Never let it be said that the extreme Left/Socialists are fair.
As anyone knows who paid even slight attention to the public debate prior to the successful invasion and counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq of Coalition forces, Hussein had a clear history of dabbling in exotic weaponry and employing it, in the case of the gas killings of the Kurds in Iraq.
The issue of Niger yellowcake was a limited one as cursory textual analysis shows. The important point being made by the U.S. administration was that Hussein had played an endless game about allowing an accurate assessment of his pursuits and capabilities to be made.
Allowing this active and determined deception to continue unpunished was clearly a dangerous option, particularly when it was not the Soviets with whom we were dealing (bad as they were for other reasons) but a human throwback to the Plasticene era. What Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV would find out about purchase of yellowcake in Niger had little potential to add to or detract from these facts. Niger yellowcake was not the sine qua non (the eggs in the scrambled eggs, for the guys at Texas Tech) of the President's justification for going in.
With this modest precis (précis for the ladies at Bryn Mawr) of the lead up to the war in mind (drafted with, as it were, one-half my brain tied behind my back™), consider the following -- about President Clinton's nightmares -- so that you can understand that this problem posed by Hussein was one that already had some whiskers on it by the time it reached Pres. Bush:
These [biological] weapons were, after all, what Secretary of State Colin Powell years earlier proclaimed to be the most worrisome of all. And in January 1999, President Clinton confessed to two New York Times reporters, Judith Miller and William Broad, that the thought of a biological attack "keeps me awake at night." Not even nuclear or chemical weapons were as frightening as germ warfare, he told the reporters. Nuclear and chemical arms are "finite," he said. But someone infected with a contagious biological agent could continue to infect others--a "gift that keeps giving," as the president put it.
* * * *
Further into the book, the authors describe the gradual and painful U.S. enlightenment about illegal Iraqi and Soviet germ-related activities. By the end of the 1980s, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had secretly developed a formidable germ arsenal and American intelligence had no notion of its extent. On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, military commanders were frenzied about how to protect their troops from a danger whose dimensions they did not fully understand.
* * * *
As the breadth of the Soviet program became clear, U.S. officials were dismayed to find themselves on another surprise learning curve. After the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq had agreed to give United Nations inspectors a full accounting of its germ-weapons program. From the outset, however, the Iraqis lied and obfuscated. Only in 1995, when Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan, did the inspectors realize how massive the cover-up was. Kamel had been in charge of the program, and his defection prompted the Iraqis to acknowledge much that they had previously denied. They claimed sudden discovery of hidden documents confirming earlier production of thousands of gallons of anthrax and botulinum toxin. They acknowledged development of bombs and missile warheads to deliver them. But the Iraqis continued to block United Nations inspectors from visiting certain locations and in 1998 prohibited further inspections of any kind. Many experts believe the Iraqis [c. 11/01] are rebuilding their germ arsenals.
"
Pox Americana." By Leonard A. Cole, The American Prospect, 11/5/01. Review of
Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad.
Considering the above, the extreme Left's attempt to discredit the president was scurrilous and a mark of its desperation to find a political theme that would allow it to gain some traction as a credible opposition.
The smart set’s ultimate concern is not national security but whether President Bush can make a speech without a dangling modifier in it or goes to bed at night without a Halliburton teddy bear.
Granted, nothing was ever dangling during the Clinton years, and we do have Mr. Clinton to thank for the consummate policy formulation and execution that (1) entrenched the Islamofascists in the Balkans and (2) gave the Europeans the option to bow out gracefully from dealing with a problem practically begging for the direct expenditure of European blood, treasure, and political capital.
Nope. It just had to be those crass GIs again who got the job done. (If "blood for oil" is a slogan that captures your imagination, consider the purposes for which American blood was put at risk in our Balkan venture.)
And while Mr. Clinton rearranged several tons of sand with a couple of $10,000,000 cruise missiles directed at Osama and his camel troopers, Mr. Bush has, with courage and common sense, focused in the real problem in Iraq, leaving it to Al Jazeera and Harvard to deal with the split infinitives.
The real problem is that we stand today where we stood in 1920 in Russia, 1949 in China, 1979 in Iran, and 1991 in Iraq – within spitting distance of permanently dealing with various certifiables who went on from military and political weakness to cause suffering and death on a scale impossible to predict and difficult even now in hindsight to grasp. We owe it to the 100,000.000 innocents who were fed to the toves and Bandersnatches to implement what we should have learned about not applying the horsewhip in a vigorous and timely fashion.
The Left is wont to decry the fall of every sparrow (when it suits them to indulge in that skewed compassion that is their hallmark -- "Welfare for the poor but poverty courtesy
us guys.").
No family ever wants its offspring to be the ones to fall, but the choice is not that none shall fall if only a humane, non-ethnocentric, inclusive, esteem-building policy can be implemented. The choice is between a smaller loss of some now versus the loss of millions and civilization itself later.
Perhaps WWI was the last war of the modern age where it probably didn't matter that much if any side had prevailed. There was civilization on all sides. Since then, it made a very big difference who prevailed and for the Islamicists to prevail the world would be plunged back into a barbarism and a degree of ignorance made more detestable for its inability to know the true meaning of ignorance.
No soldier wants to be part of a force expended to achieve a greater strategic goal. But
all soldiers must pray for generals who will do what it has been historically proven necessary to do to achieve a decisive victory.
We are at a time when we must lift up such men.
