Saying Something Stupid

I hate to be writing too often but there is a certain craziness in the air these days. The latest nut case is the former news mogul Ted Turner who created CNN for the Clintons and 1,000 of their best friends – at least based on recent Nielsen Ratings.

Turner was a guest on Charlie Rose the other night and was rambling on about global warming. I know global warming deserves a decent debate but I am not sure it ends up where Turner was taking it. He appeared to guarantee that the world will be “eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow.” He said most people will have died by then and those who hadn’t would be cannibals, and then said the world would be one giant failed state like Sudan and Somalia.

OK, Sudan and Somalia are failed states but not because of global warming but because of greed and racism of its class of warlords. Maybe we will be eight degrees warmer in 30-40 years, but perhaps Turner would be willing to put some of his energy into suggesting ways to improve conditions in Sudan and Somalia and do it now. CNN has cameras in both spots. Why not use the money they are spending on keeping reporters alive and on the ground in these places on a few thousand pounds of rice and dried milk? Instead of filming the starving victims, feed them!

He went on to add, "We're too many people; that's why we have global warming…. Too many people are using too much stuff." He then pointed out he has a tendency to put his foot in his mouth before saying, “I've gotten a lot better, though. It's been a long time since anybody caught me saying something stupid." Consider yourself caught, Ted. After all the stupid things he said leading up to that, he lasted only moments between stupid statements by suggesting all countries of the world have just one or two children; voluntarily, of course. Turner’s three marriages have produced five children so, taking his suggestion, we’re sorry to inform him he has to toss a few back.

Finally he railed on about the war in Iraq, calling the insurgents “patriots.” His reasoning is they are patriots because their country has been invaded. Think about that for a moment. If they are “insurgents,” it means they are from somewhere else and not Iraq. Therefore, the “insurgent's” countries have not been invaded, they lose patriot status and are merely invaders themselves joining in on the killing of Iraqis and Americans.

It would be best for Ted Turner to carry a tape recorder around all day and listen to the things he says. He may find that very helpful. And, yes, I am watching too much Arrested Development.

Death Of A Blogger

The Boy sent this to me a few days ago. It's about a soldier stationed in Iraq who kept up a blog on what was going on around him. He kept a final post in his back pocket in the event of his untimely death while in Iraq. Sadly that day came and his posthumous report is both powerful and sad. It also has it's moments of humor and shares some of his deep insight. It is really worth a read if you have the time.

Media Hysteria

There seems to be a passion among journalists to label things. Lately there have been two mantras coming from the chattering class.

For the past year, there has been one story or another about one scientists or organization proclaiming there is global warming. Lately there has been a slight modification and the word “manmade” has been added to the headline.

The other has been a year-long discussion about whether or not there is a “civil war” in Iraq, as if this definition changes anything for the average Iraqi or affects our forces in the battlefield.

For the sake of greater economy for future headline writers, let’s stipulate two points to the media so it can move on to other hysterias: there is global warming and it is a civil war in Iraq. Now there is no more need for breathless headlines and interviews to support the media’s new cause celeb. Anymore stories or headlines trying to further define these issues will seem like beating a dead horse (although speaking of beating dead horses, they could write more on Barbaro and give us more intimate details beyond what his last meal was – grass, as the shocking truth turns out).

Having offered permission for the media to move on it should now be a bit scary for them. Now they can’t offer the opinion of others to manufacture a story. They should write about the solutions and the impact of those solutions on their subscriber base. And this is where it gets tricky.

If we sign on to Kyoto or even go so far as to all agree that we are in the midst of manmade global warming, what are we to do? Ride our bikes to work? Stop using air conditioning? Shut down all carbon burning power plants (i.e. most power plants), plant a billion new trees or close down most manufacturing facilities and re-deploy the displaced workforce? At the same time, give China and India a free pass because, you know, they are developing and need to engage in a little bit of global warming to take their people out of poverty, right?

In Iraq, so what if there is a civil war? This is a distinction without a difference. There was one going on before W. was out of high school and, as it happens, it pitted the Sunnis against the Shiites. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone in the media because they were covering this story back then, too. The difference this time is the Sunnis are in the minority and don’t have control of as many guns. They do seem to have a strong willingness to blow themselves up, so they have that going for them.

