course and memory is necessarily selective. And nothing in recent political memory so vividly demonstrates these and has given me more piercing personal flashbacks than the ever-morphing opposition to the war that liberated Iraq. The mere fact that there continues to be determined opposition to a war already won is more than a little weird. But just like that person from my past, there are those who pathologically refuse to accept that they were, and are, wrong.
Currently the angle is to focus on the inability to uncover vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction horded by the regime of Saddam Hussein. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is feeling the heat, and the enthusiasm in this country to turn it into a full-blown scandal for the Bush administration is palpable. In fact, I haven't seen the administration's opponents this upbeat since they saw the possibility of hanging the collapse of Enron around the president's neck. But this is even better. Not only might they damage his personal credibility, they can dispatch his aura as a wartime leader, which is so annoying and inconvenient.
The U.S. Senate has already vowed to investigate, with the usual Democrat suspects promising to reveal the nefarious plot to trick the American people into supporting the war. I haven't yet heard from Tom Daschle, but there can be little doubt that he is "shocked," "saddened," or otherwise "concerned". Not surprisingly, there are a number of alleged Republicans attempting to cultivate favor in the press who are eager to go along, Mr. Maverick, Sen. John McCain among them.
As usual, the establishment media is taking their idea of a neutral position. An example appears in this week's Time Magazine. The article, Weapons of Mass Disappearance, opens with,
"How do you take your country to war when it doesn't really want to go?... if you need a lot of troops to prevail and you would like to remind everyone in the neighborhood who's boss anyway, then what you need most is a good reason - something to stir up the folks"
It goes on to describe weapons of mass destruction as "the public rationale peddled over and over to persuade a skeptical nation, suspicious allies and a hostile United Nations". It is also divided into subsections with the headings, "TREATING THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO AS FACT", "GLOSSING OVER AMBIGUITIES", and "FUDGING MISTAKES".
Keep in mind this is not an editorial, but a 2,500 word feature. One begins to wonder what the hubbub is over the practices at the New York Times.
Strange, however, that those making the most noise over the inability thus far to find banned weapons did not seem to care whether Saddam had them or not prior to the war. Instead they warned about being "distracted" from the war on terror. They preferred to keep him "in a box", deferring to Cold War-type deterrence. What they always failed to mention was that deterrence works both ways and that at some point Saddam would have the ability to deter us. Disarming Iraq, they also insisted, would be hypocritical considering Pakistan, China, North Korea and Israel maintain nuclear, and other nasty arsenals. Therefore WMDs were no reason to go to war.
Moreover, congressional Democrats, the media and world leaders (including France) fully believed that Saddam possessed WMDs or the ability to produce them, explaining their desire for U.N. weapons inspections to go on indefinitely.
And why should they, or anyone, have believed that Saddam was clean? We knew that he had used such weapons before. We knew that early weapons inspections following the first Gulf War uncovered vast amounts of biological and chemical weapons, and an active nuclear program, despite determined efforts to conceal them in violation of the cease-fire agreement and U.N. resolutions. So defiant were the Iraqis that inspectors were ultimately forced to leave in 1998, prompting then-President Clinton to order air strikes and to warn that "someday -- make no mistake" Saddam would use his illicit weapons.
No one truly thought that a butcher like Saddam had disarmed voluntarily after going to so much trouble to evade inspections, incurring crushing sanctions and costing him billions that might have built a few more palaces and some fancy new torture chambers. It was only a threat of war that brought the inspectors back. But once again their efforts were impeded. They were shadowed by Iraqi intelligence, monitored in their hotels and threatened. Iraqi scientists and their families were likewise threatened and not allowed to speak with inspectors unescorted. Even the amenable Hans Blix and co. had concluded that Iraq was "not serious" about disarming as late as February of this year. And a just-released report by Blix concluded that, "Iraq failed to alleviate fundamental suspicions that it had something to hide" on the eve of the war, as reported Monday in the Financial Times of London.
If a known violent felon is cornered and refuses to yield, or show his hands, a reasonable conclusion is that the bulge in his jacket pocket is a weapon. And if the police then pull the trigger, they are justified.
The current furor is whether the "primary reason" for Operation Iraqi Freedom was founded on "exaggerated," "overstated," or "politicized" intelligence. The problem is that intelligence is never absolutely accurate, and with an omnipresent media demanding that our leaders divulge what they know, secrets are difficult to keep. The discovery of two mobile weapons labs thus far is amazing in that Saddam had nearly two months to dispose of everything revealed in Sec. of State Colin Powell's February address to the U.N. Security Council.
The ultimate decision to make banned weapons the focus was in no small part due to the insistence of critics. The question was echoing everywhere, "Is it support for terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, or the persecution of the Iraqi people?" "Bush can't decide," they mocked.
The answer is, "all of the above and more". There was no reason to believe that Saddam had disarmed and every reason to believe that he hadn't. His continual attacks on coalition aircrafts and obstruction of inspections were violations of the Gulf War cease-fire. Our open-ended presence in Saudi Arabia, required to keep Saddam "in a box", was inflaming the Muslim world, not to mention tying up needed military assets. There was little doubt before or after the liberation of Iraq that his government was involved in terrorism. Terrorist training camps at Salman Pak and in northern Iraq, and operatives like the late Abu Nidal throughout the country proved this.
A surviving Hussein regime would have seriously hindered other actions in the war on terror. Moving against Syria, or Iran with Saddam at out backs would have been foolhardy. Considering the world has seen fit to place the Israeli/Palestinian problem squarely in the lap of the United States, it didn't hurt to take out a regime that was openly funding suicide bombers, thus sending a message to other sponsors of terrorism.
Limited resources and strategic realities make it impossible to save every oppressed nation, but in Iraq we could save 25 million people from the most brutal dictator this side of Pol Pot. Saddam's crimes far exceed those that took us into Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. And it is beyond debate that there was greater national security rationale with Iraq then with either of these media-driven deployments.
The Clinton Era reasoning that our presence in Bosnia and Kosovo was needed to prevent the outbreak of another world war was a misreading of history, and frankly laughable. Yet there were no calls for congressional investigations or charges of "overstated," "exaggerated," or "politicized" reasoning.
I am still confident that further evidence will surface of Saddam's arsenal. A few weeks in a fairly large country is not exactly a long time. And these are the same people who cried "quagmire" a few days into a military offensive that made Patton's drive across Europe look leisurely. But if we find not a single additional shred, I'll sleep just fine.
LOL! Same here, including my current wife. She denies this of course, but she always changes the rules on me... but I digress. This article is right on target. Worst case scenerio for Bush is that Saddam DID destroy them, but bluffed us into thinking he had them. We called his bluff, he lost. I have no problems with an outcome like that. Of course the "problem" would be a political one for Bush, depending on how much BS the media and Democrats can stir up. But from a moral standpoint, I have absolutely no problem with having invaded that country, no matter what the outcome of the WMD search.
Lowell must have been dating my ex-wife.
Exactly what makes them an ex-wife.
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