Fanaticism

Authored by Michael Pate on July 11th, 2004 at 11:00 PM

First off, I will admit this. I downloaded the entire report but I have not had time to finish it yet. But I just wasn’t in the mood to wait until I had finished it to comment.

I don’t care about the WMD stuff. I never did. I never will. I thought the fact that Saddam sought Weapons of Mass Destruction was reason enough for the Invasion of Iraq. The fact that no stockpile has been uncovered is utterly and completely irrelevant. I do care that the CIA got it wrong but I view it as a product of a 30-year campaign designed to render the CIA useless. What we have seen of late is the result.

There is something I do care about, though.

This is now pretty obvious. As anyone who read the newspaper then suspected, and as anyone who’s read some of this year’s confessional books now knows, the Bush administration had decided by mid-2002 to attack Iraq for reasons that were all about geopolitics. At that point, they started talking up Al-Qaeda links and Weapons of Mass Destruction and leaning on the intelligence community to dig up the story on both. Anyone with the vaguest understanding of both Iraq (Arab nationalism, lots of palaces for Saddam) and Al-Qaeda (Universal Islam, beards for everyone) knew that they were violently (literally) incompatible, and the most over-eager intelligence service in the world couldn’t possibly scrape together a convincing story. So they didn’t. So, anytime Bush or Cheney talked about Iraq-Al Qaeda links, they were lying and they knew they were lying. - Tim Bray

I have written about this before and it seems I have not finished yet. There seem to be one single belief that is driving Liberal Thought these days more than anything else: the idea that Al-Qaeda and Iraq were somehow incapable of acting in concert.

This belief is not based on fact because there is a mountain of evidence (newspaper reports, federal indictments, quotes, and documents) to support the fact there is an alliance. The evidence that Saddam supported terrorist groups has never been disputed (Arab Liberation Front, Hamas, Ansar al-Islam, and the Fatah Revolutionary Council). Saddam even hosted the 6th Conference of Popular Arab Organizations.

September 11th was not a single event. It was the latest in a whole chain that began with the First World Trade Center bombing which as anyone who read the newspaper then suspected was an Iraqi Operation. But was predicted back on January 12th, 1991.

Mr. Speaker, our Government recently announced that it has evidence that terrorists supported by Iraq are planning attacks against United States interests around the world should the coalition use the military option to liberate Iraq. I commend the administration for having taken seriously Saddam Hussein’s initial threats to use terrorism against the United States, both here in this country, as well as overseas. I urge the President to continue to upgrade our Nation’s antiterrorism capabilities. While I am unaware of any Iraqi-backed terrorist operations here in the United States, we should be well prepared for possible terrorist activities here. Iraq’s past and present involvement in terrorism around the world, however, is well documented and reveals yet another facet of that dictator’s strategy for intimidating our country. - William Broomfield

Fanaticism scares me. All sorts of fanaticism. The fanaticism of people like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden kills people. But the fanaticism of the left that holds on to their core belief beyond all reason and beyond all evidence allows other fanatics to kill people. And that is just as bad.

George W. Bush did not launch a war on Al-Qaeda in 2001. He launched a war on Terror. The Taliban in Afghanistan were the obvious first choice to be dealt with. Scott Rosenberg likes to argue that the US should have fixated on the Osama. I would love to hear his reasoning that the US should should not have entered World War II in Europe until after the defeat of Japan. But ignoring that just a moment, the obvious second choices for dealing with Terrorism were Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the favorite choice of at least one person I can think of, Saudi Arabia.

In 1997, John Kerry urged President Clinton and the United Nations to deal with Saddam Hussein. From that point on, he stayed consistent on the issue right up to the point that he flip-flopped when faced with the surging candidacy of Howard Dean. Iraq was the logical second choice because it was the one for which the clearest case could be made that it was violating International Law. A coalition was formed and the only thing preventing a UN mandate was the fact that a decade of the Oil for Food program and other voluminous side deals caused certain members of the Security Council to act in their own selfish interest.

I still have hope that once elected John Kerry will act responsibly and ignore the Dean Democrats and Moore Leftists who have made the defeat of George W. Bush much more important than his election. But given his past record, I don’t see how that is a chance worth taking.

The next vote for President is becoming than voting for the candidate of your choice. It is becoming a vote for or against fanatacism. And I can only hope people are willing to face the consequences.

—

After I read what Dan Darling and Michael Leeden (which makes three people now who have read the whole thing) said about the report, I understand even less what Tim Bray was talking about.