Let the media discuss the solution on this one, too. We could leave Iraq and Afgahnistan (where is the body count on Afghanistan, by the way) and just let them kill each other, and then the media could write headlines discussing the humanitarian and genocidal problems in the region. We could stay and put our men and women in harm’s way and have more stories about supporting the troops but not the mission. We could also take the gloves off and put a quicker end to the violence, but that would smell like victory and there is already too much vested in defeat.

Of course the main thing the media can do is stop listening to the democrats who believe they have an anti-war mandate from November’s elections (despite having to win with pro-war candidates) and ignore their enabling republicans who say the war is lost and we need our troops home in six months. First, if the war is really lost, why wait six months? Bring them home now and don’t allow another troop to die or be injured.

Absent that, do the media and those who seek their coverage have any understanding that the rise in sectarian violence – sorry, civil war – has much to do with their call to get the U.S. out the Viet Nam “quagmire?” Really, if you were a terrorits and wanted the Americans out of Iraq and understood the whim of the American public that no longer has the stomach for a body bag on television, what would you do to turn up the pressure? Increase the violence and cause gasps among the body politic, or take a nap while the U.S. undergoes this debate? The hundreds killed in recent weeks has given us the answer to this question. Perhaps those in the media could check their hands to see if they can find any blood on them.

Sympathy For The Devil

There must be something inherently human about feeling uncomfortable to witness the death of anyone. And so it is entirely justifiable for many of us to have felt trepidation about the execution of Saddam Hussein. This isn’t to say a majority of people don’t believe he got what he deserved; it’s just that we don’t want our Humanity to get lost in the impulse for revenge.

This may surprise a few, but I don’t believe in the death penalty. It’s based on the notion that planning an execution is a cousin to a planned murder. Most people believe the Ten Commandments include the principle, “Thou shalt not kill,” but it actually says, “Thou shalt not murder” and I have trouble getting around the idea that mankind arranging for the killing of another isn’t a violation of the founding tenets of our society.

Having said that (or, better, written that), Saddam was not executed based on Western values, but on Islamic law and the Iraqi society. I have less trouble with Saddam’s demise based on who carried it out and the reasons for it. There were few despots more brutal to his own people than Saddam. In modern terms, Saddam gets a seat at the same table with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao. He may have been moving toward the head seat if his regime had not been stopped.

Americans generated a certain amount of sympathy for Saddam as he walked his final steps, but Americans didn’t live under his terror and state-sponsored murder. The Iraqis did, however, and it’s doubtful our sensitivity to capital punishment means much to the Kurds who were bombed with mustard and sarin gas or the Shiites in the south of Iraq who were systematically rounded up, murdered and shoved into mass graves – all by his orders and approval. By most estimates, more than 1 million Iraqis were killed under Saddam and another 1 million in his war with Iran. To the surviving families and friends of the disappeared, Saddam’s public execution was naturally welcomed, Western concerns notwithstanding.

Only Useful Idiots Need Apply

There are some days that you vow to remember because you have a feeling in your gut that it will mean something. For me, it was early 1993 and Bush 41 had just lost to Clinton 42 (at the time there was no expectation there would be a Bush 43 and Clinton 44). I was inspired to see James Baker speak about foreign policy, mostly because we shared the same interest in the recently crumbled Soviet Union. If I said I remembered where he spoke, I would be lying, but it was likely at Carnegie Endowment for Peace or the American Enterprise Institute or some other such think tank that employs people smarter than the rest of us.

While the discussion was about the Soviets, the after-speech questions created a lively discussion on the 1991 Iraq War and other regional hostilities. There were two other panelists, one I can’t remember and the other was Robert Gates, the future defense secretary and the then recently former Director of the CIA.

And this is why I remember that day: a question was asked about why we didn’t topple Saddam when we had the chance. Baker first answered that the coalition of countries pummeling Iraq was dead set against it as were the Saudis who were nervous about hot-headed Iraqis slipping across the shifting desert border into Saudi Arabia. It was reasoned that once Iraqis were allowed in, well, there goes the neighborhood.

