Myths 123 Amid The "Getting Bettah" Myopia

"1-No Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Several hundred chemical weapons were found, and Saddam had all his WMD scientists and technicians ready. Just end the sanctions and add money, and the weapons would be back in production within a year. At the time of the invasion, all intelligence agencies, world-wide, believed Saddam still had a functioning WMD program. Saddam had shut them down because of the cost, but created the illusion that the program was still operating in order to fool the Iranians. The Iranians wanted revenge on Saddam because of the Iraq invasion of Iran in 1980, and the eight year war that followed. [ You truly need to be understanding technology only in sound bites not to understand the true import of Oppenheimer's comments on his thoughts at Trinity site quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds". Those of us who work in the technology industry and pay attention at all are well aware that we are in a race between technology and morality -- and morality is losing quite badly. And our repeated violations of the Prime Directive have made things even more perilous. -ed. ]

2-The 2003 Invasion was Illegal. Only according to some in the UN. By that standard, the invasion of Kosovo and bombing of Serbia in 1999 was also illegal. [ We still have troops in Kosovo from Clinton's legacy; but he get's a pass since it wouldn't fit the narrative meme to have him as W's mentor. -ed. ] Saddam was already at war with the U.S. and Britain, because Iraq had not carried out the terms of the 1991 ceasefire, and was trying to shoot down coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone.

3-Sanctions were working. The sanctions worked for Saddam, not for Iraq. Saddam used the sanctions as an excuse to punish the Shia majority for their 1991 uprising, and help prevent a new one. The "Oil For Food" program was corrupted with the help of bribed UN officials, and mass media outlets that believed Iraqi propaganda. Saddam was waiting out the sanctions, and bribing France, Russia and China, with promises of oil contracts and debt repayments, to convince the UN to lift the sanctions.." [ And on top of this, everyone seems to have completely lost their common sense to think that someone who has actually used WMD (ref Halabja, ref Iran) would of course foreswear them in future. All I can think of is the line in Monty Python's "Bring out your dead" scene where the dying man says "I'm getting bettah". I'm sorry but any sort of belief that Saddam "gave up on" WMD -- just as believing that the Iranians want "peaceful nuclear power" -- is nothing more than a shoddy BDS enabling mechanism.

Of course, this whole obsessive focus on Iraq -- by both W and the Dems -- ignores most of the larger picture as well. This whole Iraq debate is largely a distraction for those with short attention spans -- which unfortunately now encompasses a large majority of the populations of the West much less the rest of the world (who at least has the excuse that they can only think where their next meal is coming from). A big ironic thank you goes out to modern technology for much of the problem.

By the way, not that the WMD and sub-WMD (the WTC I conventional terror bombing was planned to topple one tower into the other and kill 250,000 in a domino effect) threats aren't stunning enough, but the internet itself is a huge enabling factor for the Islamists. Their ability to run compartmentalized operations would be hugely degraded without it. This is perhaps the biggest irony of all as the original design of the (then) Arpanet was aimed at being resilient to multiple "node failures" (read cities vaporized) during a nuclear strike! In the hands of ruthless, misogynisitic Islamist primitives, the internet is fueling the creation of the conditions of its penultimate test!

A rough historical analogy about the Iraq myopia would be as if FDR had invaded Italy with orders to hold it and convert it into a successful democracy in hopes of setting a more proximate example of a successful society to woo Hitler back to rationality. Hitler would have kept beating the crap out of us of course -- as well as funding an Italian "insurgency" just for fun.

Of course, FDR contemplated no such thing because it would have been patently absurd given the stunning losses immediately apparent from Hitler's advances. No sane person could avoid the realization that we weren't in a fight for our very lives. (Not to say there weren't plenty that were insane or were on the other side in WWII as Orwell so cogently pointed out in "Pacifism and the War". His reference to the "fascifist gang" is in fact a timeless one -- go check it out for yourself if you think you're an Orwell expert. I'm betting you haven't read it as -- in yet more irony -- it has been almost completely flushed down the "memory hole".)

There's much more I would need to say to flush this out -- plenty of it derogatory toward many of W's decisions as well as the feckless Dems -- but I don't have time right now. On the plus side, since most folks seem to have geography in their failed subject arsenal, you might conduct a 4 color test around most of the most recalcitrant Islamic terror sponsor countries in the Middle East and Asia. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria and -- look closely -- Iran. (In case you don't know, India is a "friendly" who has been on the receiving end of Huntington's "bloody borders of Islam" for a very long time and is very, very tired of it. I know from first hand contacts with Indians.) At least there's some hope that Iran in particular has become so obvious that even W's myopia can't avoid it: ]

"The gloves are off on Iranians. The Shia majority government had provided diplomatic, and other cover, for Iranian military advisers operating in Iraq. The Iraqi government would regularly come to the aid of Iranians captured by U.S. forces. But American troops have now been ordered to ignore any Iraqi interference, and capture or kill any Iranians they could find. The U.S. and the Iraqi government have been arguing about this Iranian influence for over two years. But in the past year, the U.S. has built up quite a collection of documents and interrogation videos, making it pretty obvious that Iran was running its own war in Iraq, attacking Sunni Arabs, Kurds and foreigners (including Arab diplomats.) The government feels betrayed by the Iranian Islamic conservatives who have, they believe, crossed the line with their support of Shia terrorists."

[ The Golden Hour continues for now -- we know not for how much longer with Ahmadi-Nehjad's rhetoric. Next sound bite at 11:58:46... -ed. ]