The Left Proves Hypocrisy On WMD’s
By Brian Yates (06/22/03)
To borrow a phrase from my friends at the Courier-Journal, it’s been a real “orgy” of sniping, sneering and hysteria from the Left recently over the search for weapons of mass destruction. Where are they at? Why haven’t we found them? Did Bush lie? Did Bush invent intelligence? And of course, the mainstream press has fallen right into step behind their Pied Pipers in the Senate. The New York Times is demanding to know whether or not Bush “forged” or “deliberately distorted” its intelligence reports.
(By the way, the irony in The Newspaper of Record’s attempt to condemn anyone else’s “deliberately distorted” reports is simply laughable.) Out on the Left Coast, The Los Angeles Times is busy asserting a need to hold a “thorough congressional investigation of the intelligence concerning Iraq.”
The question of “do the weapons exist?” does not need to be answered. We know that they do. And before you people in the pro-Saddam movement start sneering, “How do you know, Yates? Have you ever been to Iraq? Did yooooou ask Saddam personally?” Well no, actually I didn’t. Dan Rather was chosen to go instead and he really grilled Saddam over his weapons program. (I’ve got a wager for anyone that might be interested. I’ll bet dinner that whenever we find Saddam, we’ll find little bits of Dan Rather’s lips attached to his backside.)
We know that he had weapons of mass destruction; he’s used them before. And does anyone really believe that Saddam went through the trouble of kicking U.N. inspectors out of the country in 1998 only to then decide to destroy his weapons program? Critics seem to imply that this is the case, but had this been so, why wouldn’t Saddam come forward to provide proof of their destruction. Doing so would have enabled him to stay in power. The idea that he no longer has weapons is flat-out wrong, period.
The utter hypocrisy of the Left on this issue continues to amaze me. (Actually, no it doesn’t.) Twenty-seven U.S. Senators sent a letter to then-President Bill Clinton on October 9, 1998, urging him to “take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraq sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.” Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John F. Kerry, and Diane Feinstein were among the fourteen Senate Democrats to sign the letter. Levin, of course, is now saying that “there is too much evidence that the intelligence was shaded.” And apparently, although it was a real certainty back in 1998 when Levin sent the letter to Clinton, Bush was wrong to declare the presence of a weapons of mass destruction program. His brilliant reasoning on this is that, back in 1998, U.N. inspectors were not in Iraq, and they were this past March. Brilliant deduction, Sherlock Holmes, but everybody knows Hans Blix couldn’t find any weapons if Saddam provided him with a detailed map and placed blinking fluorescent signs over top of them. Hans Blix probably can’t find his bathroom when he gets up in the middle of the night.
Speaking of hypocrisy, what about the New York Times? After continually lampooning Bush’s decision to go to war, now they’re sniffing that intelligence has been “deliberately distorted.” But they, like Senator Levin, were all for war in 1998 when the president was a Democrat. Defending Clinton in a 1998 editorial, they stated “Given the prospect that Baghdad would rebuild its arsenal of toxic weapons while United Nations inspectors were handcuffed, Mr. Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain had no choice but to use military force to destroy portions of Iraq's arms industry.” Now wait just a minute! I thought Iraq didn’t have a weapons program? Currently they’re sniping that “after weeks of futile searching by American teams, it seems clear that Iraq was not bristling with horrific arms and that chemical and biological weapons were not readily available to frontline Iraqi forces.” Caught in a lie? For some reason I don’t think it will bother The Newspaper of Record. They’re so blatantly liberal they don’t even care to make an absolute mockery of themselves. Hell, they even managed to explain that when Clinton bombed Iraq, it had nothing to do with the exploding story of Monica…I don’t even think James Carville even touched that one. According to the Times, it just so happened that “the confrontation with Iraq has played out on its own timetable and happened to reach a decisive point on the eve of the House impeachment debate.” Huh, imagine that.
The bottom line is weapons of mass destruction do exist and we will eventually find them. The only question we need to be asking is: where are they? Having them fall into the wrong hands is a terrible situation that must not happen. Let the Democrats make “deliberately distorted” intelligence the theme of the 2004 campaign. I hope they do. You can call it a Weapon of Mass Self-Destruction for the Democrats.
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