Showing posts with label WMD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WMD. Show all posts

Thursday, May 28, 2015

STILL Pushing The LIE That "Bush Lied, People Died"?

STILL Pushing The LIE That "Bush Lied, People Died"?

May 28, 2015 Bob Woodward , George W. Bush 0 Comments
Bob Woodward: Wrong, Bush Did Not Lie Us Into Iraq 

By Jack Coleman, May 25, 2015, Newsbusters



 Read the full story: www.newsbusters.org

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Thursday, October 23, 2014

Iraq's WMD: The Shameless New York Times Moves The Goalposts By Larry Elder

October 23, 2014 Articles by Larry Elder , Iraq 1 Comments
By Larry Elder, Oct. 23, 2014, Townhall.com

Contrary to the expectations of all 16 of our U.S. intelligence agencies, the "weapons hunters" sent to Iraq by President George W. Bush found no "stockpiles" of WMD.

Never mind that there was a 15-month run-up to the war, during which time Saddam was not combing his moustache. A former Iraqi general, Georges Sada, who met with members of Congress, has long claimed Saddam Hussein moved tons of WMD by land and air into Syria during the run-up to the 2003 invasion. James Clapper, the current Director of National Intelligence, has also said publicly that he, too, believes the WMD were there. But Bush's two weapons hunters found no stockpiles.

President George W. Bush looked like a fool.

Bush-hating critics chanted, "Bush lied, people died." About the prewar intelligence, Sen. Ted Kennedy said, "Before the war, week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie." Critics said the lives of over 4,000 troops were wasted, in addition to the money supposedly squandered prosecuting the Iraq War.

Now comes the 10,000-word, eight-part story in The New York Times. The front-page story, called "The Secret Casualties Of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons," says WMD were in Iraq: "In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."

Moreover, the soldiers were told to keep quiet about the WMD:

"Troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found. ?'Nothing of significance' is what I was ordered to say,' said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.

"Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of 'wounds that never happened' from 'that stuff that didn't exist.' The public, he said, was misled for a decade. 'I love it when I hear, 'Oh there weren't any chemical weapons in Iraq,' he said. 'There were plenty.'"

This is not new news to those who get news from publications other than the Times. Following a 2010 WikiLeaks leak, Wired magazine wrote: "By late 2003, even the Bush White House's staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction. But WikiLeaks' newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). ... 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."

But, rest assured, the Times emphatically insists, the discovered WMD "did not support the government's invasion rationale." It doesn't? Well, you see, according to the Times, Bush still misled Americans because the discovered WMD were "old" and "degraded," not part of an "active" weapons program. "Active?"

But only days before the bombshell Times piece, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow restated why she felt Bush "lied." Not once during her three-minute send-up about Bush "lies" and "wrong" intel, did Maddow ever use the word "active," let alone the term "active weapons program":

"There still exists -- on the right -- a sort of dead-ender fringe who believe thatactually Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction. He must have. George Bush couldn't have been wrong about that. I say it's a dead-ender fringe because even ... George W. Bush had to admit he was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. Iraq did not have them. ...

"We are four weeks out from the elections this year. It is 10 years today since our own government officially admitted the whole WMDs thing about Iraq was a lie. It's not like an accusation that it was a lie. It's a lie. We've admitted it was a lie."

Maddow then handed the floor to colleague Lawrence O'Donnell, who promptly piled on. But again O'Donnell, like Maddow, said nothing about "active": "Rachel, I wish this wasn't true, but I do have a prediction for you -- and that is that you have not done your last segment about a Republican who believes that there were (starts laughing) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

Now we know. WMD were, in fact, in Iraq.

The New York Times, Democrats and the doofi at MSNBC should apologize to President George W. Bush, an honorable man who attempted to do the right thing, only to be savaged by his critics. Fox's Charles Krauthammer has a term for this inability to acknowledge a scintilla of decency in our 43rd president -- "Bush Derangement Syndrome."

It is more toxic than Ebola.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Friendly fire over why GOP didn't defend the war!

October 22, 2014 Americanthinker.com , C. Edmund Wright 0 Comments
Karl Rove: Weapon of Mass Delusion

By C. Edmund Wright, Oct. 21, 2014, Americanthinker.com

So Karl Rove was involved in a cover-up. Well, leave it to Karl -- the “boy genius” and the “architect” -- to orchestrate a cover-up that actually hides information exculpatory to his President and his party. He did just that on the issue of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. This is not an outlier either -- this is just Rove being Rove. And ‘Rove being Rove’ has sown the seeds of destruction that gave us Barack Obama in 2008, and again in 2012, and has scattered political germs that still haunt Republicans to this day. This goes back to late 2000 in fact. More on that later.

So in case you missed it, the New York Times ran an eight part expose on WMDs and The Daily Beast ran a well-sourced piece entitled Insiders Blame Rove for Covering Up Iraq’s Real WMDs that chronicles a Rove-inspired cover up. You might remember the little kerfuffle the nation got into when ostensibly no weapons were found? You know, “Bush lied, people died” and all of that? It helped run George W. Bush’s administration right into the ground, and he took the Republican brand with him. Yes, Hurricane Katrina was a major factor too, but again, that was related to ‘Rove being Rove’ as well -- and more on that later, too.