Gates followed up with his answer that was classic Washington smart-talk but, if you were listening carefully, came out as a response from someone we politely call a “conciliator.” He told us that Saddam could be contained by diplomatic measures and, if we had to get tough, UN sanctions would keep him on a short leash. He admitted there was pressure from Iran to take Saddam out, but no other neighbor other than the Kuwaitis had much of an opinion on the matter. Keeping everyone in the loop, he also asked the Soviet-less Russians what they thought of the situation and was told that it would be impolite to remove Saddam and suggested we slowly back away from Iraq’s oil wells.

So Gates had been busy building a consensus for what would become post-war Iraq 1991-style: a 12-year killing field by vengeful Baathists, an impoverished and uneducated underclass suffering under a dozen years of economic sanctions with no franchise rights in the Oil For Food scandal and millions of nervous Kurds and Shiites who felt completely betrayed by the skedaddling American troops.

Back then, a contained Saddam mixed with allies as far as we could see (or until 2003) was what the so-called neo-cons were pushing. Even Dick Cheney had happily approved of this plan (although he is the only significant one of the bunch to later change his mind).

Now that the voters have sent a message to the ruling elite that is so nuanced that it can mean anything anyone wants it to mean, the race is on to find the nearest exit sign out of Iraq. You may think President Bush means what he says about not leaving Iraq until the job is done, but the hiring of Gates signals that his mantra is no longer operative. Bush even spoke today about how interested he is in the Baker-Hamilton (yes, James Baker) report and hopes it will produce new ideas for winning the peace in Iraq. But he already knows what it says because he just hired one of the principal architects of the Iraq plan in Robert Gates (suggested, of course, by none other than James Baker). Don’t these guys have a handy way of boomeranging back into our lives in the name of service to our leaders?

Here’s the simple truth, when you have James Baker, Lee Hamilton and Robert Gates setting the Iraq agenda, the appeasement to follow will make Neville Chamberlain look like John Wayne. The President has not only abdicated his responsibilities to an unelected group, he has signed a death warrant for millions of Iraqis and offered a view of America that will whet the appetite of terrorists around the world. Good luck to us all, bin Laden’s cave looks like the only safe place in the near future.

Perspecitve Please

It’s difficult to pick up a newspaper and not read something about Iraq. It's become quite obvious that the media is overly focused on the war and keeping a warped win/loss percentage. Zarqawi death good, Guantanamo suicides bad. In contrast to such hype, only the Drudge Report highlighted this story: A Year in America: 16,912 murders; 92,837 rapes. And we thought it was bad every day in Iraq? Perhaps we need to focus more at home.

Of course you can get drawn back into Iraq quite easily by the general nuttiness of their murders. For example, a tennis coach and two of his players were shot to death because they were wearing shorts and exposing “forbidden flesh” in violation of Islamic law to some, and a 19-year-old was killed for selling ice because, as the murderers put it, there was no ice during the Prophet Mohammed’s time. Of course there were no AK47s, IEDs, suicide bombs and tennis shorts while Mohammed was alive either. Religion is a tricky thing in the wrong hands, eh?

Iraq and Memorial Day

By Victor Davis Hanson
(Courtesy of National Review Online)

I can't write like this so I thought some of you, and you know who "you" are, would like to read this excellent piece by a very gifted writer. If you want to read more by him, you can visit www.nationalreview.com.

There may be a lot to regret about the past policy of the United States in the Middle East, but the removal of Saddam Hussein and the effort to birth democracy in his place is surely not one of them. And we should remember that this Memorial Day.

Whatever our righteous anger at Khomeinist Iran, it was wrong, well aside from the arms-for-hostages scandal, to provide even a modicum of aid to Saddam Hussein, the great butcher of his own, during the Iran-Iraq war. Inviting the fascist Baathist government of Syria into the allied coalition of the first Gulf War meant that we more or less legitimized the Assad regime’s take-over of Lebanon, with disastrous results for its people.

It may have been strategically in error not to have taken out Saddam in 1991, but it was morally wrong to have then encouraged Shiites and Kurds to rise up—while watching idly as Saddam’s reprieved planes and helicopters slaughtered them in the thousands.

A decade of appeasement of Islamic terrorism, with retaliations after the serial attacks—from the first World Trade Center bombing to Khobar Towers and the USS Cole—never exceeding the occasional cruise missile or stern televised lecture, made September 11 inevitable. A decade was wasted in subsidizing Yasser Arafat on the pretense that he was something other than a mendacious thug.

