Connecting the Dots

Authored by Michael Pate on March 17th, 2004 at 12:45 PM

Dave, Jeffrey, and Scott are all intelligent, well-informed individuals. But they each seem to have a mental block about one issue.

The US owes everyone a big mea culpa. We went to war, unprovoked, the first time in our history. Now the simplest way to say we were wrong, if Bush won’t do it, is to elect Kerry. - Dave Winer

What to do about mass murderers? Fight them of course. But not by waging preemptive wars against countries that had nothing to do with 9-11. It is like attacking cancer with machine guns. There�s a lot of smoke, a lot of racket, a lot of blowing bystanders to bits. But after the smoke clears and the funeral parades trudge on, not one cancer cell has been cured. - Jeffrey Zeldman

Either way, the lesson here is not that the Spanish people have suddenly become toadies of al-Qaida; it’s that, if you’re trying to lead a democracy in a war against terrorists, your first duty is to tell the truth. You can’t summon the national will required to go the distance against a devious network of murderers if you lose the trust of your own people. And if you make the kind of terrible strategic error that the war in Iraq clearly was — it toppled a brutal regime but distracted the world from the fundamentalist terrorists with whom we really are at war — then don’t be surprised if voters give you the sack. - Scott Rosenberg

I have a very long post about all of this but for this purpose we can just pull out a few highlights.

In 1998, the Justice Department headed by Janet Reno during the administration of Bill Clinton issued an indictment. Below is an excerpt.

In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq. - Federal Indictment

One has to wonder, if you follow the logic of the three gentleman above, Did Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, and Mary Jo White lie?

In 1999, the following appeared in the Guardian.

Saddam Hussein’s regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials. The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad’s ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam’s most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq. - Julian Border

Keeping in mind this was again during the administration of Bill Clinton, were officials of his administration lying then? And why would the Guardian have chosen to run the story if they doubted the credibility.

Laurie Mylroie, in her book, The War Against America, made the argument the following argument.

…Mylroie sees Saddam’s fingerprints on four terrorist attacks: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the 1995 bombing of the US training mission for Saudi troops in Riyadh; the 1996 attack against the US base in al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia; and the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. - Joe Lauria

It would seem kind of odd that Hussein would have been involved in those four attacks but not September 11th. Rather than rely on my uninformed opinion, I will rely on people like Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Commander under Bill Clinton.

Certainly there�s a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. - Wesley Clark

If you want to vote for John Kerry, who does not see the War on Terror as a military operation and thinks the key to Homeland Security is having enough personnel to collect the bodies after terrorist attacks, go ahead. But just keep in mind that every time you accuse George Bush of lying, you are also accusing a whole lot of Democrats of lying as well. Personally, my problem with the Clinton Administration was not that they lied, but that they just seemed uninterested in the problem.

It would be nice if we could just stick to the real issues.