The WMD issue was one of the major public relations snafus of the Bush Administration, and the whole effort in the War on Terror. And the costs of these mistakes are catastrophic and still mounting. Those include, but are not limited to the 2006 midterms, the 2008 Presidential election, the 2012 Presidential election -- and oh, the development of a little outfit known as ISIS / ISIL / IS etc. The costs are incalculable. The electorate, over the course of the years of Bush being hammered about lying on the issue of WMDs, hardened toward Bush -- and by extension -- all Republicans and even all conservatives. We still have this hangover today! Ask a man named Romney.

Read the full story:  www.americanthinker.com

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Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The Big Dawg

October 15, 2014 al Qaeda , George W. Bush 0 Comments
FLASHBACK: Who Started That Story About Iraq, WMDs, And Al Qaeda? That’s Right, Bill Clinton.

Frmr. President Bill Clinton
By Tom Nicols, Jun. 21, 2014, Tomnichols.net

Ok, let’s stipulate up front: the Bush administration owns the invasion of Iraq and everything that happened because of it up through 2009. (I do not believe new presidents inherit all responsibility on Inauguration Day; there is a grace period. President Obama’s expired about three years ago, but leave that argument for another day.) When Megyn Kelley is pantsing former Vice President Dick Cheney on this, you know that even the conservatives have accepted at least that much.

On one thing, however, it’s important to set the record straight, and that’s the issue of “lies” about WMD, especially chemical weapons. It has now become pretty much the status of urban legend that no one was crazy enough to link Saddam Hussein to WMD and Al Qaeda terrorists until the Bush administration did it as a rationale — one of several — for the 2003 invasion. It makes for a great story, except for one problem.

It’s wrong.

What follows is adapted from my 2008 book on preventive war, Eve of Destruction. Let’s be clear: if I knew this in 2006 and 2007 when the book was undergoing edits at a top university press, then it wasn’t a secret. The fact of the matter is that Bill Clinton laid out the connection between Iraq, VX weapons, and Al Qaeda in 1998, and Clinton himself provided such a strong rationale for going to war against Hussein that the far left wasapeshit distressed at his turn toward warmongering.

If you really want to know why we didn’t have a major (or major enough) debate on going to war in 2003, you might consider the degree to which senior members of the Democratic Party over 15 years ago had already sold their souls to support Clinton’s bellicose rhetoric, and thus were going to have a hard time explaining why they were then retreating on their own death-to-Saddam stuff only five years later without looking nakedly partisan.

I think this is one of many places that Bill Clinton eviscerated the heart and soul of the Democratic Party through his “triangulations” and other compromises, actions that I as a conservative welcomed, but whose damage to our public life is only now really evident. Again, a debate for another day.

In the meantime, if you’re one of the people who burps up that line about Bush’s “lies” in 2003, I suggest you revisit 1998 for a moment. The except below can be found on pages 49-51 of the book.

Read the full story:  www.tomnichols.net

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Vindication, Part VI

October 15, 2014 Articles by Larry Elder , CIA 0 Comments
FLASHBACK: "Bush (Iraq War) Vs. Obama (Ocare): Who 'Lied'?"

By Larry Elder, Nov. 7, 2013

When the weapons hunters failed to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so began one of the greatest slanders on a president in history: "Bush lied, people died."

Never mind that, in building the case for war in Iraq, President George W. Bush relied on the unanimous opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Never mind that the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission examined the intelligence on which Bush relied, and unanimously found that "the Intelligence Community did not make or change any analytic judgments in response to political pressure. ... We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments."

Never mind that Bush retained the same CIA director, George Tenet, who served under Bill Clinton. Tenet gave Bush the same intelligence assessment: that Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, possessed WMD is a "slam dunk." Indeed, according to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, Bush was initially skeptical of the intelligence that reached that conclusion. When, on December 21, 2002, Tenet laid out the intelligence purportedly showing the existence of WMD stockpiles, Bush said, "This is the best we've got?"

Never mind that former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then a New York senator, was particularly adamant about the threat posed by Saddam: "In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program. ... If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."

Finally, never mind about then-President Bill Clinton's Persian Gulf expert on the National Security Council, Kenneth Pollack. While he opposed the war's timing, Pollack said "no one doubted" Saddam's stockpiles of WMD: "The intelligence community convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the U.N. inspectors, in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. ... Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with U.S. views. ... Germany ... Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even France held positions similar to that of the United States. ... In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."

"Bush lied, people died" -- or some version of it -- was uttered at the highest levels in the opposition party. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called W. a "loser" and a "liar." He later apologized -- for the "loser" part. Liar stands. The so-called Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, bellowed, "Before the war, week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie."

If Bush is a "liar," having relied in good faith on the unanimous opinion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, what do you call President Barack Obama? In building the case for Obamacare, Obama promised: "No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what."

Did Obama "lie"?

Obama's health care team, according to NBC News, knew that more than half of the people who buy their plans on the individual market would lose their plan: "Millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years."

NBC News' sources estimated that 50 to 80 percent of Americans who buy individual insurance will find their policies cancelled, because those existing policies don't meet Obamacare standards. And for many of those -- now forced to buy new policies -- the price tag will give them "sticker shock."

The Affordable Care Act stated that an insurance policy in effect before March 23, 2010, was to be grandfathered in -- provided insurance companies have made no "significant change" to the plan. But if the plan, say, had a change to the deductible, co-pay or benefits, the plan was no longer eligible to be grandfathered, and the policyholder would have to purchase a new plan.

