Thursday, November 24, 2005
Saddam Inside The Box
In his Weekly Standard article The Naysayer, Thomas Joscelyn compares historical fact to former NSC worker Daniel Benjamin's incredible story that there were no AQ-Iraq ties. Benjamin, who wrote in Time Mag that "there was no pre-existing relationship between Baghdad and al-Qaeda," yada yada yada, last week in Slate accused Vice President Dick Cheney of "cherry-picking" intelligence with his dirty neocon pals. Good one. Benji's problem is that the public, Joscelyn among them, has access to certain pre-war intelligence, often secretly referred to as news archives, common knowledge, and other such intentionally misleading codenames. The result is that a select few know Benji is gearing us around:
...if one is looking for an exemplary cherry-picker, then there is none better than Benjamin himself. Benjamin has gone out of his way to advance the most logically tortuous reasons for dismissing evidence of a relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. In so doing, he has demonstrated the absurd lengths to which some will carry their wrongheaded assumptions.
Funny how all that intel so widely published during the Clinton years about the ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda has been forgotten by antiwar idiots, who only listened to the "We have Saddam inside a box" nonsense because it gave such comfort: why do anything to/about a guy we "have in a box"?
Well, he wasn't in a box: he was filling mass graves with his own people after murdering them with chemical weapons or feeding them feet-first into industrial shredders or executing them in front of their families, he was evading weapons inspectors and bribing the French, Germans, Russians and the U.N. with petrodollars to look the other way, he was plotting to assassinate the President of the United States, he was firing missiles at warplanes protecting his own people from him in UN-sanctioned no-fly zones, and preparing to restart his weapons programs as soon as the sanctions against him collapsed. And, of course, he was working with terrorists who sought weapons of mass destruction.
That's pretty much your antiwar idiot's idea of "Saddam Is In A Box."
Compare that to George W. Bush's idea of Saddam in a box:
No ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda here, and Saddam's in a box. Thank you, Mr. President.
...if one is looking for an exemplary cherry-picker, then there is none better than Benjamin himself. Benjamin has gone out of his way to advance the most logically tortuous reasons for dismissing evidence of a relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. In so doing, he has demonstrated the absurd lengths to which some will carry their wrongheaded assumptions.
Funny how all that intel so widely published during the Clinton years about the ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda has been forgotten by antiwar idiots, who only listened to the "We have Saddam inside a box" nonsense because it gave such comfort: why do anything to/about a guy we "have in a box"?
Well, he wasn't in a box: he was filling mass graves with his own people after murdering them with chemical weapons or feeding them feet-first into industrial shredders or executing them in front of their families, he was evading weapons inspectors and bribing the French, Germans, Russians and the U.N. with petrodollars to look the other way, he was plotting to assassinate the President of the United States, he was firing missiles at warplanes protecting his own people from him in UN-sanctioned no-fly zones, and preparing to restart his weapons programs as soon as the sanctions against him collapsed. And, of course, he was working with terrorists who sought weapons of mass destruction.
That's pretty much your antiwar idiot's idea of "Saddam Is In A Box."
Compare that to George W. Bush's idea of Saddam in a box:
No ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda here, and Saddam's in a box. Thank you, Mr. President.
