He’s got a book deal. (And by the way, Amazon doesn’t list any books by Paula Jones.)
OK, I’ll admit it. I jumped way too fast on reports of WMD’s discovered in Iraq during the war; reports that turned out to be false. I decided from then on to give some time to reports such as those to see if they passed scrutiny before passing them on and commenting on them.
And maybe I’m breaking my rule this time, but the London Telegraph is reporting today (free registration required for reading) that they have documents retrieved from the (former) Iraqi intelligence agency (Mukhabarat) describing from at least February 1998 a close relationship between al-Qaeda (and Osama bin Laden himself) and the Iraqi government. This of course proves what the Bush administration had a tough time proving before the war. They had some circumstantial evidence the Powell presented to the UN, but it wasn’t very convincing. Now, however, they’ve been vindicated to a good degree, and can now more properly claim that the war in Iraq was, at least in part, a portion of the war on terrorism.
My hunch back then, during Powell’s presentation, was that they had other evidence but didn’t want to tip their hand quite as much as they did with the WMD-related photos and recordings. But they believed they had enough evidence that the connection was there, and that documents like these would show up following the war. That was a serious gamble, but it appears to have paid off.
And why didn’t America stop such looting as did take place? Lt. Col. Eric Schwartz of the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division “said he couldn’t move into the museum compound and protect it from looters last week because his soldiers were taking fire from the building–and were determined not to respond.”
They couldn’t stick around because they were being shot at, and they wouldn’t shoot back with the big guns for fear of destroying things. Time for the carping to cease.
Oh, and not everything was lost. Taranto also quotes a Wall Street Journal article:
Thanks to Iraqi preparations before the war, it seems the worst has been avoided. Donny George, the director-general of restoration at the Iraqi Antiquities Department, Wednesday said his staff had preserved the museum’s most important treasures, including the kings’ graves of Ur and the Assyrian bulls. These objects were hidden in vaults that haven’t been violated by looters.
“Most of the things were removed. We knew a war was coming, so it was our duty to protect everything,” Mr. George said. “We thought there would be some sort of bombing at the museum. We never thought it could be looted.”
Blame the looters, not the Marines.
Forced to choose between leaving the museum unharmed and freeing the children from the now infamous children’s jail, which would you choose? On a broader scale, would you prefer the order of Saddam’s regime, including the horrific practices of its jails, or a week of looting and chaos?
Even if there was no specific point in time when the choice between the museum and the jail was required, there are still priorities that need to be followed, and guarding a museum has got to be much farther down on the list than rescuing children.
And if one child died in there while we were guarding the museum, you gotta know that the left would be saying just the opposite. “Why were we guarding bones and pottery when children were dying?” They’d be right, but only by chance, because they’re reflexively anti-military and the military would’ve been wrong to do that.
A good article, with many ramifications.
1 – Country A invades Country B.
2 – Country C drives Country A out of Country B.
3 – Country A signs a cease-fire agreement with Country C, contingent on certain conditions that must be met by Country A.
4 – Country A violates those conditions.
5 – Country C resumes hostilities.
Would the action represented by step 5 be considered:
A – As mentioned above, a resumption of hostilities started in step 2.
B – A new war in which Country C is making a pre-emptive strike.
If you answered A, you’d be right. And the fact is, you’d be right regardless of the time spent deciding on whether step 4 had actually occurred. For example, if it took 12 years (due to international foot-dragging) to come to the conclusion that the cease-fire agreement had been violated, you still couldn’t answer B.
Well, I guess you could if you were stridently anti-Bush, or the New York Times…or both. The Times, reporting on their CBS/New York Times poll, said, “But a majority remains opposed to a policy of pre-emptive attack like the one President Bush invoked in invading Iraq…”. However, the way the question is reported in the article suggests the Times was manipulating, not just the results, but the questions themselves.
Amid poll questions about the war with Iraq, the article says this:
And the nation has yet to embrace the tactical doctrine of pre-emption Mr. Bush advanced to justify the war in Iraq and, potentially, an invasion of Syria, North Korea or Iran. For example, 51 percent said the United States should not invade another nation unless it was attacked first.
First of all, the current hostilities with Iraq are the result of Iraq failing to comply with a cease-fire agreement and 18 UN resolutions. That cease-fire agreement was part of a war that was clearly backed by the international community. There was no pre-emption involved.
Further, the question imposes the belief that this war was pre-emptive on the respondent. The Times says the question was whether the United States should invade another nation pre-emptively. A “Yes” answer to this expands to, “Yes, this war was pre-emptive, and we should do it again”, while a “No” answer says, “Yes, this war was pre-emptive, and we should not do it again”. The premise of the question is false, but that one little word “another” no doubt flew by respondents, even those who didn’t think this was a pre-emptive attack. When we’re taking a poll, how many of us spend the time to carefully judge any hidden assumptions made by the question and just answer it quickly? Most, I’m sure. Thus the Times gets to proclaim a falsehood because it manipulated the question.
I really don’t like poll reporting. It’s simply the artificial generation of news, and the whims of people so easily change in these days of the 24-hour news cycle. But that doesn’t stop organizations like these from using them and manipulating them. Granted, most of the rest of the numbers look very good for Bush, making them difficult to downplay. But be careful when reading polling data and look for hidden assumptions. A single word can make the difference.
And I wish journalists would learn a little bit of very recent history on this whole Iraq situation. The whole “pre-emptive” kick they’re on doesn’t stand up in the face of it. Once again (and again, and again), history refutes liberal catch-phrases and assumptions.
April 9, 2003, 7:18pm
I’ve been watching all day what’s been going on in Iraq today; namely the symbolic fall of Saddam Hussein, as the people of Baghdad, with a helping hand from coalition forces, took down a relatively new statue of the man. It ain’t over ’til it’s over, as an embedded Yogi Berra might say, but the pictures today coming from all over Iraq certainly aren’t what Bush’s nay-sayers had in mind when they were saying their nays 3 weeks ago (and for many, as recent as 1 week ago).
On the O’Reilly Factor this evening, Bill and two others (Dick Morris and Douglas Brinkley, PhD) were discussing winners and losers in this. Losers included network media, the UN, the Democrats in general (and vocal anti-war ones in particular), and Vladamir Putin. Winners included the president of Spain (who stuck his neck out in publicly standing with the coalition), Tony Blair, and Hillary Clinton. Hillary was a winner because she voted for the “use of force” resolution, and then completely shut up on the issue while fellow Democrats dug their holes deeper with every nay. However, I wonder how long the attention span of the Democrat base will be. Will they realize that these folks just don’t understand the world as it is today, and that they have no idea how silly predictions of World War III sound (so soon after making the same predictions before Afghanistan)? I hope they remember, but I’m not holding my breath.
My pick as a big loser in all this would be the alleged “peace” movement. The longer the war went, and the more they protested, the bigger Bush’s numbers got. I think they were hoping to create another Vietnam-era groundswell, but they failed in a huge way. Some in the “peace” movement that went to Iraq as human shields were directly exposed to the most potent remedy for their idealism: reality. Once they saw the real Iraq, and real people telling them about their real suffering, they realized the folly of promoting a “peace” that merely meant continued killing and rape and torture. They realized that real peace, in these situations, comes from victory, not simply a lack of fighting.
Here’s hoping it’s over soon, and the people of Iraq can get to the business of self-government.
Nope, not according to the latest review of 240 scientific studies on global temperature:
Such claims have now been sharply contradicted by the most comprehensive study yet of global temperature over the past 1,000 years. A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today’s temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather – in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.
So when could it have possibly been warmer than now, with all the greenhouse gases man produces?
The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today.
They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again – but has still to reach the balmy temperatures of the Middle Ages.
Must’ve been all the exhaust from the horses.
And NPR is reporting that a cache of medium-range missiles with sarin and mustard gas were found, ready to fire.
Hans Blix (and anti-war protestors), call your offices. You’ve missed a lot of messages.
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