Obamacare's July 2010 regulations included an estimate that "40 to 67 percent" of customers wouldn't be able to keep their policy because of normal annual turnover in the individual insurance market. And, because many policies will have been changed since the March 23, 2010, date, "the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range." Yet Obama continued to tell Americans that no one would lose their plan or doctor, a promise without which Obamacare would never have passed.

For his part, Obama (SET ITAL) now (END ITAL) says: "What we said was, you can keep it if it hasn't changed since the law passed." A lie is an untruth told with intent to deceive.

Bush didn't "lie."


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Vindication, IV

October 15, 2014 9/11 , Articles by Larry Elder 0 Comments
FLASHBACK: "Bush Lied, People Died? Part I" By Larry Elder

General Georges Sada, Iraqi Air Force
By Larry Elder, Mar. 2, 2006

I recently interviewed General Georges Sada, who served as the second-highest ranked general in the Iraqi Air Force. A two-star general, he wrote a recently published book called "Saddam's Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied and Survived Saddam Hussein." Here are some sound bites from that interview:

Elder: General, as you know, the president has been accused of lying about the intelligence, fabricating it, cherry-picking it, that he wanted to go to war, he really didn't believe that Saddam had WMD. It was all a big smokescreen. When you hear people accuse the president of lying about WMD, of misleading the country and the world, your reaction, Gen. Georges Sada, is what?

Sada: Let me tell you. I am really surprised how people are speaking like this and their soldiers are still in the battle. You see, a soldier when he is in battle, he wants to feel that all his nation are backing him and they are with him. And now I tell you I feel very sorry when I see some people in this country, their soldiers are in the battle, and they are discussing political things making that soldier to feel that he is there in the wrong place. That's one. Second, if there was something right had been done in this country, it was the best decision taken in the proper time, to go and liberate Iraq from an evil dictatorship who only God knows what he was going to do in the region, and maybe even to America, because that man was possessing the weapons of mass destruction and then he was with very evil intentions towards all the West, especially America.

Elder: Fifteen months before we invaded Iraq, the president began talking about what our intentions would be if Saddam would not comply with the U.N. resolutions. During those 15 months . . . did Saddam have WMD, have stockpiles of WMD, and, if so, what type?

Sada: Iraq possessed WMD and they were there, and they were chemical and biological, and nuclear weapons. He have also deals with China to make it in China this time, not in Iraq, because F-16s of Israelis have destroyed the Iraqi nuclear project, therefore, he designed a new system to have the atom bomb to be done in China, and he would only pay the money, and he did for $100 million, and $5 million were paid for down payment. I know the bank, I know the branch, and I know the accountant who did it.

Elder: What happened to the chemical and biological weapons?

Sada: The chemical and biological weapons were available in Iraq before liberating the country, but Saddam Hussein took the advantage of a natural disaster that happened in Syria when a dam was collapsed and many villages were flooded. So Saddam Hussein took that cover and declared to the world that he is going to use the civilian aircraft for an air bridge to help Syria with blankets, food and fuel oil, and other humanitarian things, but that was not true. The truth is he converted two regular passenger civilian aircraft, 747 Jumbo and 727 . . . all the weapons of mass destruction were put there by the special Republican Guards in a very secret way, and they were transported to Syria, to Damascus, by flying 56 flights to Damascus. . . . In addition . . . also a truck convoy on the ground to take whatever has to do with WMD to Syria.

Elder: I've always thought it incredible, bizarre, unbelievable, that our intelligence could have been wrong, British intelligence could have been wrong, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the U.N., the Egyptians, the Jordanians, all of whom thought he had WMD. I never felt comfortable with the idea that everybody got it wrong. . . .

Sada: Your intelligence said that Saddam Hussein had WMD. . . . I agree with them. They were there in Iraq. But they didn't find them after liberation of Iraq, because they were searching not in the right place. These things were transported by air and by ground.

Elder: General, why would Saddam, knowing we were about ready to invade, transfer WMD out of the country instead of using it on American and coalition troops?

Sada: Because he knew that the power of America to liberate the country is more than what he can do. And maybe not all WMD were ready to use then. And that's why he transported to Syria and he thought that he's going to maintain in the power as he was maintained in 1991 and then he was going to get it back again and then proceed to complete the whole project of WMD.

"Bush lied, people died"?

To be continued.

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Vindication, III

October 15, 2014 9/11 , Articles by Larry Elder 0 Comments
FLASHBACK: "Who thought Iraq had WMD? Most Everybody" 

By Larry Elder, May 25, 2006

As Memorial Day approaches, 51 percent of Americans, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, think the commander in chief "deliberately misled" us about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. "Deliberately misled"? Once again, let's go to the videotape:

Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, February 1998: "Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."

Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, February 1998: "He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has 10 times since 1983."

Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, October 2003: "When [former President Bill] Clinton was here recently he told me was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."

French President Jacques Chirac, February 2003: "There is a problem -- the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right . . . in having decided Iraq should be disarmed."

President Bill Clinton, December 1998: "Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: He has used them, not once, but repeatedly -- unleashing chemical weapons against Iranian troops during a decade-long war, not only against soldiers, but against civilians; firing Scud missiles at the citizens of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Iran. Not only against a foreign enemy, but even against his own people, gassing Kurdish civilians in Northern Iraq. . . . I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again. . . . "

Clinton, July 2003: " . . . [I]t is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons. We might have destroyed them in '98. We tried to, but we sure as heck didn't know it because we never got to go back there."

