Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Beware What You Want (You Just Might Get It)

Pity the poor liberals. It seems that everything they've ever said and believed about the Iraq war was wrong. Not that they care - the truth is arbitrary to them. Getting their way, getting their choice of president, was all that mattered:
While the media have been quick to run with WikiLeaks’ U.S. State Department cable releases to undermine Washington’s efforts to effect stability in unstable parts of the world, it is slow, if not silent, in giving credit where credit is due. Although other credible sources confirmed it before WikiLeaks did, in receiving similar disinterested responses from the media, it should be clear now that President Bush’s concerns about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program were well-founded.

The 2003 Iraq invasion by U.S. forces also launched a massive effort to find WMDs. By late 2003, as determined in a review by a Wired Magazine editor of WikiLeaks documents on the issue, the Administration was losing faith WMDs would be found. But, as Wired reports, the WikiLeaks documents clearly show "for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction. . . . Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam's toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents."
 
A September 2004 New York Times op-ed by the former head of Saddam’s nuclear research program supported this, as well. He wrote:

"[T]he West never understood the delusional nature of Saddam Hussein’s mind . . . he lived in a fantasy world . . . .  giving lunatic orders . . . he kept the country’s Atomic Energy Commission alive . . . Saddam fooled  . . .  the world . . . . [O]ur nuclear program could have been reinstituted at the snap of Saddam Hussein’s fingers."
 
Of note too is a January 2004 revelation by Syrian journalist defector Nizar Nayuf. He reported there were three locations in Syria where Iraqi WMDs had been transported prior to the 2003 invasion and were being stored. He also revealed some of these sites were being built with North Korean cooperation. This explained why three years later Israel attacked a nuclear facility being built in Syria by Pyongyang — and Syria’s subsequent failure to criticize Israel for fear of drawing further international attention to what Damascus had been doing.
Ahh, delusion. It's such a wonderfully common thing today. Where would we be without it? Where would liberalism be without it? One has to wonder, considering:
To the extent that there is such a thing as a "peace movement" in America, its members are a contemptible lot. But why are peaceniks so unworthy?

For one thing, because pacifism is dumb. It is merely the reductio ad absurdum of the trivial truth that war is bad. Philosophers and statesmen have a wide range of opinions as to when going to war is wise, justified or necessary. Only a child or a simpleton thinks the answer is "never." Thus the "peace movement" tends to attract the dull and the immature.

To be sure, under some circumstances it takes courage to stand against one's government. A public pacifist in Nazi Germany, or in Iran or North Korea today, would be an admirable figure notwithstanding the naiveté of his ideology. By contrast, being a pacifist in 21st-century America entails risking exactly nothing.
Well, nothing but the country, that is. Like we said, pity the poor liberals.

After this latest round of lies, and political fiascos, they're never getting this one back.

1 comment:

COMMENTS ARE BACK ON