LeoO
12-22-2004, 02:01 AM
The problem with Huffington and other anti-war leftists pretending to be outraged by the Humvee issue or soldier suicides or whatnot is that they're against the war. They never wanted us to liberate Iraq and overthrow Saddam's WMD-obssessed, terrorist-friendly regime in the first place. The whole project of making Iraq into a normal country run by decent locals who permit a reasonable degree of political, religious, and economic freedom is something they ferociously opposed.
Their reasons for such opposition were purely partisan, of course -- Clinton, Gore, and Kerry warned repeatedly that Saddam consorted with terorrists and sought WMDs, and supported regime change, but when Bush decided to follow through after 12 years of bluster, rhetoric, empty threats, diplomatic pressure, sanctions, air strikes, cruise missile attacks, and carrot-and-stick overtures, Arianna and her Hollywood/lib friends went berserk with knee-jerk opposition, solely because it was BUSH doing these things.
Regardless of their motives, however, the fact remains that they were against. Against liberation, against jailing Saddam and Chemical Ali, against opening the gates of the child prisons, against excluding the people who ripped out tongues and nailed them to boards from future positions of power in Iraq, against, against against.
Over and over, solely to damage Bush, their favored Congressmen viciously attacked America. Some flew to Baghdad and parroted Saddam's party line before the war. Many are doing so to this day. Bush waited for months, years, to deliver the most-telegraphed punch in history because he let his implacable, bad-faith critics hound him into begging the useless UN for "permission" to go to Iraq. The endless debate, as if Saddam weren't obviously guilty and demonstrating bad faith for 12 straight years, gave him plenty of time to destroy, hide, or give away whatever weapons and components he may have had.
To sweeping media silence, we found a nuclear weapon centrifuge buried in a scientist's garden, and chemical weapon artillery shells rigged as IEDs. I guess they must have grown on trees. We found an entire MiG-29 squadrons buried in the sand. Iraq was a mlitary dictatorship with ammo dumps the size of Manhattan. Who knows what was there?
The fact is that Saddam was caught with a nuke program in the mid-90s that he had been running right under the nose of UN inspectors. And yet somehow we were supposed to give him endless benefits of a doubt, require ACLU, OJ-jury levels of proof before we were allowed to finally resume the war he brought on himself by refusing to comply with the terms of the Gulf War armistice he had asked for. The burden of proof was on Saddam to show he had disarmed for good. South Africa, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, many countries have done this. And now Libya. Saddam played hide-the-pea for 12 years. The UN Security Council gave him a "final opportunity" to "immediately" disarm fully or face "serious consequences" - which in the understated world of international diplomacy means war. It balked at carrying out this threat because it had been corrupted by Saddam's oil-for-food money, so Bush carried it out.
After 9/11, no responsible president could let Saddam alone forever. He openly harbored and sheltered terrorists such as Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal (who gained fame by hijacking a cruise ship and throwing a wheelchair-bound Jewish American to his death into the sea). He financed the families of suicide bombers who murdered civilians. And, he even offered and gave medical care, shelter, and help for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda loyalist who had trained in Afghanistan and who was wounded fighting US troops in Afrghanistan AFTER 9/11. Saddam helped Zarqawi set up Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq, in the northern Kurish region that was no longer in Baghdad's control.
No honest person can claim Saddam wasn't mixed up with terrorists up to his eyeballs. And constantly pursuing WMD. And after the UNSC's "final" demand, he produced a "report' that was such an insult, such a pack of lies, that not even the French or Chinese pretended that is met with UN's war ultimatum.
At that point, Bush, being a sane and responsible leader, decided there was no other alternative but war.