I cite these few examples of the now nostalgic past, because it is common to see Iraq written off by the architects of these past failures as the “worst” policy decision in our history, a “quagmire” and a “disaster.” Realists, more worried about Iran and the ongoing cost in our blood and treasure in Iraq, insist that toppling Saddam was a terrible waste of resources. Leftists see the Iraq war as part of an amoral imperialism; often their talking points weirdly end up rehashed in bin Laden’s communiqués and Dr. Zawahiri’s rants.

But what did 2,400 brave and now deceased Americans really sacrifice for in Iraq, along with thousands more who were wounded? And what were billions in treasure spent on? And what about the hundreds of collective years of service offered by our soldiers? What exactly did intrepid officers in the news like a Gen. Petreus, or Col. McMaster, or Lt. Col Kurilla fight for?

First, there is no longer a mass murderer atop one of the oil-richest states in the world. Imagine what Iraq would now look like with $70 a barrel oil, a $50 billion unchecked and ongoing Oil-for-Food U.N. scandal, the 15th year of no-fly zones, a punitative U.N. embargo on the Iraqi people—all perverted by Russian arms sales, European oil concessions, and frenzied Chinese efforts to get energy contracts from Saddam.

The Kurds would remain in perpetual danger. The Shiites would simply be harvested yearly, in quiet, by Saddam’s police state. The Marsh Arabs would by now have been forgotten in their toxic dust-blown desert. Perhaps Saddam would have upped his cash pay-outs for homicide bombers on the West Bank.

Muammar Khaddafi would be starting up his centrifuges and adding to his chemical weapons depots. Syria would still be in Lebanon. Washington would probably have ceased pressuring Egypt and the Gulf States to enact reform. Dr. Khan’s nuclear mail-order house would be in high gear. We would still be hearing of a “militant wing” of Hamas, rather than watching a democratically elected terrorist clique reveal its true creed to the world.

But just as importantly, what did these rare Americans not fight for? Oil, for one thing. The price skyrocketed after they went in. The secret deals with Russia and France ended. The U.N. petroleum perfidy stopped. The Iraqis, and the Iraqis alone—not Saddam, the French, the Russians, or the U.N.—now adjudicate how much of their natural resources they will sell, and to whom.

Our soldiers fought for the chance of a democracy; that fact is uncontestable. Before they came to Iraq, there was a fascist dictatorship. Now, after three elections, there is an indigenous democratic government for the first time in the history of the Middle East. True, thousands of Iraqis have died publicly in the resulting sectarian mess; but thousands were dying silently each year under Saddam—with no hope that their sacrifice would ever result in the first steps that we have already long passed.Our soldiers also removed a great threat to the United States.

Again, the crisis brewing over Iran reminds us of what Iraq would have reemerged as. Like Iran, Saddam reaped petroprofits, sponsored terror, and sought weapons of mass destruction. But unlike Iran, he had already attacked four of his neighbors, gassed thousands of his own, and violated every agreement he had ever signed. There would have been no nascent new democracy in Iran that might some day have undermined Saddam, and, again unlike Iran, no internal dissident movement that might have come to power through a revolution or peaceful evolution. No, Saddam’s police state was wounded, but would have recovered, given high oil prices, Chinese and Russian perfidy, and Western exhaustion with enforcement of U.N. sanctions. Moreover, the American military took the war against radical Islam right to its heart in the ancient caliphate. It has not only killed thousands of jihadists, but dismantled the hierarchy of al Qaeda and its networks, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Critics say that we “took our eye off the ball” by going to Iraq and purportedly leaving bin Laden alone in the Hindu Kush. But more likely, al Qaeda took its eye off the American homeland as the promised theater of operations once American ground troops began dealing with Islamic terrorists in Iraq.

As we near five years after September 11, note how less common becomes the expression “not if, but when” concerning the next anticipated terror attack in the U.S. Some believe that the odyssey of jihadists to Iraq means we created terrorists, but again, it is far more likely, as al Qaeda communiqués attest, that we drew those with such propensities into Iraq. Once there, they have finally shown the world that they hate democracy, but love to kill and behead—and that has brought a great deal of moral clarity to the struggle. After Iraq, the reputation of bin Laden and radical Islam has not been enhanced as alleged, but has plummeted. For all the propaganda on al Jazeera, the chattering classes in the Arab coffeehouses still watch Americans fighting to give Arabs the vote, and radical Islamists in turn beheading men and women to stop it.

