Weekend update: Boosh gets angry
GW Boosh yesterday bust a gut about those nasty Democrats complaining about the war in Iraq and how they were misled and how they never really supported it in the first place.
Boosh sounds shrill. But in this case he is absolutely right: the Senate Intelligence Committee did check out the information and did support the decision to go to war. The later review of the info to see if Boosh (and cronies) had tampered with the evidence to induce the initial vote came out to clearly support the administration. In short, no foul here. Yet 3 out of 5 Americans distrust Boosh's motives and use of the facts that led up to war. That is a PROPAGANDA triumph for the press and liberals. It sort of supports Joseph Goebbels' contention that you tell a lie often enough, it sticks as truth, even the big lie (and no, I am not implying that the liberal press is the equivalent of Joseph Goebbels, only that the techinques of the disemination of propaganda remain as valid and viable today as in 1936: you control the press, you control the minds of the electorate).
Ws of MD: lets be clear about this too. If you believe anything Saddam Hussein's administration told you about weapons of any kind, you are an idiot. Plain and simple. We KNOW that Saddam had WMDs (that acronym is grammatically offensive): he used them against Kurds and Shiites in his own country and against Iran. That much is totally beyond dispute. The inspections to ensure the destruction of said WMDs post Gulf War #1 were inconclusive to say the least. Never were the inspectors given unfettered access to the sites requested, and there remains a great deal of suspicion as to how effectively Saddam had penetrated the inspections teams and process (think oil for food -- could someone have a secret abnk account somewhere??). Hans Blix couldn't find his own nether end in broad daylight with both hands, let alone thwart a dictator like Saddam.
So, assuming the rational, that is that Saddam kept at least some goodies, where did they go? All that has been found are some shells with traces of chemical weapons that some insurgents tried to use as improvised devices against marines. Again, let's get real and point to the elephant(s) in the room: Syria and Iran. Before considering Syria, let's take Iran for a moment. Would Saddam give WMDs to Iran, his erstwhile enemy and against which he used the same weapons? Why, yes, of course! Think like Saddam for a moment (or use Middle Eastern logic, if you will), better to give them to a regime that might use them against the West or even better Israel (and be really quiet about having them) than have them fall into the hands of his ultimate nemesis. Duh.
Syria. Ruled by a Baathist President for Life. Sound familiar? Would Bash-baby like to own some of those weapons for security purposes? The Assad family has never shown a particular reluctance to murder large numbers of people. Hafez was known to have had 20,000-30,000 people slaughtered when it appeared that his rule was threatened. And Syria is relatively homogeneous as compared to Iraq: those were his own people, ethnically. Remember also that Syria has controlled Lebanon as a vassal state for at least the last 20 years. Remember too, that Syria encouraged the various violent groups in Lebanon dedicated to the extermination of Israel, Jews and all things Western, even letting in Iranian Revolutionary Guards to train some of these groups. Syria last got its teeth knocked out in the Bekaa valley before letting PLFP, Hizballah, and others continue to pester Israel. Syria also recently got caught with its fingers in the pie of the assassination of Rafik Hariri. These are not nice people, folks. And critically, they are Ba'athist. Yes, that's right folks. The self same purveyors of peace that continue to assert themselves in Iraq, albeit a slightly different brand of the Ba'ath orthodoxy.
Syria's border with Iraq is long. Syria has absolutley no intention of going the way of Iraq, The Assad family and the Ba'ath party like where they are, what they have and have no intention of letting someone upset the status quo: as long as there is fighting in Iraq, nobody is going to turn their beady eyes on Syria (have you checked out how beady the Boosh eyes are?). All this has been known and anticipated (at least anyone who knows spit about the Middle East, which might well preclude such knowledge from the Boosh administration and the US military) for a long time. Would Saddam send his WMDs to Syria -- given that he knew that the gig was up? Would he send his goodies to Damascus in the hope that if he goes down, someone will use them effectively some time in the future? Maybe even to kill some (or a lot of) Americans and Jews? Or even to provide a staging post and a fearsome weapon for the faithful to seize control of Iraq back from whatever government forms there? In short, would Saddam just give the WMDs to the Americans/Brits? No. Under no theory of war or power politics does that make sense. He had WMDs. He almost certainly did not destroy all of them. They are gone.
Where did they go? The ability of Saddam to make WMDs vanish was underestimated by the US and UK. This is not a political issue for partisan politics as practiced by the DNC. It is a grave mystery in need of an answer.
