Category: Networks

The anti-war and anti-liberation brigades are pretty upset over the Feith memo, as it clearly sinks their claims of a firewall between Saddam’s goons and Osama’s goons. Consequently, they’re pushing back with their own memo, this by advocate Anthony Cordesman on an exhaustive search he conducted during a harrowing ten-day trip to Iraq spent mostly in David Kay’s offices with a note pad and a pencil. Read this and tell me who Cordesman works for:

The CIA’s search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found no evidence that former president Saddam Hussein tried to transfer chemical or biological technology or weapons to terrorists, according to a military and intelligence expert.

Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provided new details about the weapons search and Iraqi insurgency in a report released Friday. It was based on briefings over the past two weeks in Iraq from David Kay, the CIA representative who is directing the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq; L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator there; and military officials.

“No evidence of any Iraqi effort to transfer weapons of mass destruction or weapons to terrorists,” Cordesman wrote of Kay’s briefing. “Only possibility was Saddam’s Fedayeen [his son’s irregular terrorist force] and talk only.”

Can I see a show of hands from those who think he’s a CIA operative? The first paragraph implies that he is, but the second says that he’s not. So if Cordesman isn’t a CIA operative, why would the CIA appoint him to publicize the findings of an ongoing investigation, when they have their own in-house PR staff?

They wouldn’t, of course, and they didn’t.

President Bush visits the UK this week, and the usual elements of the sanctimonious left intend to demonstrate against the murderous ways of the American hegemon with red paint, papier mache, and the rest of it. Writing in The Observer (the Sunday edition of The Guardian), David Aaronovitch asks why the protests are so selective:

Where is the red paint to protest against the blasts at Najaf, of the UN in Baghdad, of the Red Cross, of the synagogues, of the Bali night-club, of the Arab-Jewish restaurant in Haifa? Where are the ‘No Suicide Bombings’ posters in the Muswell Hill windows? Or do you really believe we can save ourselves by constructing a huge wall around these islands, or around America, and painting it with smileys? That maybe then the ills of the world will leave us alone?

…and welcomes the president to the Isles.

Those still skeptical about the Saddam/Al Qaeda connection had best read the Weekly Standard article on a 50-point memo detailing the connections:

OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda–perhaps even for Mohamed Atta–according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

This really should come as no surprise.

Via Roger Simon, Michael Totten, and Little Green Footballs.

Josh Chafetz has posted his speech to the Oxford Union on the question of winning or losing the peace:

Three of the most widely read American magazines have recently run stories on how the occupation is going, and the verdict is unanimous. “Americans are Losing the Victory” screams one. “How We Botched the Occupation” is on the cover of another. “Blueprint for a Mess” is the verdict of the third.

Actually, I’ve taken some liberties with two of those headlines, so let me start over. “Blueprint for a Mess” is indeed the cover article in this week’s New York Times Magazine. But “Americans Are Losing the Victory” is from the January 7, 1945 issue of Life magazine, and the full headline is “Americans are Losing the Victory in Europe.” The Saturday Evening Post on January 26, 1946 ran “How We Botched the German Occupation.”

Chafetz and two undergrads trounced two leftist MPs and an undergrad.

Here’s a part of the President’s speech on spreading democracy to the Middle East:

Our commitment to democracy is also tested in the Middle East, which is my focus today, and must be a focus of American policy for decades to come. In many nations of the Middle East — countries of great strategic importance — democracy has not yet taken root. And the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free. (Applause.)

Some skeptics of democracy assert that the traditions of Islam are inhospitable to the representative government. This “cultural condescension,” as Ronald Reagan termed it, has a long history. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a so-called Japan expert asserted that democracy in that former empire would “never work.” Another observer declared the prospects for democracy in post-Hitler Germany are, and I quote, “most uncertain at best” — he made that claim in 1957. Seventy-four years ago, The Sunday London Times declared nine-tenths of the population of India to be “illiterates not caring a fig for politics.” Yet when Indian democracy was imperiled in the 1970s, the Indian people showed their commitment to liberty in a national referendum that saved their form of government.

Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country, or that people, or this group, are “ready” for democracy — as if freedom were a prize you win for meeting our own Western standards of progress. In fact, the daily work of democracy itself is the path of progress. It teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, and the peaceful resolution of differences. As men and women are showing, from Bangladesh to Botswana, to Mongolia, it is the practice of democracy that makes a nation ready for democracy, and every nation can start on this path.

It should be clear to all that Islam — the faith of one-fifth of humanity — is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries — in Turkey and Indonesia, and Senegal and Albania, Niger and Sierra Leone. Muslim men and women are good citizens of India and South Africa, of the nations of Western Europe, and of the United States of America.

More than half of all the Muslims in the world live in freedom under democratically constituted governments. They succeed in democratic societies, not in spite of their faith, but because of it. A religion that demands individual moral accountability, and encourages the encounter of the individual with God, is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government.