Gen. Wesley Clark, September 2002, testimony before the House Armed Services Committee: "There's no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat. . . . Yes, he has chemical and biological weapons. . . . He is, as far as we know, actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, though he doesn't have nuclear warheads yet. If he were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our friends in the region would face greatly increased risks, as would we."

Vermont Gov. Howard Dean [D], September 2002: "There's no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and to our allies."

Dean, February 2003: "I agree with President Bush -- he has said that Saddam Hussein is evil. And he is. [Hussein] is a vicious dictator and a documented deceiver. He has invaded his neighbors, used chemical arms, and failed to account for all the chemical and biological weapons he had before the Gulf War. He has murdered dissidents and refused to comply with his obligations under UN Security Council Resolutions. And he has tried to build a nuclear bomb. Anyone who believes in the importance of limiting the spread of weapons of mass killing, the value of democracy and the centrality of human rights must agree that Saddam Hussein is a menace. The world would be a better place if he were in a different place other than the seat of power in Baghdad or any other country."

Dean, March 2003: "[Iraq] is automatically an imminent threat to the countries that surround it because of the possession of these weapons."

Robert Einhorn, Clinton assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, March 2002: "How close is the peril of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors (albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate and limited in size). Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously -- and to threaten U.S. territory with such weapons delivered by nonconventional means, such as commercial shipping containers. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner."

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and others, in a letter to President Bush, December 2001: "There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. . . . In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies."Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., December 1998: "Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."

Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., ranking minority Intelligence Committee member, October 2002: "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years."Any questions?




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NYT too shameless to be embarrassed

October 15, 2014 9/11 , C.J. Chivers 0 Comments
The Secret Casualties Of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons

Erica Gardner/United States Navy, via Getty Images
Source:  www.nytimes.com
By C.J. Chivers, Oct. 14, 2014, Nytimes.com

The soldiers at the blast crater sensed something was wrong.

It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.

Two technicians assigned to dispose of munitions stepped into the hole. Lake water seeped in. One of them, Specialist Andrew T. Goldman, noticed a pungent odor, something, he said, he had never smelled before.

He lifted a shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling.

The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.

All three men recall an awkward pause. Then Sergeant Duling gave an order: “Get the hell out.”

Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had entered an expansive but largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Read the full story:  www.nytimes.com

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Vindication, Part II

October 15, 2014 9/11 , Articles by Larry Elder 0 Comments
FLASHBACK: "Does Iraq Make Bush a 'Failed President'?" By Larry Elder

President Barack Obama and
President George W. Bush
By Larry Elder, Jan 15, 2009

In his final press conference, President George W. Bush called failing to find WMD in Iraq a "disappointment."

For many historians -- not allowing a little history to pass before rendering judgment -- this makes him a "failed president." In a 2006 survey of 744 history professors, 82 percent rated President Bush either below average or a failure. Last April, in an informal poll of 109 historians by George Mason University, 98 percent considered him a failed president, and 61 percent judged him one of the worst in American history.

His "crime"? For most of these historians, Bush led the country into an "unnecessary war."

Return to the bad old days immediately following Sept. 11, 2001, when terror attacks killed 3,000 on American soil. Eighty to 90 percent of Americans expected another attack -- on American soil -- within six months to a year. Critics called Bush asleep at the wheel, that he failed to "connect the dots." Never mind that the 9/11 Commission said that former President Bill Clinton blew several opportunities to kill or capture Osama bin Laden.

Let us recall Saddam Hussein, the "Butcher of Baghdad."

Under President Clinton, Congress voted for -- and he signed -- the Iraq Liberation Act, calling for "regime change." Saddam Hussein stood in defiance of several United Nations resolutions calling for him to fully account for his weapons of mass destruction. He certainly possessed WMD, having used them against his enemies and his own people. He continually fired at the American and British planes patrolling the southern and northern "no-fly zones" set up to prevent genocide against fellow Iraqis. In addition to stealing billions from the "oil-for-food" program (to what end?), he sent $25,000 apiece to families of homicide bombers who attacked Israelis. Following Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the U.S.-led coalition's subsequent expulsion of him, we found Saddam much closer to developing a nuclear weapon than our intelligence community assumed. He later attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush. Estimates vary, but Saddam killed, during his 25-year reign, between 300,000 and 1 million Iraqis.

In the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, all 16 U.S. intelligence departments concluded -- with the highest possible level of certainty -- that Saddam still possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological WMD. British intel reached the same conclusion. According to former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks, officials in Egypt and Jordan told him that they believed the dictator still possessed WMD.

Bush retained the same CIA director, George Tenet, who served under Clinton. Tenet described the case for assuming the dictator possessed WMD a "slam-dunk." After the invasion of Iraq, Clinton publicly said he thought Saddam still had the weapons. A few months after the Iraq invasion, the former president visited Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, who later said, "When Clinton was here recently, he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."

True, "weapons hunter" David Kay, sent to Iraq to find the stockpiles, found no WMD. But Kay said that Saddam retained the capacity and the intent to restart his program.

Now let's play suppose.

Bush ignores the nearly unanimous intelligence community. He takes no action against Saddam. The dictator remains in power. The sanctions end. He restarts his WMD program. We experience another 9/11 or worse on American soil. Our intel traces the attack back to Saddam. Congress demands investigations for Bush's "failure to heed the clear consensus of the intelligence community and to take appropriate action." Democrats and many Republicans push for impeachment, based on negligence and malfeasance.

