Great Piece from Victor Davis Hanson . Read it all;
One of the most frequent charges is that President Bush hyped a non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida — and that as a result, we diverted our efforts from finishing off the real terrorists to start a new and costly war to replace a secular dictator.
Almost every responsible U.S. government body had long warned about Saddam's links to al-Qaida terrorists. In 1998, for example, when the Clinton Justice Department indicted bin Laden, the writ read: "In addition, al-Qaida reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al-Qaida would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaida would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq."
..... October 2002, George Tenet, the Clinton-appointed CIA director, warned the Senate in similar terms: "We have solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida going back a decade." Seventy-seven senators apparently agreed — including a majority of Democrats — and cited just that connection a few days later as a cause to go to war against Saddam: " ...
.... More importantly, one of the masterminds of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Baghdad to find sanctuary with Saddam after the attack. And after the U.S.'s successful war against the Taliban, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the present murderous al-Qaida leader in Iraq, reportedly escaped from Afghanistan to gain a reprieve from Saddam. All of this is understandable since Saddam had a long history of promoting and sheltering anti-Western terrorists. That's why both Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas — terrorist banes of the 1970s and 1980s — were in Baghdad prior to the U.S. invasion and why the families of West Bank suicide bombers were given $25,000 rewards by the Iraqi government.
The Saddams and Assads of the region — and to a less extent the Saudi royal family and the Mubarak dynasty — deflected popular anger over their own failures onto the United States by allowing terrorists to scapegoat the Americans.
That day came after Sept. 11. To end the old pathology, we took out the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, pressured the Syrians to leave Lebanon, encouraged Lebanese democracy, hectored the Egyptians about elections, told Libya's Moammar Gaddafi to come clean about his nuclear plans, and risked oil supplies by jawboning the Persian Gulf monarchies to liberalize.
Americans can blame one another all we want over the cost in lives and treasure in Iraq. But the irony is that not long ago everyone from Bill Clinton to George Bush, senators, CIA directors and federal prosecutors all agreed that Saddam had offered assistance to al-Qaida, the organization that murdered 3,000 Americans. That was one of the many reasons we went into Iraq, why Zarqawi and ex-Baathists side-by-side now attack American soldiers — and why an elected Iraqi government is fighting with us. Hat tip: jahpdq
And I still stand behind every word of this article I [Atlas] wrote back in October of 2004 on going to war in Iraq;
............if she's a devoted Kerry/Edwards supporter, there's still time. Her loyalty to the Democratic party is admirable, but not when it's party before country. Her contention that our commander in chief is waging war in a foreign land naively defies logic. The war was waged here as thousands of our brothers and sisters vaporized into the very air we breathed on 9/11. President Bush took the war where it belonged...to the heart of the Middle East.
While many
countries sponsored terrorism, Saddam's Iraq was the most flagrant.
Twelve years
flouting sanctions alone would have legitimized the war, but Saddam was paying
off families of suicide bombers. He was bankrolling the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine through the UN oil-for-food program. The man was using
our taxpayer money to bomb innocents. He gave Abu Nidal, infamous Palestinian
terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds, safe harbor for decades
protecting the grisly executioner of wheelchair-bound American Leon Klinghoffer.
What in the world does she think was going on at Salmon Pac?
Radical Islamist terrorist organizations are all connected. Changing their
names shouldn't get us off their stench. Iraq is precisely where the war should
be taking place, not at La Grenouille. When I hear Democrats lamenting all the
terrorists are flooding into Iraq, I say "Hallelujah!" Let's draw them out of
their caves and spiderholes and kill them before they come after our kids here.
We have a president who iced out the greatest terrorist of all, Yasser Arafat,
who cut his teeth in 1972 with his bloodlust and murder of 11 Israeli athletes.
When Bush stopped the ridiculous moral equivalency in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and backed Sharon and the security fence, terrorist attacks markedly
decreased. The Democrats don't have the conviction nor the will for such action.
The French and Germans want Kerry too, but it was their enormous
payoffs via the oil-for-food program that fueled their refusal. They
conspired against us so that they might continue to suck the blood of
the Iraqi poor. They’re really not our friends nor that of the Iraqi
people. Ms. Kreiss should take note: when terrorists, Arafat, the
French, the Germans, those opposing us at the UN, and radical Islamist
fascists the world over are all routing for Kerry, she should probably
vote for the other candidate. I realize her loyalty to the Democratic
party might be like religious fervor or a drug, but this one just might
kill the organism.
I realize your loyalty to the Democratic party might be like religious
fervor or a drug, but this one just might kill the organism.
The arguments of the left are becoming laughable. They focus on weapons
of mass destruction. Saddam gassed his own people and was famous for
his weapons programs. We're quibbling over exactly when this would
become a danger again? This is the man who pledged all sorts of mayhem
against us in speeches since the first Gulf War. With a history of
having attacked four of his neighbors, shooting at us in the no-fly
zone and flouting sanctions for years, we needed to take it seriously.
Clinton, Kerry, and numerous other luminaries were convinced of the
threat and publicly made us aware, but somehow Bush's belief is
sinister? The intelligence failures occurred during the Clinton
administration with Bush inheriting a weakened military, patchwork
intelligence networks that did not share information a la the Gorelick
memo and terrorist plans that were reaching their final stage. How do
they compare Bush's eight months in office to Clinton's eight years of
squandered prosperity, inaction on terrorism and missed opportunities
to get Bin Laden?
The left isn't salvagable if you exchange "flipflopping" with "intellectual
growth". Intellectual giants are often paralyzed into inaction and the
spinally challenged
The left is no one to trust with the current World
War. The stakes are too high...it's good vs. evil. I submit to the readers that
all heads should be removed from the sand and they must read between the lines
of a biased media. Western civilization hangs in the balance.
UPDATE: November 26th.... and why is no one blaming Bill Clinton for understating the terror threat?
A Fitting Address
We are winning the war. So why doesn't
President Bush say so?