Yet there’s a great challenge today in the Middle East. In the words of a recent report by Arab scholars, the global wave of democracy has — and I quote — “barely reached the Arab states.” They continue: “This freedom deficit undermines human development and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political development.” The freedom deficit they describe has terrible consequences, of the people of the Middle East and for the world. In many Middle Eastern countries, poverty is deep and it is spreading, women lack rights and are denied schooling. Whole societies remain stagnant while the world moves ahead. These are not the failures of a culture or a religion. These are the failures of political and economic doctrines.

This was an extremely important address, but I’ll have to delay commenting on it for a while.

Arab News columnist Fawaz Turki opposed the liberation of Iraq, but now he’s entertaining Revisionist Thoughts on the War on Iraq:

Look, I have no illusions about the shenanigans and hypocrisies of a big power like the US, including its neocon ideologues, who are more cons than neos. Lest we forget, at the height of Saddam’s bloody reach in the 1980s, which saw the Halabja atrocities, Washington not only uttered nary a word of criticism of the Iraqi leader, let alone called for his overthrow, but provided him with political, military and economic assistance that, in effect, underwrote his survival and made possible the very repression that American officials now claim they want to banish forever from the land.

All true. Yet, the US may, just may, end up doing in Iraq what it did in war-ravaged European countries under the Marshall Plan. And if it doesn’t, well, what would Iraqis have lost other than the ritual terror of life under a dictator who had splintered their society into raw fragments of fear, hysteria and self-denial — a man who insisted that third graders learn songs whose lyrics lauded him with lines such as “when he passes near, the roses celebrate.”

Saddam ruled by “fear, repression, genocide, cult of personality and wanton murder”, and now he doesn’t. The only people who still condemn this war are so consumed with hate for President Bush or for America that they can’t see daylight.

See also: Roger L. Simon, Andrew Sullivan.

See Michael Totten in Tech Central Station – The Crucial Alliance:

Last month at a Democratic Party debate Howard Dean said “we need to remember that the enemy here is George Bush.” This was during an argument with Dick Gephardt about Medicare. At the same time, the mullahs in Iran and the Stalinist tyrant in North Korea were firing up nuclear weapons programs. Al Qaeda threatens to use whatever nukes they can find to turn the United States into a “sea of deadly radiation.” At a time like this, calling George Bush the enemy is more than a little ridiculous.

Totten is eminently reasonable.

Kathleen Parker actually read the Kay report on WMDs in Iraq:

What Kay really says in his report is that he and his inspectors have found “dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002.”

And that’s just the beginning of a laundry list of findings that should chill a vampire, including a clandestine network of laboratories suitable for chemical and biological warfare research and a prison lab complex possibly used in human testing of biological agents.

But, as most news outlets noted as dramatically as possible, he found no stocks of weapons. Bada-bingo.

Why aren’t the other, um, mainstream media sources saying what she’s saying?

Matt Welch effuses over the bang-up quality of the playoffs and bemoans the A’s baserunning. I don’t think it’s fair to bash the A’s for running the bases like “8-year-old retards.” After all, the Giants went down in four games against a wild card team from someplace in the South, and they don’t run the bases at all. No, with both California teams eliminated in the first round, there’s no escaping the fact that something is going on that’s larger than the individual teams. It’s a California Collapse.

Clearly, Gray Davis is behind the Collapse, because he wrecked the economy and sent so many quality players out of the state. Look at the Giants, who once had an actual pitching staff, starring Russ Ortiz. Ortiz lost his job and had to move all the way to Atlanta to find work, so Ted Turner got the benefit of his great arm and the best won-lost record in baseball. Similar deal with Kenny Lofton, who hitch-hiked to Chicago, of all places, and ends up going to the second round along with Moizes Alou, the son of the Giants’ manager. Jeff Kent had to go to Houston to live off his relatives, but he’s out for the year too.

On the other side of the Bay, unemployment hit the A’s really, really hard: Jason Giambi had to go to New York, and whoever used to work the bullpen split town too. Without all this unemployment, it’s pretty clear these teams would have played a whole lot better.

So this is part of Gray Davis’ legacy to California, and those people down there in the Sunny South need to recall the bastard tomorrow, for the children, especially the 8-year-old retards who suffer from this comparison. And while they’re at it, recalling the A’s bullpen and the Giants’ starting rotation (except Schmidt) wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Tim Blair exposes an evil Saudi agent:

Three years ago Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal invested $50 million in the Disney company, which is financing Moore’s next film. The Prince invested a similar amount in Amazon, which distributes Moore’s films and books, and has $1.05 billion in America Online — with whom Moore has an account. Why, Moore is practically swimming in evil Saudi cash!

Stop him before he kills again.