Angry members of Congress quote the February 1998 words of the secretary of State under Clinton, Madeleine Albright: "Iraq is a long way from (here), but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."

What if we had known before we got there that he possessed no stockpiles of WMD? Would we have invaded? A better question is as follows: Given what the President reasonably thought and the consequences of doing nothing, did he do the right thing?

Osama bin Laden called Iraq the "central front in the war" against the infidels. Gen. Franks said: "The global war on terrorism will be a long fight. But make no mistake about it. We are going to fight the terrorists. The question is: Do we fight them over there, or do we fight them here?"

Support for homicide bombing has fallen dramatically from 2002 to 2007 in seven of eight Muslim countries surveyed -- as much as 74 to 34 percent in Lebanon, and 33 to 9 percent in Pakistan. And support for the extreme "Islamist" parties in Muslim countries, with some exceptions, has also declined. Iraq -- alone among Muslim Middle Eastern countries -- now has a fledgling democracy.

One more thing. We haven't been attacked on American soil since 9/11.

 Related:  'The Secret Casualties Of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons' --NYT too shameless to be embarrassed

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Vindication, Part I

October 15, 2014 Articles by Larry Elder , George W. Bush 0 Comments
FLASHBACK: "The WikiLeaks Vindication of GWBush" By Larry Elder

By Larry Elder, Dec. 9, 2010

The WikiLeaks de facto declassification of privileged material makes it case closed: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- and intended to restart his program once the heat was off.

President George W. Bush, in the 2003 State of the Union address, uttered the infamous "16 words": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson sprang into action and, in an op-ed piece, in effect wrote, "No, the Cheney administration sent me to investigate the allegation -- and I found it without merit."

Put aside that Wilson's CIA-employed wife, not the evil Vice President Dick Cheney -- as Wilson implied -- sent him on the African errand. Put aside that the British still stand by the intelligence on which Bush made the claim. And put aside that the anti-Bush Washington Post, in an editorial, concluded that Wilson had lied about not finding evidence to support the Iraq-in-Africa-for-uranium claim, since he told the CIA the opposite when he reported back from Africa.

Bush claimed that Iraq sought uranium, specifically "yellowcake." What is yellowcake, and why would its presence or attempted acquisition corroborate the nearly unanimous assumption that Saddam possessed WMD?

The Associated Press called yellowcake "the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment" and said that it "also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment."

"Bush and Iraq: Follow the Yellow Cake Road" headlined a euphoric Time magazine July 2003 piece -- written when the Bush administration began backtracking from the Iraq-sought-uranium-from-Africa claim. Time said no yellowcake equals no WMD equals bogus basis for war.

The article led with this ripper: "Is a fib really a fib if the teller is unaware that he is uttering an untruth? That question appears to be the basis of the White House defense, having now admitted a falsehood in President Bush's claim, in his State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa."

Time hoisted (the now discredited) Joe Wilson on its shoulders as The Man Who Told the Truth to Power: "Just last weekend, the man sent by the CIA to check out the Niger story broke cover and revealed that he had thoroughly debunked the allegation many months before President Bush repeated it." Never mind that the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Wilson's report "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal" sought by Iraq in Niger.

Let's recap.

Bush, in building the case for war against Iraq, lied to the nation. He falsely claimed that Iraq was attempting to purchase yellowcake from Africa. Time magazine specifically referred to the yellowcake "lie" in accusing Bush of fabricating the case for war. Therefore, were Iraq to have had yellowcake -- an assertion called a "lie" -- it would have confirmed the presence of WMD, giving credence to Bush's declaration of Iraq as a "grave and gathering threat."

But ... there ... was ... yellowcake. This brings us back to WikiLeaks.

Wired magazine's contributing editor Noah Shachtman -- a nonresident fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution -- researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October. Here's what he found: "By late 2003, even the Bush White House's staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks' newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncoverweapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). ... 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."

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq -- on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels -- what even The Associated Press called "the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program": 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized: "The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. ... To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam ... would have been too big a risk."

Now the mainscream media no longer deem yellowcake -- the WMD Bush supposedly lied about -- a WMD. It was, well, old. It was degraded. It was not what we think of when we think of WMD. Really? Square that with what former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean said in April 2004: "There were no weapons of mass destruction." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow goes even further, insisting, against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that "Saddam Hussein was not pursuing weapons of mass destruction"!

Bush, hammered by the insidious "Bush Lied, People Died" mantra, endured one of the most vicious smears against any president in history. He is owed an apology.

When Hollywood makes "The Vindication of George W. Bush," maybe Sean Penn can play the lead.

 Related:  'The Secret Casualties Of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons' --NYT too shameless to be embarrassed

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Saturday, July 12, 2014

Dick Cheney: "The Truth About Iraq--And Why It Matters" --Obama "squandered" it

July 12, 2014 al Qaeda , Dick Cheney 1 Comments
ISIS:  Mass execution of Iraqi soldiers
By Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, Jul. 21, 2014, Weeklystandard.com

 As the jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) capture territory and establish a caliphate stretching across the now-eradicated Syria-Iraq border, hard-won gains secured with American blood and treasure are being lost. We are watching the rise of potentially the gravest threat to our national security in a generation, one that surpasses even the threat we faced on 9/11. Against this backdrop, as we debate what our response should be, it has become fashionable in some quarters to say, “Let’s not relitigate Iraq.” It’s not politically expedient, this line of argument goes, to discuss why we invaded Iraq in the first place, or the lessons we learned. This view is wrong on the history, misguided on the politics, and dangerous as a matter of policy.

