Thursday, March 19, 2009
In Retrospect, Armchair Generals Still Wish We Spared Saddam
| There are those who, till even this day, base their entire political being on the claim that the war in Iraq was wrong and had no legitimate foundation behind it . Some even join with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and claim that we lost the war. These isolationists and leftists maintain, that there was absolutely no reason for the United States to focus any military attention on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the days, months and even years after 9/11. With creative flair, they refer to 9/11 as a ploy and claim that supporters of Operation Iraqi Freedom simply used 9/11 as an excuse. Others delve deeper and extrapolate that the true reason behind the overthrow of Hussein was a corporate conspiracy spearheaded by oil interests led by Haliburton. Others say it was a family matter that involved the revenge of one presidential son of another President who Saddam once tried to assassinate. Putting aside theoretical liberal reasoning for Republican support of the Iraqi war and their tendency to believe that Republicans do not care about the lives of those who carry the war out, what these people fail to realize and comprehend are facts. They fail to accept the reality of the time. Most basic to the reality that they deny is the fact that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was the policy of the United States since 1991. Initially we urged the people of Iraq to do it. Unfortunately those we hoped to do so, such as the Kurds, are also the people we left hanging and they paid dearly for it. In 1995, under President Clinton, the C.I.A. organized a covert coup to topple Saddam Hussein. It failed. Three years later, still acknowledging the threat that Saddam Hussein posed, in 1998, President Clinton signed into law a congressionally approved bill called The Iraqi Liberation Act. Through it all, Democrats and Republicans alike agreed on few things other than the fact that an Iraq led by Saddam Hussein was an Iraq that threatened American interests, Mid East peace and international security. Other small factors included things like cease fire agreements and United Nations resolutions. After the original Gulf War, Saddam signed treaties promising to stop the production and procurement of WMD‘s. He made a commitment to permit UN weapons inspectors to verify that he was not in breach of these treaties and he was also not allowed to oppose our enforcement of U.S. no-fly zones. Yet for the twelve years after the Gulf War, Saddam repeatedly violated the terms of the cease fire agreement that he had with the U.S.. Additionally, he denied weapons inspectors proper access to establishing proper inspections. He also repeatedly shot our aircrafts in the no-fly zones and violated seventeen Security Council resolutions regarding weapons development and procurement. I would contend, that if the American word is to mean something in the world, we should have removed Saddam immediately following the very first time he violated the cease fire agreement that we had with him. That would have eliminated his threat back in late 1991. But we didn’t. I would contend that we had reason to topple Saddam after he defied the very first UN resolution regarding inspections. But we didn’t. Instead we allowed him to skirt the terms that were established to contain him and render his ability to be a threat ineffectual. It wasn’t until after 9/11 that America realized that the risks we faced were great and the threats that exist are serious. Up until 9/11, aside from shooting back on an Iraqi jet that fired at us outside of an established no-fly zone in Iraq, a failed C.I.A. backed coup, a continuous string of disregard for UN violations and inability to enforce proper weapons inspections and a signed congressional act calling for the liberation of Iraq, we did little more than provide lip service to the agreed fact that Saddam Hussein was a danger and needed to be eliminated. President Bill Clinton said on February 4, 1998, “One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line” On December 16, 1998 high liberal lord Al Gore said, “If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He’s already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons”. Around this same time, based on information collected by the Clinton administration, long before anyone could even accuse the Bush administration of falsifying facts, Nancy Pelosi said ” Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of WMD technology which is a threat to countries in the region and has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process”. According to liberal lion, Ted Kennedy in an interview on October 6, 2002…….”Saddam Hussein is a dangerous figure. He’s got dangerous weapons”. Shortly after that, Democrat Senator Robert Byrd stated ”The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked upon on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities” Before his campaign for the presidency of the United States was official, a previous liberal standard bearer of today’s liberal Democrat party, John Kerry said, ” Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime…..He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction….So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real” It was rather obvious that Saddam needed to go and that fact never changed. Years later, even after there being no weapons of mass destruction found, other evidence of sinister intentions does exist. The discovery of over 500 degraded missile casings designed to carry deadly chemicals actually supports such conclusions. Then there exists the evidence of what Saddam was known to actually be doing. Leading Iraqi inspectors and figures with the International Atomic Energy Agency stated “there was evidence that the Iraqis continued research and development "right up until the end" to improve their ability to produce ricin. "They were mostly researching better methods for weaponization," They add “Iraq did make an effort to restart its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001, but that the evidence suggested that the program was rudimentary at best and would have taken years to rebuild, after being largely abandoned in the 1990's...." All of this points to the fact that there was little disagreement regarding Saddam Hussein between both Democrats and Republicans and there was little to distinguish any difference between the Bush administration or the Clinton administration when it came to Iraq. All except for one. After the devastating results of 9/11 materialized, the administration of President George W. Bush decided to take action. President Bush decided that lip service was no longer a good enough strategy when it came to eliminating threats. That explanation produces a knee-jerk reply from the left and isolationists. To that, like Pavlov’s dog, they jump to their feet and scream “but Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorists”. An oversimplification of events might make their stale reply seem rational but a scratch of the surface of that shallow argument reveals the truth, which those who make that claim, refuse to accept. Although there has been no connection between the 19 terrorists who participated in the hijacking of the airplanes that produced 9/11, there is no denying that they were terrorists and as a result, on September 20th, 2001, President Bush declared a War On Terror and in a speech to the nation he said, "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.