It's a curiosity of liberals that in the arena of morality, truth and absolutes are in the eye of the beholder, but in politics they alone have a direct conduit to the truth. For an example almost guaranteed to cause heartburn, let's have a look at Arrianna Huffington's piece on Dick Cheney, which again demonstrates that the former vice president's truth tour is hitting a nerve with the hard left.
Despite the fact that even President Obama has conceded our successes in Iraq, putting twenty-five million souls on a slow track to a fledgling form of democracy, Huffington continues gnawing on the bone about pre-war intelligence and Iraq-9/11 connections. With respect to the former issue, we should remind her that page 84 of the July 7, 2004 report by the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, titled “Report of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Pre-War Intelligence Assessments on Iraq,” references a June 1999 report, which concluded: “All of the assessments in these [Intelligence] Community papers on Iraq’s nuclear program were consistent in assessing that: Iraq continued low-level clandestine theoretical research and training of personnel, and was attempting to procure dual-use technologies and materials that could be used to reconstitute its nuclear program…if Iraq acquired fissile material it could have a crude nuclear weapon within a year.”
Having used chemical weapons on his own people, and given his wholesale lack of compliance with the U.N. Resolutions, literally every intelligence agencyin the world believed that Hussein constituted a credible threat to his neighbors and to the civilized world. Why is this so difficult for Huffington and her liberal brethren to admit? Because it's a stark concession that their appeasement gene once again blinded them to the truth.
With respect to connections between Iraq/Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda/9/11, we turn to the most credible source available, Stephen F. Hayes' The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America. His work is well researched and provides incontestable evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda, which really should surprise no one. In order to make their arguments nominally plausible, critics are obliged to trot out the argument that Hussein was a secularist and had no interest in al Qaeda's goal of hegemonic Sharia law.
For those willing to look, history provides numerous examples of paradoxical alliances based on the momentary alignment of strategic interests of two otherwise adversarial forces. The practice of medism in ancient Greece involved wayward Greeks siding with the Persian Empire and it played an adverse role in key battles such as Marathon. In modern times, we're reminded of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which may seem shocking at first glance. However, when you realize it was Hitler's attempt to avoid a two-front war--which is what led to Germany's defeat in WWI--it made perfect strategic sense.
Huffington concludes her misinformed paean to political cynicism with a reference to glass houses, noting "that people with a paper trail that proves they ignored the looming threat of al-Qaeda, sanctioned torture, and used lies and manipulated intelligence to get us into a war, shouldn't be so fast to throw stones either."
Well, of course, no one sanctioned torture, and, as I've argued here, there's no evidence that anyone lied to get us into Iraq, but with respect to ignoring "the looming threat of al-Qaeda," she must be referring to former President Clinton's studied avoidance of the threat that developed under his very eyes, abetted, of course, by his insistence on maintaining the bifurcation of intelligence between the FBI and CIA.
Talk about 'glass houses.'
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