 The larger war, of which the liberation of Iraq was part, is still ongoing. Winning it requires that we understand the truth about the liberation of Iraq, the challenges America faced in the aftermath of the invasion, how we overcame them with the 2007-08 surge, how we defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq and established a stable, functioning nation allied with America in the heart of the Middle East. We must understand how President Obama squandered it all, creating a vacuum in which ISIS, the richest terrorist organization in history, now thrives.

 Those who say the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a mistake are essentially saying we would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power. That’s a difficult position to sustain. It is undisputed, and has been confirmed repeatedly in Iraqi government documents captured after the invasion, that Saddam had deep, longstanding, far-reaching relationships with terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda and its affiliates. It is undisputed that Saddam’s Iraq was a state based on terror, overseeing a coordinated program to support global jihadist terrorist organizations. Ansar al Islam, an al Qaeda-linked organization, operated training camps in northern Iraq before the invasion. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the future leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, funneled weapons and fighters into these camps, before the invasion, from his location in Baghdad. We also know, again confirmed in documents captured after the war, that Saddam provided funding, training, and other support to numerous terrorist organizations and individuals over decades, including to Ayman al Zawahiri, the man who leads al Qaeda today.

 It is also undisputed that Saddam Hussein had the technology, equipment, facilities, and scientists in place to construct the world’s worst weapons. We know he intended to reconstitute these programs as soon as the international sanctions regime collapsed. He had an advanced nuclear program in place prior to Operation Desert Storm in 1991. In 1998, he kicked the international weapons inspectors out of Iraq. He violated every one of the 17 U.N. Security Council Resolutions passed against him.

 Anyone pining for the days of Saddam would do well to read the accounts of his 1988 chemical weapons attack on Halabja, Iraq. Listen to the survivors talk about the babies and children who died slow, painful deaths in bomb shelters where they had sought refuge with their families. The shelters became, as Saddam knew they would, gas chambers. The lesson of Halabja is that Saddam had no compunction, no moral compass, no hesitation to use the world’s worst weapons, including against his own people.

 Saddam’s was a reign of terror characterized by torture, rape rooms, the murder of parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, and the oppression and slaughter of Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Shiites. George W. Bush captured it well when he wrote that Saddam was a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD and supporting terror at the heart of the Middle East.

 Leaving Saddam in power after 9/11, in light of the threat he posed, would have been, as Tony Blair has noted, an act of political cowardice. We are not saying Saddam was responsible for 9/11. What we are saying is that in the aftermath of 9/11, when we saw thousands of our fellow citizens slaughtered by terrorists armed with airline tickets and box cutters, our leaders had an obligation to do everything possible to prevent terrorists from gaining access to even worse weapons. Saddam’s Iraq was the most likely nexus for such an exchange.

 Against the weight of historical evidence, some critics claim the Bush administration manufactured or exaggerated the intelligence about Saddam’s weapons programs. The charge doesn’t stand up against the facts. Both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Robb-Silberman Commission issued bipartisan reports concluding there was no politicization of the intelligence or pressure on analysts to change their judgements about Iraq’s WMD.

Read the full story:  www.weeklystandard.com

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Thursday, July 10, 2014

Breaking; ISIS Rebels Looted Iraq’s Largest Chemical Weapons Plant --Not the non-existent chemical weapons?

July 10, 2014 al Qaeda , Iraq 0 Comments
By Jim Hoft, Jul. 9, 2014, The Gateway Pundit

The ISIS terror group seized Saddam Hussein’s largest chemical weapons plant in June. Now there is evidence some equipment was looted by the terror group.
Press TV reported:
Iraq has warned that the ISIL Takfiri terrorists have taken control of a huge former chemical weapons facility northwest of the capital Baghdad. 
In a letter distributed on Tuesday at the United Nations, Iraq said remnants of 2,500 chemical rockets filled with the deadly nerve agent sarin are kept along with other chemical warfare agents in the facility. On June 12, the site’s surveillance system showed that some equipment was looted. 
Iraq’s ambassador to the UN, Mohamed Ali Alhakim, told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in the letter that “armed terrorist groups” penetrated the Muthanna site on June 11, and detained officers and soldiers from the protection force guarding the facilities. 
He said that his country is not capable of fulfilling “its obligations to destroy chemical weapons” due to the deteriorating security situation in the complex.
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Wednesday, June 25, 2014

10 Reasons Why Iraq's Bloodbath Is Not W's Fault By Larry Elder

June 25, 2014 al Qaeda , Articles by Larry Elder 0 Comments
President Barack Obama and
President George W. Bush
Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
By Larry Elder, Jun. 26, 2014

1) In 2011, President Barack Obama pronounced Iraq "self-reliant and democratic," and "a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process." In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden called Iraq "one of the great achievements of this administration." Obama ignored pleas by top generals who advised against pulling out without leaving a residual force.

2) Nearly everybody assumed Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Of the newspaper editorials that opposed the war, not one challenged the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.

President George W. Bush relied on the same intelligence -- and on the same CIA director -- as did President Bill Clinton. Kenneth Pollack, Clinton's Persian Gulf adviser, said not one government intelligence analyst disagreed with the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.