To Arianna Huffington and her airhead Hollywood friends, this was some monstrous crime against humanity. They have worked relentlessly to portray our noble war effort as a cynical evil act, motivated by domestic politics, oil-greed, corporate corruption, bigotry, Cold War paranoia, filial-jealousy psychological problems, or what have you. In the same rant they will portray the war as either a colossal blunder by a complete fool or an evil conspiracy by a greedy tyrant. Coherence doesn't matter. The essential point is always to DELEGITIMIZE THE WAR EFFORT, TO MAKE SURE OUR SOLDIERS, THE ENEMY, AND THE WORLD KNOWS THAT OUR TROOPS' FIGHTING HAS NO VALUE, AND WILL PRODUCE NO GOOD.
And now Arianna weeps crocodile tears over solider suicides? When she is the one working hard night and day to tell our brave warriors fighting for good that they are chumps working for fools or wicked men?
The hypocrisy is breathtaking in its loathsome shamelessness.
As far as the armor issue, this is more opportunism. War is war. Anyone who is not a hair-sprayed Hollywood airhead knows that war is chaos and wrenching change and disasters and unanticipated crises, all the time. God only knows how she would have handled the fact that in World War 2 we deliberately rejected better-armored tanks in favor of the lightly armored Sherman. The Sherman was easy prey for much heavier and more powerful German tanks. However we produced them in vast quantities and emphasized reliability and fuel-efficiency. The slow, finicky, ponderous German tanks that always broke down and could not be produced in numbers were eventually overwhelmed and bypassed by our speedy Shermans. But thousands of Americans died as a result of this strategy.
This time around it wasn't even a deliberate choice. The humvee was never designed as a counter-insurgency vehicle, meant to bounce RPG-7 fire in urban combat zones. It was meant to operate behind enemy lines, ferrying men and supplies over rough terrain. Yes, a bureaucratic snafu and mutual misunderstanding caused the Pentagon to overlook the reality that it could have gotten more up-armored Humvees. That's in the nature of bureaucracies and war.
During World War 2 Harry Truman as a Senator worked hard to flush out the kinks, corruption, and ineffeciencies in the military procurement system. Waste and mistakes and delays are bound to occur.
But Truman had CREDIBILITY IN HIS EFFORTS BECAUSE HE SUPPORTED THE WAR. HE WASN'T EAGERLY SEEKING OUT PROBLEMS TO HYPE AS A WAY TO DEMORALIZE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND OUR TROOPS, TO DESTROY OUR WAR EFFORT AND MAKE US LOSE.
Their reasons for such opposition were purely partisan, of course -- Clinton, Gore, and Kerry warned repeatedly that Saddam consorted with terorrists and sought WMDs, and supported regime change, but when Bush decided to follow through after 12 years of bluster, rhetoric, empty threats, diplomatic pressure, sanctions, air strikes, cruise missile attacks, and carrot-and-stick overtures, Arianna and her Hollywood/lib friends went berserk with knee-jerk opposition, solely because it was BUSH doing these things.
Regardless of their motives, however, the fact remains that they were against. Against liberation, against jailing Saddam and Chemical Ali, against opening the gates of the child prisons, against excluding the people who ripped out tongues and nailed them to boards from future positions of power in Iraq, against, against against.
Over and over, solely to damage Bush, their favored Congressmen viciously attacked America. Some flew to Baghdad and parroted Saddam's party line before the war. Many are doing so to this day. Bush waited for months, years, to deliver the most-telegraphed punch in history because he let his implacable, bad-faith critics hound him into begging the useless UN for "permission" to go to Iraq. The endless debate, as if Saddam weren't obviously guilty and demonstrating bad faith for 12 straight years, gave him plenty of time to destroy, hide, or give away whatever weapons and components he may have had.
To sweeping media silence, we found a nuclear weapon centrifuge buried in a scientist's garden, and chemical weapon artillery shells rigged as IEDs. I guess they must have grown on trees. We found an entire MiG-29 squadrons buried in the sand. Iraq was a mlitary dictatorship with ammo dumps the size of Manhattan. Who knows what was there?
