In reading the anti-Bush Administration propoganda that
spammed the Slashdot forum under the article about the
USGS censor, I was shocked to find such woefully inaccurate libel.
Allow me to respond to this piecemeal (for the purpose of
clarity, I will quote the slashdot poster with bold
italics and any other article with only italics).
You are woefully uninformed (despite your absolutely
ridiculous "informative" moderation), not to mention
completely wrong. I say this because:
> Iraq was not attcked illegally
Bush and crew lied about the reasons for
attacking Iraq.
[cnn.com] Iraq had no WMD.
Whoa there cowboy... lets take a step back and take a
look at this in perspective. Was this truly a Bush
Administration fabricated lie? To answer this question, it
is interesting to note that even the Clinton
Administration claimed that Iraq had WMDs (a fact that the
Left would like you to forget as it would ruin their anti-
Bush propoganda and their supposed moral highground).
A Google search provides us with the following link: TRANSCRIPT: CLINTON ON PREEMPTIVE AIRSTRIKES
AGAINST IRAQ dated December 16th, 1999.
Quoted from the article:
Washington -- President Clinton ordered America's Armed
Forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq
December 16 to "attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and
biological programs, and its military capacity to threaten
its neighbors."
Clinton states:
"This situation presents a clear and present danger to the
stability of the Persian Gulf and the safety of people
everywhere. The international community gave Saddam one
last chance to resume cooperation with the weapons
inspectors. Saddam has failed to seize the chance."
[...]
"If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we
will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will
strike again at his neighbors; he will make war on his own
people," Clinton said. "And mark my words, he will develop
weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he
will use them. Because we are acting today, it is less
likely that we will face these dangers in the future."
If you read the full transcript, you see the following
statements:
Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and
biological programs
[...]
For example, Iraq obstructed UNSCOM's effort to
photograph bombs related to its chemical weapons program.
If that's not enough to convince you that the Clinton
Administration felt certain that Iraq had possession of
WMDs, let us examine a speech he gave in February of 1998:
In the next century, the community of nations may see more
and more the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue
state with weapons of mass destruction ready to use them
or provide them to terrorists
This seems to counter the uninformed Leftist views that
WMDs were an imagination of the Bush Administration. Not
only did the Clinton Administration believe that Iraq had
(or would soon have, depending on your interpretation of
Clinton's statements) possession of WMDs, but it had even
launched an attack based on their belief at the time
(President Clinton launched missiles at a target in
Sudan suspected of being a chemical weapons plant back in
the summer of 1998).
If we take a look at the article that the Slashdot
poster referenced, we find an amusing admission by that
article's author:
Readers may not recall exactly what President Bush said
about weapons of mass destruction; I certainly didn't.
Thus, I have compiled these statements below. In reviewing
them, I saw that he had, indeed, been as explicit and
declarative as I had recalled.
We find here that this journalist did research on the
subject of Iraq and the claims by the United States that
they (Iraq) had Weapons of Mass Destruction, yet he
conveniently omits quotes by past presidents
claiming the same assertions. A little further
investigation brings to light that John W. Dean has a
political agenda to push, which is evident by the number
of books he has written with anti-conservative sentiments
along with the content of his interview with Democracy Now
where he pushes that Bush should be impeached.
Folks, I can't stress enough the importance of
evaluating the objectivity of the articles you read in
newspapers and what you see in the news on television. For
starters, you need to realise that a vast majority of the
news media are staunch supporters of the Democratic Party
and thus have a tendency to provide a slanted view of the
facts tipped against the Right (usually, I believe, this
is done on a subconscious level but it is there
none-the-less; no one can be 100% objective, especially on
matters of politics).
in order to generate popular support for his attack on
Iraq, Bush and his crew lied to the public.
I think "lied" is a bit extreme here, especially
considering that it was the common belief among all
officials in the United States that Iraq did in fact have
WMDs (note that I say "belief" which is the key word here
because in order to lie, one must know for a fact that
what he is saying is fictitious in nature - and it has yet
to be proven that Iraq never had WMDs, it is only a
suspicion that we (the USA) was wrong in our original
assumption that they had them).
In fact, subsequent to the first gulf war, Iraq was not
threatening anyone or their interests.
While they may not have directly threatened anyone,
they were closely collaborating with terrorists which, I
believe, many would define as threatening to the safety of
our and other nations. Even Clinton, the hero if the Left,
has stated that Iraq was a threat to both this nation and
the neighbors of Iraq (see above).
The administration repeatedly and specifically claimed
that Iraq's administration had direct and unequivocal ties
to Al-Quida. And has that been found to be so? No.