"The intelligence community," said Pollack, "convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the U.N. inspectors in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. ... The U.S. intelligence community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction predated Bush's inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. ... Germany ... Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even France held positions similar to that of the United States. ... In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."

3) Saddam Hussein did possess stockpiles of WMD. James Clapper, the current director of National Intelligence, said in 2003 that materials for WMD had "unquestionably" been moved out of Iraq, to Syria or perhaps other countries, in an effort to "destroy and disperse" evidence just before the war began.

One of Saddam's top generals, Georges Sada, in his book called "Saddam's Secrets," said truck convoys and 56 airplane flights moved tons of WMD into Syria.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in December, 2002, said, "Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria."

4) Had we not invaded, Saddam Hussein would have soon restarted his chemical and biological program -- and resumed his pursuit for a nuclear capability. After the war started, Bush sent David Kay, a weapons hunter, to locate the assumed stockpiles of WMD. Kay found no stockpiles, but he did find that Saddam had the intent and the ability to restart his WMD program as soon as the heat was off.

5) George Bush did not "rush" America into the war. He obtained a consensus -- a resolution from the House, a resolution from the Senate and a resolution from the United Nations. There was a 15-month run-up before the war, during which time Saddam could have declared what he did or did not do with the WMD.

6) Americans supported the Iraq War, overwhelmingly at least at first. Gallup found 76 percent of Americans supported the Iraq War when the military action began, about the same percentage that supported the first Persian Gulf War.

7) Obama wanted out of Iraq, and ran in 2008 with a promise to do just that. A year after the troop pullout, during a 2012 debate, Mitt Romney said he wanted a residual force to remain. Obama pointedly disagreed, saying that leaving "10,000 troops in Iraq ... would tie us down."

Incredibly, Obama now blames the Iraqis for his refusal to leave any troops. Obama says he wanted legal protection for the soldiers left behind and that Iraq's parliament would not provide it. So Obama happily walked away, blaming it on "a decision made by the Iraqi government" to reject the offer of "a modest residual force." Obama sure had no difficulty in quickly working out an agreement -- via diplomatic notes, without the approval of Iraq's parliament -- for the recently promised 300 "advisers."

8) We were greeted as liberators in Iraq. The New York Times Iraq reporter John Burns said: "The American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it." In April, 2003, the New York Daily News reported, "Jubilant crowds chanted, 'Thank you, Bush' and showered troops with yellow and pink flowers, exactly as administration hawks had promised."

9). There were legitimate, good-faith reasons why we sent "too few troops." The Times' Burns said, "I think that to be fair to the United States, when I speak as a citizen of the United Kingdom, I think that the instincts that led to much that went wrong were good American instincts: the desire not to have too heavy of a footprint, the desire to empower Iraqis."

10) The men and women who served in Iraq deserve better. They achieved great things under harsh and unforgiving circumstances. That the succeeding commander-in-chief did not preserve their hard-fought gains ought not devalue what they accomplished. Perhaps the returning soldiers might more readily adjust to civilian life if Americans truly understood and appreciated what they achieved in Iraq. They did their jobs -- and their mission was just, important and noble.

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Monday, June 23, 2014

Canada Free Press: Saddam’s WMDs--Where's W's Apology?

June 23, 2014 al Qaeda , Canada Free Press 0 Comments
By Arnold Ahlert, June 23, 2014, Canadafreepress.com

The recent turmoil in Iraq brought on by the rise of the Sunni extremist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has ironically struck a blow to the American Left’s endlessly repeated narrative that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq prior to the war.

The State Department and other U.S. government officials have revealed that ISIS now occupies the Al Muthanna Chemicals Weapons Complex. Al Muthanna was Saddam Hussein’s primary chemical weapons facility, and it is located less than 50 miles from Baghdad.

The Obama administration claims that the weapons in that facility, which include sarin, mustard gas, and nerve agent VX, manufactured to prosecute the war against Iran in the 1980s, do not pose a threat because they are old, contaminated and hard to move. “We do not believe that the complex contains CW materials of military value and it would be very difficult, if not impossible to safely move the materials,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

The administration’s dubious rationale is based on information provided by the Iraq Study Group, which was tasked with finding WMDs in the war’s aftermath. They found the chemical weapons at Al Muthanna, but they determined that both Iraq wars and inspections by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) had successfully dismantled the facility, and that the remaining chemical weapons were rendered useless and sealed in bunkers. The report called the weapons facility “a wasteland full of destroyed chemical munitions, razed structures, and unusable war-ravaged facilities,” the 2004 report stated.

Saddam’s weapons stockpile, now potentially in the hands of Sunni radicals

Yet other sections of the same report were hardly reassuring. “Stockpiles of chemical munitions are still stored there,” it stated. “The most dangerous ones have been declared to the UN and are sealed in bunkers. Although declared, the bunkers’ contents have yet to be confirmed.” It added, “These areas of the compound pose a hazard to civilians and potential black-marketers.”

Another report paints an even more disturbing picture of the Muthanna facility. It warned that the number and status of Saddam’s sarin-filled rockets was unknown because facilities were not able to be inspected, leaving investigators only able to surmise about the weapons’ condition. Even in degraded conditions, the report said, these rockets still posed a proliferation risk:

Although the damaged Bunker 13 at Muthanna contained thousands of sarin-filled rockets, the presence of leaking munitions and unstable propellant and explosive charges made it too hazardous for UNSCOM inspectors to enter. Because the rockets could not be recovered safely, Iraq declared the munitions in Bunker 13 as ‘destroyed in the Gulf War’ and they were not included in the inventory of chemical weapons eliminated under UNSCOM supervision.