Syria is also a grave threat to the new Iraq and US/UK alliance: Syria has every reason to destabilize Iraq and we have more than a little anecdotal evidence that they are working hard to forment discontent and assist the Jihadis in bringing violence and death to Iraq. Never has Syria shown a reluctance to spread misery, they have the whole Lebanese experience and their own internal repression as models. The Syrian intelligence machinery was trained and designed by the Soviet Union. The political goals of Syria have not changed a whit since those distant days when Brezhnev rattled sabres against the West and funded wars with Isreal. They perceive themselves as politically pure and the guardians of the ideology of the pan-arab state to come. In that goal they have the support of the Saudis, the Gulf, and wherever one-party politics predominates. Not to mention any group that would like to rid the Earth of Israel.
What the Western news and media need to do is wake up and smell the coffee. Heck, let's vote to demote Boosh as dogcatcher. I'd be thrilled. Rarely has anyone been so unsympathetic, unlikeable, arrogant and offensive as President. I'd have to go back to LBJ to find one ... wait a minute, see a similarity there??? But seriously, we CANNOT continue to undermine the work we are doing in Iraq and the incredible harm we are inflicting on American soldiers for the sake of partisan politics. We are there for better or worse and we HAVE to see it through. The political need to remove Boosh cannot justify the actions being taken by leftists and liberals in this country. Lies, half-truths and base political grandstanding is disgusting and far beneath the process. And before we get to finger pointing saying that I must be referring to Boosh, remember that the people who have the most reason to hate Boosh have already done their due diligence on the matter: they cleared him. Digging this stuff up again has its base in a political desire to muddy the waters in anticipation of electoral gain. At what price?
If the left wants to attack Boosh, do it where it hurts. Let's have a good look at the contracting process in Iraq. That is fair game. That has not been reviewed by independent process by either house. And we KNOW that this will be juicy. If we choose not to, it can only be because we are are afraid of angering the people that will fund our next re-election campaigns -- the left and right are equally complicit in not addressing that can of worms. Teddy K, (the other great unindicted and the greatest Windbag beside the GoodYear blimp) is a prime example of what I am talking about. "Let nothing get in the way of our pork." Certainly not something so vital as corruption in contracting and undue influence of business in the government -- it is far easier to just claim that Boosh lied and that is why we are in a mess (and didn't Kerry and Windbag get to review that same intelligence? Kerry loudly proclaimed his support for the military action).
Boosh sounds shrill. But in this case he is absolutely right: the Senate Intelligence Committee did check out the information and did support the decision to go to war. The later review of the info to see if Boosh (and cronies) had tampered with the evidence to induce the initial vote came out to clearly support the administration. In short, no foul here. Yet 3 out of 5 Americans distrust Boosh's motives and use of the facts that led up to war. That is a PROPAGANDA triumph for the press and liberals. It sort of supports Joseph Goebbels' contention that you tell a lie often enough, it sticks as truth, even the big lie (and no, I am not implying that the liberal press is the equivalent of Joseph Goebbels, only that the techinques of the disemination of propaganda remain as valid and viable today as in 1936: you control the press, you control the minds of the electorate).
Ws of MD: lets be clear about this too. If you believe anything Saddam Hussein's administration told you about weapons of any kind, you are an idiot. Plain and simple. We KNOW that Saddam had WMDs (that acronym is grammatically offensive): he used them against Kurds and Shiites in his own country and against Iran. That much is totally beyond dispute. The inspections to ensure the destruction of said WMDs post Gulf War #1 were inconclusive to say the least. Never were the inspectors given unfettered access to the sites requested, and there remains a great deal of suspicion as to how effectively Saddam had penetrated the inspections teams and process (think oil for food -- could someone have a secret abnk account somewhere??). Hans Blix couldn't find his own nether end in broad daylight with both hands, let alone thwart a dictator like Saddam.
So, assuming the rational, that is that Saddam kept at least some goodies, where did they go? All that has been found are some shells with traces of chemical weapons that some insurgents tried to use as improvised devices against marines. Again, let's get real and point to the elephant(s) in the room: Syria and Iran. Before considering Syria, let's take Iran for a moment. Would Saddam give WMDs to Iran, his erstwhile enemy and against which he used the same weapons? Why, yes, of course! Think like Saddam for a moment (or use Middle Eastern logic, if you will), better to give them to a regime that might use them against the West or even better Israel (and be really quiet about having them) than have them fall into the hands of his ultimate nemesis. Duh.