…” Keeping that in mind, even though none of the 19, 9/11 hijackers came through Iraq, there is no doubt that, through Saddam Hussein, Iraq was a safe haven for terrorists with a so-called “global reach”. The list of terrorists that fall into this category includes, but is not limited to: Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the conspirators in the 1993 Khala Khadr al-Salahat, who created the bomb for the Libyans that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland Abu Abas, mastermind of the October 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and murder of Leon Klinghoffer Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, formerly a director of an al Qaeda training base in Afghanistan before he reentered the insurgency that followed the post Saddam days of Iraq". Given those names alone, bringing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein into the War On Terror was, and still remains, a legitimate part of the greater battle. After 9/11, to have ignored Iraq and allowed Saddam to continue to rule with impunity would have been an irresponsible continuation of doing nothing more than offering dire warnings about what could happen and presenting legislation symbolic of what we should do to prevent it from coming to fruition. In its wake, armchair generals, with more hindsight than foresight, took to calling this front misguided and a diversion. Yet what diversion was created? A diversion which attracted other terrorists to take up arms and flee to Iraq like flies to flypaper.? Some will falsely claim that our efforts in Iraq gave opportunity to a resurgence of Taliban forces in Afghanistan. They will falsely claim that our decision to fight in Iraq put us in the position of fighting two different failed wars. Those who make such claims are not just wrong, they are lying. First of all, neither war has been lost. The coming fulfillment of our goals in Iraq has enabled President Obama to continue the same policy set in motion by the previous administration. Secondly does anyone believe for a minute that our efforts in Afghanistan would be any further ahead than they are now, had Saddam Hussein still been an active protagonist in the region? Given his history, his continued intentions, ever present risk and consistent defiance of the international community and agreements with the U.S., no effective attempts to combat terrorism beyond mere words, could have been undertaken without neutralizing and removing Saddam Hussein from the equation. After more than a year of trying to achieve that goal through diplomacy, force was resorted to. That was a decision Saddam Hussein made. The opportunity to avoid military action was always there for him and he was the one to reject it. In the end the United States had two choices. Either finally do something about Saddam Hussein and eliminate the threat he posed and the proliferation of terrorism that he afforded opportunity to, or, once and for all put action behind our words and eliminate the threat and reduce the risks that we spoke so much about for over a decade. In a post 9/11 government our government chose to act. Rather than risk having to react to another disastrous terrorist plot that claimed more innocent lives, we chose to prevent it. The benefit of that decision is immeasurable, at least to us. We will never be able to count the lives spared by the removal of Saddam Hussein. We will not know how many future surprise attacks were prevented from occurring but what we do know is that there will be no more assisted or arranged terrorist or state sponsored attacks by Saddam. We do know that a beachhead for democracy is developing in the heartland of intolerance in the Middle East. We do know that millions of Iraqi are now tasting freedom and for the first time in generations are living either in less fear or no fear. We do know that in addition to all the previous facts which gave reason to removing Saddam Hussein, others existed as well. Such as his support of Palestinian suicide bombers and his prompting of two regional wars. But in addition to that, Hussein’s oppression and extermination of his own people is justification in and of itself. Such humanitarian reasoning justified our actions in places like Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti during the Clinton years. Why that alone is not enough cause for our actions in Iraq is an example of liberal hypocrisy. Yet till this day, there are those who try to paint our actions as irresponsible, imperialistic forays of greedy, misguided political folly. They try to claim the Republican party who nominated a President that carried this action out is a party that has lost sight of its purpose. Well to them I make it clear that the Republican party has not lost sight of our purpose, our beliefs or of what is important. The decision to include Iraq in the War on Terror is one that we stand by today as steadfast as we did on the day that Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched. We are proud of the fact that Republicans finally achieved what, for too long, many only spoke about. We are proud to not excuse away the abuses of Saddam Hussein and ignore his treaty and cease fire violations. We are proud of the fact today, we are not having to add Saddam into an already complicated enough risk equation that involves Iran, North Korea, China, an erratic Russia and the still existing sources Islamic radicalism and terrorism. Utopian romantics may try to argue how better off we would be had we ignored the facts and allowed Saddam Hussein to remain a player. They will calculate the immediate financial cost of the war and claim it to be the source of our great economic debt. In doing so, what they leave out of their equation is the long term cost that we would still be paying to continue countering Saddam Hussein. They also leave out the price we would be paying as it relates to the lives at risk or lost had Saddam continued with his ambitions. What these deniers of truth fail to do is acknowledge the fact that America can no longer simply talk about what needs to be done to protect ourselves. We must do things to protect ourselves. What these liberal leaning, apologists for jihad refuse to do is admit that they would have been the first to crucify a Republican President had he not prevented Saddam Hussein from successfully enabling or carrying out any other terrorist related event. But we did, so now their need to point fingers of blame to anyone but themselves causes them to point blame, not at he who made such events possible, but at he who made them less likely. Such people may continue to call opposition to their denial of facts extremists and they may try to evangelize their message by exploiting those whose lives were lost in the War On Terror but they do so at the risk of taking responsibility for the next terrorist attack that their ways fail to thwart. |
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