And Another Thing ...

The anti-war chant “Bush lied and people died” has been tossed around a lot lately. Let’s examine some relevant quotes to see if the chant fits the rant:

"Without question we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator leading an oppressive regime. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. And now he's miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction.”

“He’ll use those weapons of mass destruction again as he has 10 times since 1983.”

"We begin with a common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them."

"We know that he has stored nuclear supplies, secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."

“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. We also should remember that we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in developments of weapons of mass destruction.”

"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."

The “lies” go on and on. Since we have not located any WMD in Iraq, quotes like these are the smoking gun democrats have been looking for to parlay partisan gains and force Bush and the neo-cons into admitting that going to war was hasty and based on bad intelligence. The only problem is; Bush didn’t say any of this. All of the above quotes are by democrats and attributed to the following: Sen. John F. (as in Friggin’) Kerry in Jan. 2003, Sandy Burger (and just what intelligence information was he stuffing in his underwear?) in February 1998, Sen. Carl Levin, Sept. 2002, Nit Wit Al Gore, Sept. 2002, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Oct. 2002, and Al Gore again the same month. Thanks to Rush Limbaugh for supplying the quotes that I had been searching the internet to find. There are more at http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/stacks/democrat.guest.html.

Next time you hear that Bush “cooked the books” on pre-war intelligence, please remember that many of the above statements were made when the country wanted a confrontation with Iraq and was only a month or two prior to the 2002 elections. Also remember that many of the above are either on the Senate Intelligence Committee or have security clearances that would allow them to examine the intelligence and draw their own, independent conclusions. Which is it? Did the democrats read but not understand the intelligence? Did they understand the intelligence was bad but wanted to ride a patriotic wave into the elections? Or was the intelligence what Bush said it was, and they understood it perfectly well? I don’t know which answer says more about the depravity of the democrats.

I don’t think there is any question that our intelligence community missed a ton of key evidence in Iraq. In 1993, then-President Clinton slashed funding for human intelligence at the CIA by 50% and added 25% to electronic surveillance. Many of our most seasoned agents were offered and accepted early retirement to save money. The result is that our intelligence capability pn the ground was severely hampered by the move and catching up, especially in an area such as the Middle East, was not an easy or quick task. Our agents and special forces were infiltrated by Iraqi intelligence in nearly everything they did leading up to the war, so it should be no big surprise that the decisions made a decade earlier had lasting consequences and led to poor intelligence gathering.

Going forward, maybe we insist on a new approach of our elected officials. Since Bush didn’t get us into anything in Iraq that did not get the unanimous vote of support from Congress maybe the armchair-quarterbacking could end. It certainly takes no genius to figure out that these public fights have an impact on how the world and insurgents view our resolve. In fact, papers belonging to insurgents and Baathists have been discovered in Iraq that discusses precisely that. They know if American political perseverance ends, the troops will be pulled out and they will fill the void with a radical Islamic fundamentalism that will be tough to uproot.

With further kudos to Rush, he posed a hypothetical question to democrats. Essentially he asked that if it is determined that all the intelligence Bush relied on was wrong, and or it is all been made up to further a war agenda, what do the democrats propose we do? The democrats have proven themselves worthy at ensuring the world knows what we are doing wrong, but where is their solution? Inquiring Bloggers – especially those who have supposedly stopped Blogging – want to know. Oh, and in case I keep doing this, I have a doozey of a post that tracks the WMDs in Iraq’s possession.