Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Enough Already: I've been arguing that the invasion of Iraq was justified even if Saddam Hussein was never in cahoots with Al Qaeda, because he was involved with other terrorist organizations. Now I'm seeing more and more evidence that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden had a working relationship.

The left is trying to discredit everything Bush is doing in Iraq. And all of the bellyaching is falling flat on its face time and time again.

Iraq never had WMD! It's a Bush lie!

Iraq has used WMD plenty of times, including against the Kurds. During the first Gulf War, we discovered large caches of biological and chemical weapons, and our own soldiers got sick from them. Clinton even bombed Iraq in 1998 under Operation Desert Fox because Saddam Hussein refused to cooperate with U.N. inspectors who were sent to see whether Iraq was dismantling its WMD program. The presence of WMD in Iraq has been verified by Republicans, Democrats, the U.N., Germany, Russia, and even France.

Iraq didn't have WMD before the latest war!

You still believe Saddam Hussein got rid of all his WMD without telling anybody? Well, then you'll have to explain where this sarin and mustard gas came from. And there is a lot of evidence that Saddam shipped materials to Syria during the long run up to the war. Plus, ever heard of a spider hole?

Iraq has never supported terrorism!

Yes, Iraq did. And Saddam Hussein even bragged about it.

Iraq has never worked with Al Qaeda!

I believed that at first. But now it looks very much like Iraq did.

Iraq was not an imminent threat!

Were we supposed to wait until Iraq became an imminent threat? Iraq may have not had the military capability to invade Kuwait, again. But hateful despots with no other recourse are the first to depend on terrorism. And we didn't want to see Iraq's WMD fall in the hands of one of our enemies, like Al Qaeda.

Iraq was a sovereign nation! Leave them alone!

Iraq invaded Kuwait (for oil) and was massing its military along the border to invade Saudi Arabia. There was no provocation before this happened. We had to fight a war to stop them and push the Iraqi military back to its own country. When you lose a war after invading a sovereign country, you lose rights. We left Saddam in power only if he followed certain conditions. He broke nearly all of them.

We are killing Iraqi women and children

And men, too. But we haven't killed nearly as many as Saddam Hussein killed. Unfortunately, Saddam Hussein and the terrorists now operating in Iraq have no regard for human life. To save the millions of people who live in that country, there will be a few casualties. That is not the fault of the U.S. That is the fault of our enemies.

Reagan and other Republicans supported Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden!

Actually, both the CIA and Osama Bin Laden deny ever working together. While we did support some rebels during Afghanistan's fight against the Soviet Union, Bin Laden's group apparently was not one of them. Either that, or it's another CIA-Al Qaeda cover up. But I digress.

Yes, we did support Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and shame on us. Then Saddam Hussein betrayed us. Anytime you have a friend turn your back on you, that person is no longer your friend. But even if what we did in the past was wrong, that doesn't mean we can't do something right later on.

Other dictators do bad stuff and work with terrorists!

That sounds like an all or nothing approach -- either invade every country in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, or none of them. We had good reason to go into Iraq, notably because of 12 years of Saddam Hussein ignoring the stipulations of the 1991 cease-fire, refusing to show that he had destroyed his WMD, and shooting at our planes patrolling the area for a decade. Iraq will also serve as an example for other countries to fall in line. Because there were so many reasons to invade Iraq, I'd like to hear one legitimate reason to let Saddam Hussein's crimes go unpunished.

This war is a distraction from the fight against Al Qaeda! Saddam Hussein wasn't a part of 9/11!

That, my friend, is called tunnel vision. The 19 hijackers who crashed our airplanes and murdered 3,000 Americans are dead. We cannot only focus on the 9/11 attacks. We have to disrupt the terrorist organizations to prevent another 9/11. We won't be able to defeat the terrorist infrastructure immediately, so we have to implement short-term and long-term fixes at the same time. That's why we're destroying individual terrorist cells while bringing down despots, like Saddam Hussein, who support terrorism. That way we can change the culture in the Middle East that breeds terrorism. We already destroyed Al Qaeda's number one ally and sponsor, the Taliban. Now that Al Qaeda is scattering like so many cockroaches, we can undertake other military endeavors while our intelligence agencies concentrate on cleaning up the pockets of terrorists that continue to scamper across the Middle East.

Al Qaeda is using the invasion of Iraq as a call to arms! We're only making things worse by making the terrorists mad!

What did we do to make the terrorists mad on 9/10? Osama Bin Laden and other terrorist leaders are propaganda experts. They will use any excuse to attacks us. We have to respond forcefully, or else Bin Laden would use our impotence as an excuse to attack.

This war will destabilize the Middle East!

So far it hasn't -- at least it's no more unstable than before the war. Instead we're centralizing the war on terror. As Al Qaeda and other terrorists enter Iraq to fight, our troops are much better equipped to fight back than the citizens in New York and Washington. And in the long run, democracy and capitalism will bring more stability to the Middle East.

We'll lose our allies through our unilateral actions!

While not everyone is on board, I'd hardly call a military action with England, Australia, and Italy and others on our side unilateral. Nevertheless, we delayed the war for months while we begged the United Nations to join our fight, and even warned the esteemed body that it risks fading into irrelevance if it didn't back up its own resolutions. Some of the countries were scared to join, so we went ahead and did what we needed to do.

After all that, we're still working with France on dealing with Haiti. The United Nations is helping oversee the upcoming Iraqi elections. NATO will help train the new Iraqi military. And we're still working with all these countries to fight Al Qaeda. This was a big disagreement, but every country involved has too much at stake to sever ties or to let pettiness interfere with confronting outside threats. We haven't lost anything.

This war was about oil, Halliburton, rich friends, daddy, and American imperialism!

That tinfoil hat looks absolutely lovely on you. It's funny how we're not getting any of Iraq's oil after the sovereignty handoff. It's also funny how we aren't keeping Iraq. An empire without colonies isn't much of an empire.

Bush said it would be a cakewalk! Cheney said we'd be greeted as liberators!

No serious official ever said this would be a cakewalk, and nobody should have expected as such. And a huge portion of the Iraqi population did greet us as liberators. They showered our soldiers with flowers and kisses. Who do you think those people were who were trying to tear down the statues of Saddam Hussein?

Yes, there was a small insurgency, and it grew as Al Qaeda and other terrorists poured into the country. We're fighting a war on terror, and now we're fighting terrorists on their turf. This is how we need to destroy the terrorists.

Okay, the war was worth it, but Bush mismanaged it!

We crushed the Iraqi military almost instantly. We captured a murderous dictator within months after the start of the invasion. Although terrorists continue to pour into the nation, we are repelling their attacks, leaving them with the only option of sporadic suicide attacks, and prompting the terrorist mastermind there to desperately cry for help. We have installed a new sovereign and representative government. Iraq has a Constitution that protects individual rights. Iraq will have free elections within a matter of months.

All that, and we lost less than a quarter of the number of American lives than we lost on 9/11. Nobody can realistically anticipate every setback. We expected a massive civilian exodus and a much longer military engagement in an urban setting that never took place. As mismanagements go, I'd like to see more like this.

I hate Bush!

Yes, I know.