If many in the Middle East once thought it was cute that 19 killers could burn a 20-acre hole in Manhattan, I am not sure what they think of Americans now in their backyard not living to die, but willing to die so that other Arabs might live freely. All of our achievements are hard to see right now. The Iraqis are torn by sectarianism, and are not yet willing to show gratitude to America for saving them from Saddam and pledging its youth and billions to give them something better. We are nearing the third national election of the war, and Iraq has become so politicized that our efforts are now beyond caricature. An archivist is needed to remind the American people of the record of all the loud politicians and the national pundits who once were on record in support of the war.

Europeans have demonized our efforts—but not so much lately, as pacifist Europe sits on its simmering volcano of Islamic fundamentalism and unassimilated Muslim immigrants. Our own Left has tossed out “no blood for oil”—that is, until the sky-rocketing prices, the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, and a new autonomous Iraqi oil ministry cooled that rhetoric. Halliburton is also now not so commonly alleged as the real casus belli, when few contractors of any sort wish to rush into Iraq to profit.

“Bush lied, thousands died” grows stale when the WMD threat was reiterated by Arabs, the U.N., and the Europeans. The “too few troops” debate is not the sort that characterizes imperialism, especially when no American proconsul argues that we must permanently stay in large numbers in Iraq. The new Iraqi-elected president, not Donald Rumsfeld, is more likely to be seen on television, insisting that Americans remain longer. A geography more uninviting for our soldiers than Iraq cannot be imagined—7,000 miles away, surrounded by Baathist Syria, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, and theocratic Iran. The harsh landscape rivals the worst of past battlefields—blazing temperatures, wind, and dust. The host culture that our soldiers faced was Orwellian—a society terrorized by a mass murderer for 30 years, who ruled by alternately promising Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish collaborationists that cooperation meant only that fewer of their own would die. The timing was equally awful—in an era of easy anti-Americanism in Europe, and endemic ingratitude in the Muslim world that asks nothing of itself, everything of us, and blissfully forgets the thousands of Muslims saved by Americans in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, and the billions more lavished on Jordanians, Palestinians, and Egyptians.

And here at home? There are few Ernie Pyles in Iraq to record the heroism of our soldiers; no John Fords to film their valor—but legions to write ad nauseam of Abu Ghraib, and to make up stories of flushed Korans and Americans terrorizing Iraqi women and children.

Yet here we are with an elected government in place, an Iraqi security force growing, and an autocratic Middle East dealing with the aftershocks of the democratic concussion unleashed by American soldiers in Iraq. Reading about Gettysburg, Okinawa, Choisun, Hue, and Mogadishu is often to wonder how such soldiers did what they did. Yet never has America asked its youth to fight under such a cultural, political, and tactical paradox as in Iraq, as bizarre a mission as it is lethal. And never has the American military—especially the U.S. Army and Marines—in this, the supposedly most cynical and affluent age of our nation, performed so well. We should remember the achievement this Memorial Day of those in the field who alone crushed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, stayed on to offer a new alternative other than autocracy and theocracy, and kept a targeted United States safe from attack for over four years.

Bin Laden's Demands

The following first appeared in the London Telegraph and I saw it in the Sydney Morning Herald under the headline "Bin Laden, without the filters" and written by Francis Harris. Hopefully it shows what constitutes bin Laden's world view and makes people realize that an Al Qaeda victory would not be healthy.

By Francis Harris
Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals, bar women from appearing in the press and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.

The first complete collection of the Saudi's statements, published on Thursday by Verso, portrays a world in which Islam's enemies will take the first steps towards salvation by embracing the "religion of all the prophets".

Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden is billed as the first accurate compendium of the terrorist leader's words, threats and ruminations from 1994 to 2004.
Its editors have rooted out many statements which they identified as forgeries and retranslated to correct "horrendous" errors.