As before, it is again interesting to note that the
Bush Administration was not the first to make the
connection between Iraq and the Al-Qaeda as pointed out by
an article in The Washington Times, which
states:
The Clinton administration talked about firm evidence
linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Osama bin Laden's al
Qaeda network years before President Bush made the same
statements.
and
In fact, during President Clinton's eight years in office,
there were at least two official pronouncements of an
alarming alliance between Baghdad and al Qaeda. One came
from William S. Cohen, Mr. Clinton's defense secretary. He
cited an al Qaeda-Baghdad link to justify the bombing of a
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
There are even more interesting tidbits in the article,
so I urge anyone interested to read further.
As far as whether the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection has been
proven to be true or not seems to be a side-issue to the
Slashdot poster who only seems interested in trying to
argue that the connection was a Bush-concocted lie to the
American public. That said, however, let us investigate
further.
As Andrew C. McCarthy observes in this article discussing the 9/11 Committee
staff's
Statement No. 15,
Is the commission staff saying that the CIA director has
provided faulty information to Congress? That doesn't
appear to be what it is saying at all. This is clear
— if
anything in this regard can be said to be "clear" —
from
the staff's murky but carefully phrased summation
sentence, which is worth parsing since it is already being
gleefully misreported: "We have no credible evidence that
Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the
United States." (emphasis mine.) That is, the staff is
not saying al Qaeda and Iraq did not cooperate — far
from
it. The staff seems to be saying: "they appear to have
cooperated but we do not have sufficient evidence to
conclude that they worked in tandem on a specific
terrorist attack, such as 9/11, the U.S.S. Cole bombing,
or the embassy bombings."
As mentioned in the above article, George Tenet,
Director of the CIA, wrote to Congress:
- Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and
Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying
reliability. Some of the information we have received
comes from detainees, including some of high rank.
- We have solid reporting of senior level contacts
between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade.
- Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda
have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression.
Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence
of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including
some that have been in Baghdad.
- We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders
sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D.
capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has
provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of
poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.
- Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians
coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al
Qaeda suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will
increase, even absent U.S. military action.
It seems to be the CIA's consistant assertion that
there is, in fact, a connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.
I suppose the original Slashdot poster would make the
accusation that the CIA is wrong, but can the original
Slashdot poster post evidence to the contrary? I somehow
doubt it.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld specifically claimed
they knew where the WMD were. And were they there? No.
For the sake of argument, pretend that you are a drug
dealer and the police have given you a written notice
stating that they will be searching your home for the
possession of drugs on a particular date and that they
know where in your household these drugs are "hidden" (and
provide, in detail, where those drugs they know of are
located). Do you:
- a) leave the drugs where they are so that they might
be discovered and proven to exist
- b) move the drugs to another location and/or get rid
of them altogether
I think any intelligent person would get rid of the
drugs or at the very least, hide them in a new location.
I'll hold the ludacracy of the Slashdot poster's
assertions to be self-evident (especially considering the
extensive amount of time between the disclosure of the
location of said WMDs and the actual invasion of Iraq
to "find" said WMDs).
It does not, unfortunately, address the hundreds of
billions of dollars spent in pursuit of this illegitimate
war; nor the loss of Iraqi lives; nor the loss of US
soldier's lives, and the lives of those soldiers from
other countries who ill-advisedly entered into combat with
the US in this criminal action.
I find it amusing that the Slashdot poster purports to
be so interested in the lives of Iraqis. Does he know how
Iraqis are treated under the Saddam Hussein dictatorship?
Does he not realise that anyone who displeased Saddam in
any way would be executed without a trial? Does he not
know of the Human Rights under Saddam Hussein's Iraq? I
think, if he did, he would change his mind on this issue.
This
website documents further the attrocities committed in
Iraq under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. How can anyone
who claims to be concerned about the well being of Iraqis
be so against the United States getting involved in Iraq
to liberate the people? A good question indeed.
It is unfortunate that US soldiers had to die, but it
is a sad reality of war. People die. Was it worth the
lives of the men and women who faught so bravely in this
conflict? Only time will tell, but it is at this time far
too early to tell and will likely never be clear (it's
impossible to compare and contrast the outcome of
different choices). The only measure we can truly evaluate
is the feeling from the soldiers as to what their beliefs
are - do they believe that their efforts were in vein? Or
do they feel their lives were worth the effort?
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to read the
numerous articles where US soldiers involved in the Iraq
conflict commented on their feelings of whether it was
worth risking their lives. I think you'll find that most
feel their efforts were worth it.
The last assertion made by the Slashdot poster claims
that other countries blindly followed the US into Iraq.
This is naive. No government blindly follows another into
war - they all had their own Intelligence and risk
analysis, anyone who believes otherwise is a fool.