The fact is that Saddam was caught with a nuke program in the mid-90s that he had been running right under the nose of UN inspectors. And yet somehow we were supposed to give him endless benefits of a doubt, require ACLU, OJ-jury levels of proof before we were allowed to finally resume the war he brought on himself by refusing to comply with the terms of the Gulf War armistice he had asked for. The burden of proof was on Saddam to show he had disarmed for good. South Africa, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, many countries have done this. And now Libya. Saddam played hide-the-pea for 12 years. The UN Security Council gave him a "final opportunity" to "immediately" disarm fully or face "serious consequences" - which in the understated world of international diplomacy means war. It balked at carrying out this threat because it had been corrupted by Saddam's oil-for-food money, so Bush carried it out.
After 9/11, no responsible president could let Saddam alone forever. He openly harbored and sheltered terrorists such as Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal (who gained fame by hijacking a cruise ship and throwing a wheelchair-bound Jewish American to his death into the sea). He financed the families of suicide bombers who murdered civilians. And, he even offered and gave medical care, shelter, and help for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda loyalist who had trained in Afghanistan and who was wounded fighting US troops in Afrghanistan AFTER 9/11. Saddam helped Zarqawi set up Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq, in the northern Kurish region that was no longer in Baghdad's control.
No honest person can claim Saddam wasn't mixed up with terrorists up to his eyeballs. And constantly pursuing WMD. And after the UNSC's "final" demand, he produced a "report' that was such an insult, such a pack of lies, that not even the French or Chinese pretended that is met with UN's war ultimatum.
At that point, Bush, being a sane and responsible leader, decided there was no other alternative but war.
To Arianna Huffington and her airhead Hollywood friends, this was some monstrous crime against humanity. They have worked relentlessly to portray our noble war effort as a cynical evil act, motivated by domestic politics, oil-greed, corporate corruption, bigotry, Cold War paranoia, filial-jealousy psychological problems, or what have you. In the same rant they will portray the war as either a colossal blunder by a complete fool or an evil conspiracy by a greedy tyrant. Coherence doesn't matter. The essential point is always to DELEGITIMIZE THE WAR EFFORT, TO MAKE SURE OUR SOLDIERS, THE ENEMY, AND THE WORLD KNOWS THAT OUR TROOPS' FIGHTING HAS NO VALUE, AND WILL PRODUCE NO GOOD.
And now Arianna weeps crocodile tears over solider suicides? When she is the one working hard night and day to tell our brave warriors fighting for good that they are chumps working for fools or wicked men?
The hypocrisy is breathtaking in its loathsome shamelessness.
As far as the armor issue, this is more opportunism. War is war. Anyone who is not a hair-sprayed Hollywood airhead knows that war is chaos and wrenching change and disasters and unanticipated crises, all the time. God only knows how she would have handled the fact that in World War 2 we deliberately rejected better-armored tanks in favor of the lightly armored Sherman. The Sherman was easy prey for much heavier and more powerful German tanks. However we produced them in vast quantities and emphasized reliability and fuel-efficiency. The slow, finicky, ponderous German tanks that always broke down and could not be produced in numbers were eventually overwhelmed and bypassed by our speedy Shermans. But thousands of Americans died as a result of this strategy.
This time around it wasn't even a deliberate choice. The humvee was never designed as a counter-insurgency vehicle, meant to bounce RPG-7 fire in urban combat zones. It was meant to operate behind enemy lines, ferrying men and supplies over rough terrain. Yes, a bureaucratic snafu and mutual misunderstanding caused the Pentagon to overlook the reality that it could have gotten more up-armored Humvees. That's in the nature of bureaucracies and war.
During World War 2 Harry Truman as a Senator worked hard to flush out the kinks, corruption, and ineffeciencies in the military procurement system. Waste and mistakes and delays are bound to occur.
But Truman had CREDIBILITY IN HIS EFFORTS BECAUSE HE SUPPORTED THE WAR. HE WASN'T EAGERLY SEEKING OUT PROBLEMS TO HYPE AS A WAY TO DEMORALIZE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND OUR TROOPS, TO DESTROY OUR WAR EFFORT AND MAKE US LOSE.