Bin Laden's terms for America's surrender appeared after the September 2001 suicide attacks.
Alcoholic drink and gambling would be barred and there would be an end to women's photos in newspapers or advertising. Any woman serving "passengers, visitors and strangers" would also be out of a job.

The West must "stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you" and has become the "worst civilisation witnessed in the history of mankind".

Verso said it expected criticism for publishing the thoughts of a terrorist, but "the idea is to have an annotated, scholarly collection of bin Laden's words", Gavin Browning from Verso said.
"Until now, his words have only been available in poor translations or soundbites." Mr Browning emphasised that publishing bin Laden's views did not imply approval of them by the publishers.

The book's introduction is written by Professor Bruce Lawrence, who teaches Islamic studies at Duke University, in North Carolina, and describes the terrorist as "one of the best prose writers in Arabic". Many past translations of the words of the head of al-Qaeda had been "horrendous" and often wrong, he said.

In the book the terrorist responsible for killing 3000 civilians in September 2001 says that killing the innocent is wrong. In bin Laden's world a global conflict is under way between the umma, or Muslim community, and unbelievers.

The Mother of All WMD Post

The mantra from everyone about the Iraq war – opponents, proponents, world leaders, and the intelligence community – is that there were no weapons of mass destruction found and no link between Al Qaeda, state-sponsored terrorism and the Iraqi regime. It’s all a load of horse pucky.

Evidence of WMD and links to Al Qaeda are abundant and readily available, even to blind democrats. And what’s available through open sources is just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of other reports that, for national security reasons, have not been made available to the public, but they are well known to Congressional members and staff, some of whom have selectively leaked both accurate and inaccurate accounts.

So let’s get to it. It will seem boring and technical and will lose anyone with the attention span of a Member of Congress or someone who reads People Magazine and thinks they just read a novel.

Iraq’s connection to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups has been around for decades but it’s rarely talked about. For years, Iraqi intelligence recruited terrorists for training from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Chechnya, recnetly most of them Al Qaeda members. They were trained at the Saad military camp located northeast of Baghdad which at times housed as many as 2,500 foreigners who were trained in urban warfare, bomb making, kidnapping, and “specialized urban warfare,” a euphemism for spectacular terrorism such as chemical and biological attacks in the U.S. and Europe. The base was run by Qusay Hussein’s own Special Security known as Amn Khass. The fiercest group of terrorists fighters were trained by Uday Hussein’s Saddam’s Fedayeen Call and was comprised by 700 Algerian members of the Salafist Brigade for Combat and Call. This group was so brutal and unstable that they reported to nobody and were left to do as they wished after the training. Fortunately, once the U.S. and Britain began attacking Iraq in March 2002, most of the Algerians approached U.S. troops in broad daylight and were taken out by air strikes.

Saddam himself encouraged further terrorism against Israel by paying $25,000 to the surviving family members of any suicide bomber who detonated themselves in Israel. This came at a time when the Palestinians began the 2001 Intifada, giving further incentive to strap on the latest in Palestinian fashion. Once Saddam was attacked, the money stopped and suicide attacks were dramatically reduced.

Iraq mixed terrorism and WMD too. In September of 2002, Israeli soldiers captured three members of the Arab Liberation Front who were attempting to cross the Jordan River and enter the Palestinian territory. During their interrogation, the three admitted they were trained in Iraq at a base known as Salman Pak by Iraqi military intelligence. The three were specifically trained to use shoulder-launched missiles to aim at planes landing at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport. They further admitted that there was a second training facility in which all participants were Al Qaeda members who were being trained in chemical warfare, specifically the use of ricin. The interrogators learned that these operatives were trained to carry out missions on a U.S. base in Turkey, several attacks inside Europe and to help the Chechens in their battle with the Russians. The information was corroborated by other intelligence sources and the plots were thwarted in Turkey and Europe but not in Russia as several Iraqi-trained Chechen and Arab terrorists seized a theater in Moscow and rigged it with explosives, threatening to kill everyone inside. More than 200 people, including the terrorists, were killed when the Russians used a nerve agent to knock out the terrorists before they could detonate the bombs. Unfortunately many of the hostages died from secondary problems related to the nerve agent.

