Varifrank

Not Watching

| Main |

Construction Dust II

»

Selective Memory

Golly, I remember the hordes of Democrats that were saying in 2003 that there were "No WMD's in Iraq", because they were the ones saying that "thousands of soldiers were at risk of attack by "Iraq chemical and biological weapons". I also remember the Democrats saying that because they all still voted for the action against Iraq. Clearly all those brave policy makers were just intimidated by the evil Bush administration who holds the puppet strings of government in the US.

I also remember the French, Russian and German Foreign ministers and intelligence services saying that there were "no WMD's in Iraq". I remember because they also issued memos at the time stating the risk to civilian populations from Chemical and Biological Weapons. Why did they do that? Because those three countries still had the receipts for selling Iraq the equipment to build WMD's.

I'm sure the UN said something about WMD's at the time, but I'm also sure the memo started with a rebuke of Israel and its nuclear weapons, so I just tuned it right out.

Let's see how this works. In 1990's Afghanistan was an infected host state giving sancturary and support for a set of bloodthirsty murdering parasitical thugs who attacked the US in Manhattan in 1993, again in Saudi Arabia, and the USS Cole in 2000. What did the US do in the 1990s to stop the terrorist threat from Afghanistan in the 1990's? Did anyone acknowledge that there was a threat? Nope, not a thing and not a word. Why, the're just funny little people, they might blow up a car here and there, but no real threat to the country.. The Result? The terrorist parasites living on the host body of Afghanistan go on to kill 5,000 civilians by using nothing more sophisticated than 19 suicidal dupes and a stack of box knives.

9th Century religious death cult + box knives = mass death : Ergo - WMD's.

Nope, no WMDs here. move along...

In 2003, we have a thugocracy in charge of Iraq that has threatened or attacked every single one of its neighbors and committed genocide in its own country, and is clearly judged by every country in the world to be a terrorist state. It also has a large capacity for the creation of chemical and biological weapons and with their clear demonstrated ability to use them against their own civilian populations they are very dangerous indeed. Iraq also has access to vast amounts of cash. It has also violated every-single-agreement with the UN in regards to abiding by the armistace of 1992 and threw out UN weapons inspectors in 1998, leading everyone to believe that they must have them.

And the answer the Democrats seem to give today is that despite the recent experience that 9/11 taught us, despite Bali and Beslan, we should have just looked the other way when it come to action on Iraq. The Iraq action was a Preemptive War. It was meant to stop Iraq from becoming a bigger threat than it already was. We failed to take action on Afghanistan when we could've stopped 9/11. Afghanistan had no infrastructure, it could only provide sanctuary. Iraq could not only provide sanctuary but access to capital and industrial infrastructure. Should we just let it fall into the hands of the Jihadis? Should we allow its assets to fall into the hands of the Iranians?

19 fanatics and box cutters. Thats the low end of the spectrum for WMD's.

19 fanatics with access to not much more technology and cash than the average crack or meth house has in it and you can kill millions with anthrax bacilli. thats the middle spectrum for WMD's

19 fanatics with access to billions of dollars, access to inport/export facilities, multinational trade agreements, intelligence services/infrastructure/data, aircraft and shipping, international banking letters of credit with the a host state. A host state with an active chemical industry. Thats the high end of the spectrum of WMD's.

Thats what we took preemptive action to stop. The potential threat was there, the expressed threat was there. If you wait for the threat to become a real threat, you are already dead. We learned that on 9/11.

Did Iraq have WMD's? probably not. Do I care?, no. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I didn't need WMD's to decide to take action in Iraq, and whatever reasons I may have put on the table before the invasion, the reality of "Childrens Prisons" removed any other prerequisite. Only people who have lost their moral compass and a good portion of their brain needed the WMD's to be sitting in a big warehouse just waiting to be captured by US forces. By every measure of decency and strategy, Iraq needed to be liberated. From just a strategic sense, Iraq made all the sense in the world as it provides wide access to the border with the next threat, the far more sophisticated and dangerous Jihadi host state - Iran.

Those who decry the invasion and liberation of Iraq are also those who are wondering why we arent in Iran or North Korea. Look at a map, tell me what surrounds Iran? American Troops are on the eastern border, the northern Border and the Western Iraninan Border. We control the seas of their southern ports . Now, Look at a map and tell me what type of geographical feature that is Korea. Korea, is a pennisula. American Troops are on the Southern Korean DMZ against North Korea, side by side with their South Korean Allies. The American Navy has a defacto blockade underway around the Korean shoreline. The Chinese, following a long standing tradition is building large physical barriers ( some might even say its a "wall") on the northern border of their one time client state.

If Bush was "lying about WMD's", dontcha think he could also plant some WMD's? Would it be that hard?
Why didnt he order Iraq to be salted with WMD's? Because, he, like me, didn't care. It wasnt the WMD's, it was the place and the people that needed to be turned into assets against the Jihadis instead of a waiting for it to become a real threat against us.

Bush didnt lie. Some people just didnt hear what he was saying. Afganistan was a threat, it is no longer. Iraq was a threat, it is no longer. The Bush Doctrine says " If you are a terrorist, or if you harbor terrorists, we will make no distinction". The only question you have to ask yourself about the future is how many people have to die before you take action to stop it?

UPDATE: In Response To A Reader of this post, I also wrote this, following a theme on a couple of earlier posts:

Thanks, I appreciate the review and the link.

As far as why people find the Iraq situation so much different than I do, I have no idea. 60 years ago, we got attacked in Hawaii and the first country we invaded in response was Morocco. Why? Because it fit the larger strategy of ending fascist power in Europe. 60 years ago, the smartest man on earth( Einstein ) said we should build an atomic bomb before the Nazis did, it turned out the Nazis didnt even come close to building an atomic bomb. If FDR can be wrong, If Einstien can be wrong, then what can we really expect of the rest of us. There's two ways that history could've come out, One way the Nazis do get the bomb, at which point this email would be written in German or the other way, were we are wrong but alive to say so. I prefer the second version, which is what happened then, and its what happened now in Iraq.

But it also turned out that the Nazis were killing their own citizens, ( albeit an unpopular religious minority, but German citizens none-the-less) so fast that they had to develop new technology to dispose of the bodies. Genocide wasnt why we went to war, but in the end its why everyone fought so hard. The people who fought that war on our side didn't fight for peace, they fought for Unconditional Surrender and Total Victory. We had 7,000 KIA and 18,000 wounded in Iwo Jima, just one battle in the Pacific Theatre of War, in a bigger world war where 52 million people lost their lives, nobody got weepy and said that we needed a damn "summit" with our allies or that we were sustaining all of the casualities.

How that generation survived the great depression, then fought both the Nazis and the Japanese empire then came home and raised an entire generation of whiny little piss-pants quitters, I'll never know. My personal "pet theory" is that this is what really happened when they put fluoride in the water back in the 1950's.

We are at war, thats not conjecture, its a fact. We didnt start the war, but we damn well better win it. Winning does not mean quitting and hoping for the best. Winning means ensuring that the word "Jihadi" has the same resonance as "Nazi" or "Klansman" or any of the other losers in the humanities hall of shame.

Selective Memory

: