Partisan treachery
By Alan Caruba
web posted November 28, 2005
 A construction worker smooths cement on the front of a building under construction in the capital Baghdad earlier this summer |
Veteran's Day was a good one on which to begin striking back at the avalanche of lies being told about the Bush administration's decision to liberate Iraq and one can only hope it will now take the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans to the enemy; the Democrat Party and elements of the mainstream media.
The American people are being deliberately victimized by a campaign of lies whose purpose, some Washington insiders surmise, is to impeach the President and render his final years in office powerless while positioning the Democrats as ready to desert our allies and the whole of Western civilization by ceding victory to the Islamofascists.
What I continue to wonder about is why anyone would have any faith left in a party whose most recent candidate for the office of Vice President, former Senator John Edwards, says "It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake." So, if this moron failed, as a US Senator, to do due diligence to determine if the intelligence and other factors involved were wrong, why should anyone want to take his word today?
For the record, the intelligence which Edwards and the rest of the bleating chorus of Democrat liars now calls "deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda" was neither.
Hardly a day goes by when we do not learn that the reasons cited for going to war against Saddam Hussein were valid. Indeed, an entire book has been written on the subject. It is Disinformation: 22 Myths that Undermine the War on Terror by Richard Miniter ($27.95, Regnery Publishing, Inc.) His book dispels the lies being advanced by Democrats and so-called peace activists. Let's just look at some of its findings:
If you depended on the mainstream media, you would assume that Iraqis support the "insurgency", but this makes no sense at all. They are its primary victims. In a nation of some 25 million, al-Qaida is estimated to have, at most, 2,000 fighters, most of whom are foreigners. Composed of three different factions, the "entire insurgency doesn't even amount to five percent of the population."
Understand, too, that as the insurgency continues to lose, it will increase its efforts. That is what is happening in Iraq, a nation whose formerly enslaved population has now twice turned out to vote and will again in mid-December.
Here are just a selection of the myths to be found in Miniter's book.
Iraq is not Vietnam, despite the instantaneous use of the word "quagmire" by US politicians like Sen. Teddy Kennedy. As tragic as the loss of a single US serviceman or woman is, by comparison America lost a total of 55,750 dead from 1965 to 1972 in Vietnam. The current losses in Iraq are just over 2,000, a rate of less than two servicemen a day, compared to nineteen a day in Vietnam. And all are volunteers as opposed to draftees in that previous conflict. To a man, our troops in Iraq support the war and understand that we are gaining the upper hand on the insurgency with every passing day.
The US military did not kill 100,000 civilians in Iraq. That claim is based on a study by an international research team whose purpose was, in the words of its author, intended to provoke "moral outrage." In an interview with a Scottish newspaper, Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University said, "I was opposed to the war and still think it was a bad idea." Bottom line? "Fourteen of Iraq's eighteen provinces have seen virtually no war-related violence at all."
The biggest of the Big Lies being told these days is that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Meticulously, Miniter cites evidence that, for example, "In a secret operation on June 23, 2004, US forces seized 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium—the kind used to make fuel for atomic bombs—in a nuclear facility in Iraq." In another largely unreported event, "Polish military officials bought seventeen chemical-weapons warheads from Iraqis for $5,000 each to keep them from Iraq's so-called insurgents."
During the long years when the United Nations inspectors tried to identify and eliminate Saddam Hussein's treasure trove of WMDs, they were routinely thwarted despite finding evidence that Iraq was making VX nerve gas and concluding that they could not account for 6,500 chemical weapons, nor could prove that Iraq had destroyed its stores of anthrax. Between 1991 and 1994, the inspectors "uncovered and dismantled a previously undeclared network of about forty nuclear research facilities, including three clandestine enrichment programs."
Now, I ask you, would you have preferred to have permitted Saddam to continue his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons? Iraq was invaded again after Saddam had spent a decade ignoring United Nations resolutions and had, as we now know, engaged in massive bribery to enrich himself from the UN Oil-for-Food sanctions.
Miniter also documents the fact that there were extensive connections between Iraq and al-Qaida. You can read about them in the 9-11 Commission report! "Die-hard opponents of President Bush," writes Miniter, "will be disappointed to see that there are indeed many proven links between the Iraqi dictator and the world's most infamous terrorist. All I can say is that the evidence is clear and uncontested."
Uncontested by all except the Democrat leadership in Congress and let it be said there is something obscene when ex-President Bill Clinton goes to the Middle East to tell an audience there that the liberation of Iraq was a mistake!
Many other myths are put to rest in Miniter's relentlessly documented book. What remains for the Bush administration to do now is to fight back against its political enemies at home as hard as it has fought to liberate Iraq. It will be a horror to have won the war there and lost it here. 
Alan Caruba writes a weekly commentary, "Warning Signs", posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center. © Alan Caruba, November 2005
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