Syria. Ruled by a Baathist President for Life. Sound familiar? Would Bash-baby like to own some of those weapons for security purposes? The Assad family has never shown a particular reluctance to murder large numbers of people. Hafez was known to have had 20,000-30,000 people slaughtered when it appeared that his rule was threatened. And Syria is relatively homogeneous as compared to Iraq: those were his own people, ethnically. Remember also that Syria has controlled Lebanon as a vassal state for at least the last 20 years. Remember too, that Syria encouraged the various violent groups in Lebanon dedicated to the extermination of Israel, Jews and all things Western, even letting in Iranian Revolutionary Guards to train some of these groups. Syria last got its teeth knocked out in the Bekaa valley before letting PLFP, Hizballah, and others continue to pester Israel. Syria also recently got caught with its fingers in the pie of the assassination of Rafik Hariri. These are not nice people, folks. And critically, they are Ba'athist. Yes, that's right folks. The self same purveyors of peace that continue to assert themselves in Iraq, albeit a slightly different brand of the Ba'ath orthodoxy.
Syria's border with Iraq is long. Syria has absolutley no intention of going the way of Iraq, The Assad family and the Ba'ath party like where they are, what they have and have no intention of letting someone upset the status quo: as long as there is fighting in Iraq, nobody is going to turn their beady eyes on Syria (have you checked out how beady the Boosh eyes are?). All this has been known and anticipated (at least anyone who knows spit about the Middle East, which might well preclude such knowledge from the Boosh administration and the US military) for a long time. Would Saddam send his WMDs to Syria -- given that he knew that the gig was up? Would he send his goodies to Damascus in the hope that if he goes down, someone will use them effectively some time in the future? Maybe even to kill some (or a lot of) Americans and Jews? Or even to provide a staging post and a fearsome weapon for the faithful to seize control of Iraq back from whatever government forms there? In short, would Saddam just give the WMDs to the Americans/Brits? No. Under no theory of war or power politics does that make sense. He had WMDs. He almost certainly did not destroy all of them. They are gone.
Where did they go? The ability of Saddam to make WMDs vanish was underestimated by the US and UK. This is not a political issue for partisan politics as practiced by the DNC. It is a grave mystery in need of an answer.
Syria is also a grave threat to the new Iraq and US/UK alliance: Syria has every reason to destabilize Iraq and we have more than a little anecdotal evidence that they are working hard to forment discontent and assist the Jihadis in bringing violence and death to Iraq. Never has Syria shown a reluctance to spread misery, they have the whole Lebanese experience and their own internal repression as models. The Syrian intelligence machinery was trained and designed by the Soviet Union. The political goals of Syria have not changed a whit since those distant days when Brezhnev rattled sabres against the West and funded wars with Isreal. They perceive themselves as politically pure and the guardians of the ideology of the pan-arab state to come. In that goal they have the support of the Saudis, the Gulf, and wherever one-party politics predominates. Not to mention any group that would like to rid the Earth of Israel.
What the Western news and media need to do is wake up and smell the coffee. Heck, let's vote to demote Boosh as dogcatcher. I'd be thrilled. Rarely has anyone been so unsympathetic, unlikeable, arrogant and offensive as President. I'd have to go back to LBJ to find one ... wait a minute, see a similarity there??? But seriously, we CANNOT continue to undermine the work we are doing in Iraq and the incredible harm we are inflicting on American soldiers for the sake of partisan politics. We are there for better or worse and we HAVE to see it through. The political need to remove Boosh cannot justify the actions being taken by leftists and liberals in this country. Lies, half-truths and base political grandstanding is disgusting and far beneath the process. And before we get to finger pointing saying that I must be referring to Boosh, remember that the people who have the most reason to hate Boosh have already done their due diligence on the matter: they cleared him. Digging this stuff up again has its base in a political desire to muddy the waters in anticipation of electoral gain. At what price?
If the left wants to attack Boosh, do it where it hurts. Let's have a good look at the contracting process in Iraq. That is fair game. That has not been reviewed by independent process by either house. And we KNOW that this will be juicy. If we choose not to, it can only be because we are are afraid of angering the people that will fund our next re-election campaigns -- the left and right are equally complicit in not addressing that can of worms. Teddy K, (the other great unindicted and the greatest Windbag beside the GoodYear blimp) is a prime example of what I am talking about. "Let nothing get in the way of our pork." Certainly not something so vital as corruption in contracting and undue influence of business in the government -- it is far easier to just claim that Boosh lied and that is why we are in a mess (and didn't Kerry and Windbag get to review that same intelligence? Kerry loudly proclaimed his support for the military action).
posted by Zaphod at Saturday, November 12, 2005
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