Because of the hazardous conditions in Bunker 13, UNSCOM inspectors were unable to make an accurate inventory of its contents before sealing the entrances in 1994. As a result, no record exists of the exact number or status of the sarin-filled rockets remaining in the bunker…. In the worst-case scenario, the munitions could contain as much as 15,000 liters of sarin. Although it is likely that the nerve agent has degraded substantially after nearly two decades of storage under suboptimal conditions, UNMOVIC cautioned that ‘the levels of degradation of the sarin fill in the rockets cannot be determined without exploring the bunker and taking samples from intact warheads.’ If the sarin remains highly toxic and many of the rockets are still intact, they could pose a proliferation risk.”

Nonetheless, U.S. officials, who claimed they were well aware of the facility insisted that the United States wouldn’t have left it there if it were a genuine threat. They also continued to stress that the takeover by ISIS doesn’t constitute a military gain by the group because the weapons would prove useless, even if ISIS were able to penetrated the sealed bunkers where they are stored. ISIS has reportedly yet to gain access to the bunkers.

Read the full story: www.canadafreepress.com

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Monday, June 16, 2014

FLASHBACK: Did GWBush 'Squander' The 9-11 Unanimity? By Larry Elder --Even Bill Maher was pulling for Iraq

June 16, 2014 al Qaeda , Articles by Larry Elder 0 Comments
By Larry Elder, Sep. 15, 2014

Sept. 11 unified America. But President George W. Bush "squandered" this shared sense of purpose.

We still hear this drivel, mostly from the left, 10 years after the terror attacks. But how did Bush blow this alleged consensus, this shared sense of purpose presumably expected to last, well, forever?

Bush's critics pretty much give the same three reasons.

First, "America was ready to sacrifice," they say, but Bush made no demands. "Go shopping," Bush urged Americans, a comment that somehow came to symbolize Bush's alleged wrong-footedness as commander in chief. He blew it! Why, he should have convened a joint session of Congress, asked for network airtime, stared sternly at his teleprompter and barked: "All you American men and women between the ages of 18 and 45, hit the floor and gimme 25 push-ups. I got all your names. I got your addresses! So move those fannies, America!"

Bush wanted the 9/11 Islamofascists to understand that they did not and would not succeed in decapitating the country by attacking the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and our seats of government. His message to the terrorists: Americans do not cower behind closed doors and would not be intimidated. And we intend to take the fight to you.

Second, Bush "divided America" in how he chose to fight the war on terror. Well, yes, figuring out exactly how to fight this war did, indeed, cause a rift or two. Imagine that. Yet the now controversial and much-criticized decision to invade Iraq received broad public support. At the beginning of the Iraq War, over 70 percent of Americans supported it. Seventy-seven members of the Senate voted for the Iraq war resolution. This included several Democrats who ran for president in 2008: Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton -- all of whom later renounced their vote and blamed it on everything from "having been misled" to bad sushi.

Biden even co-wrote a pre-invasion op-ed piece explaining his support for the war. He warned that while toppling Saddam Hussein would be easy, it would then take about 10 years to stabilize Iraq. Then, the war, pre-surge, went south. Things turned bleak. Biden pivoted. He suggested a dividing of Iraq into three parts. Then he pivoted again. Alas, he admitted, he erred in voting for the war. Now vice president, Biden pivoted again, calling Iraq, in February 2010, "one of the great achievements of this administration." Don't ask. Just Joe being Joe.

The New York Times editorialized, on March 20, 2003, against the Iraq War. But the paper said it respected the administration's position and wanted success. Even pathological anti-Bush critic Bill Maher, who disagreed with the invasion, seemed almost impressed by Bush's vision in deciding to invade Iraq.

Maher, shortly after the war started, told CNN's Larry King: "I always said I did not think going after a country that was not directly involved in 9/11 ... was not the approach. ... But you know what? The idea that Bush has -- and it is a big idea, I got to give him that. He's a guy with big ideas. The idea of transforming the Middle East and fighting this in a long-range way by having democracy in Iraq is not the worst idea I could think of, and I'm rooting for that plan." Yes, that Bill Maher.

Third, Bush supposedly "squandered" the post 9/11 bipartisanship by finding no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, shattering the rationale for the war, and thus making many Americans feel "lied to."

Lied to? Bush retained the same CIA director, George Tenet, as served under Bill Clinton. Months after the start of the Iraq War, former President Bill Clinton visited Portugal. The Portuguese prime minister later said, "When Clinton was here recently he told me he was absolutely convinced, given his years in the White House and the access to privileged information which he had, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction until the end of the Saddam regime."

Kenneth Pollack, Clinton's Iraq expert, long opposed an Iraq war, believing the U.S. should use sanctions and inspections. But he insists that the intel unanimously supported the assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD: "The intelligence community convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the U.N. inspectors, in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. ... The U.S. intelligence community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction predated Bush's inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. ... Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with U.S. views. ... Germany ... Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even France held positions similar to that of the United States. ... In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." So much for "lied to."

Ten years after 9/11, we have not suffered another successful major attack on our soil. That Bush did the right thing is evidenced by his successor's reluctant embrace of nearly all his predecessor's policies that -- along with a little luck -- have kept us safe for 10 years. And counting.

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