For these reasons and many more, I think it’s safe to say Saddam supported and gave safe haven to terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. The training the regime gave was not intended for the defense of Iraq, but rather to prepare soldiers for attacks aimed at the West and Israel. None of this is guesswork or unknown. It was written down in detail in papers left behind by the fleeing Saddam and his top leaders, including his two sons. All the above information has also been reported in several U.S. newspapers and magazines and much of it was included in the Congressional 9/11 report. In other words, no honest politician or journalist (assuming there are some left) can say or write that there was no link to Saddam and agents of terror.

The same is true about Weapons of Mass Destruction. The information to follow has also been written about for the past three years and, while you have to dig a bit deeper for some of it, it’s all been in open-sourced publications and de-classified reports.

As Baghdad was falling, hundreds of drums of sarin gas and mustard gas were discovered. It was reported in May 2003 in the New York Times that the drums contained enough sarin gas to kill more than one million people.

In April of 2003, a U.S. Marine Corps unit identified high concentration of mustard gas and cyanide in the Euphrates near Nasiriyah along with hundreds of gas masks and chemical warfare suits at a nearby military base. This suggests the Iraqis dumped their WMD ammunition into the river once they realized the fall of the city was imminent.

Still, these reports never served as enough proof that there were the expected wholesale stockpiles of WMD. There remain only two logical conclusions for this: Iraq did not have huge amounts of WMD; or it did possess them and either destroyed them or shipped them out of the country. There is certainly more evidence that the later was true and that Syria played a significant role.

During numerous U.S. bombing raids, an area around al-Qaim was largely untouched. The reason for this was the assumption that Iraq’s main biological and chemical weapon stockpiles were stored under camouflaged hangars and in the heavy brush around the base. Once American forces got close to al-Qaim, intense activities were observed in the thick foliage along the Euphrates. Under cover of darkness, numerous large objects, tanks, and containers were moved from their hiding places and tracked by drones and U.S. jest being taken across the border to Syria.

On April 5, Saddam failed to show up for an advertised address on Iraqi TC. The regime was falling and Saddam’s family had already fled on a flight to Belarus. Saddam was close behind. Elements of the Russian GRU were in Baghdad quickly destroying all pertinent intelligence data collected through a close relationship with the regime. They were the first to know that Saddam was part of a group of Republican Guard and other units of the regular army from the Tikrit area who were on their way to Syria. As reported by the GRU, the fleeing convoy including three hundred tanks, one hundred GRAD multiple-barrel rocket launchers, many which had chemical warheads, and many other weapons systems, including Iraq’s entire remaining WMD arsenal. The report suggests Saddam was in Damascus for a short time before returning to Tikrit.

Once the fall of Iraq was clear, the Syrians worked diligently to cover their complicity in transferring WMD systems into Iraq. They began to move and hide the WMD that had entered Syria during the last days of the regime to permanent locations inside a maze of tunnels and other permanent stockpile sites in northern Lebanon and central Syria.

According to numerous sources, the concealment of the Iraqi WMD was under the command of General Zou al-Himma al-Shaleesh, a veteran of Syrian-Iraqi strategic cooperation and smuggling. Assaf Shawqat, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law and deputy chief of Syrian military intelligence, personally supervised the undertaking. The first specific account of this action to transfer and hide Iraqi WMD was provided by Syrian opposition journalist Nizar Nayyouf on the basis of maps and notes he had received from a “Syrian senior officer who had become a dissident.” Several Lebanese, Syrian and other Arab intelligence sources later confirmed Nayyouf’s reports and provided additional details about the whereabouts of Iraq’s WMD.

First to be moved were the large tanks containing chemical materials that were put on flatbed trucks and moved to areas of northeastern Lebanon under Syrian military control and buried in deep pits near Hermel and in the northern Bekaa valley. The Iraqi operational weapons and other sensitive military components were transferred to three sites associated with comparable Syrian military activities. Most other items were moved via flatbed trucks or rail cars with the most dangerous and sensitive materials transferred by ambulance. Much of this is stored in the complex tunnel system controlled by Bureau 489 of the Cipher and Document Security Division of Syrian Intelligence – the agency responsible for the security of Syria’s most sensitive facilities. Vital parts of Iraq’s WMD munitions were stored in a Syrian Air Force munitions factory near the village of Tal Sinan.

This has been independently confirmed by several intelligence sources, not all working on the same side. In fact, a recent report from a U.N. source indicates that President Bashar is attempting to leverage the Iraqi WMD to have the U.N. put aside its investigation into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The negotiations are modeled after the deal struck by Lybian Leader Moammar Gadhafi so he was able to have sanctions removed.

If the U.N. takes the easy route on this – a likely scenario – there will be little doubt left about the origins of the WMD stockpiles. Whether anyone will be willing to admit it is altogether another story. To be honest, I’m not one of those who need the smoking-gun proof that others need. President Bush was handed a choice in September, 2001: treat the 9/11 attacks as a crime and convict all 19 hijackers posthumously or consider the larger scope and realize that we have been under assault from fundamentalist Wahabi Muslims since 1993. President Bush and a majority of Members of Congress opted for the later approach and, while nobody thinks the prosecution of this war or any war is perfect, we’ve accomplished at least one goal in that, knock on wood, there have been no other attacks on targets within the U.S.

Once More With Feeling

I can’t resist one more post. No, no, this is the last. Please, stop begging. One has to know when he's run an audience out of the room. Time for the hook, and all that. But I have to respond to a news report roaming about the Web and originating from a Canadian news service.

First, where is Canada, anyway? I think it’s north, but not sure if it’s been slowly floating away from North America and, when last seen, headed toward France. Show of hands; how many people can name the Canadian prime minister. Hint: he’s named after a guitar made in a town in Pennsylvania where The Band visited feeling half past dead. For the zero or one who read this Blog and aren’t that obscure, his name is Paul Martin and the only reason I know this is because he’s been in the news lately under a cloud of scandal. He hasn’t been seen much in Canada’s capital these days. Which is in Toronto. I think. Maybe somewhere else. But I digress.

Not to bury the lead again, but the story from our Molson-drinking, hockey-playing, can’t pronounce the letter U neighbors is that the decent Sheikdom of the United Arab Emirates offered Saddam exile, he accepted, and the war all could have been avoided. It would be a good story and enhance other story lines deriding the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war, except for the fact that it’s not true, and the guy who made the offer is dead and the one who supposedly accepted isn’t too happy with us at the moment.

The reason it’s not true is because it was supposedly agreed to at a February 2003 Arab summit hastily called in Egypt to halt the possible spread of self-rule in a region that boasted only free elections in Israel. The summit started, the parties bickered, and ended early without so much as an agreement on a joint press statement to be given several state-run news agencies. It was so bad at the summit that an aging and terminally-ill Muammar Gadhafi had harsh words for the Saudis because they had allowed U.S. troops to get their boots shined within their borders before heading into the Iraqi desert. The Saudis, their panties always in a bunch, returned the volley by reminding Gadhafi who put him in power in 1962 – blowing the cover off a carefully-guarded 40-year-old story in which the Saudis admitted they were behind the military coup. It was not a summit about a unified Arab front. Instead it was a signal to the West that each of the countries was only looking after their own backsides and taking the position: screw Saddam and the camel he rode in on.

The bottom line is that several offers of exile were presented and even some accepted for a period of time. The hitch in all of them was the fact that Saddam wanted guarantees that he wouldn’t be brought before The Hague on war crimes. The guarantees were made but Saddam, being the paranoid that he is, didn’t believe other countries could ensure he wouldn’t be nabbed while sitting on a pile of food-for-oil money by a team of Rangers. Maybe with good measure, too. Perhaps the U.S. could be blamed for not persuing some of the exile plans, but all of them had flaws and nobody seemed willing to negotiate, least of all Saddam who saw himself in the larger light as a modern-day Prophet Mohammed battling Qoreish tribes (i.e. the U.S.) to return to Medina.

The best offer for Saddam came from the Russians but he turned it down on the same grounds, causing grumbling in Moscow, Paris, and Tehran, all centers of high finance profiting off the largess of a see-nothing U.N. The fact is that Bush did not ask his Administration for a go, no-go on the war until March 15, two days before bad intelligence caused the delivery of four 2000-pound bunker busters to be dropped at Dora Farms, thus starting Iraq War, the Sequel. True, the plans had been laid, but the Administration welcomed all reasonable exile offers to avoid war. Anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn’t know this president.