Well screw it. Guess I might as well go along with the off-topic nature of
this NG nowadays...
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Thursday, December 18, 2003
The Democrats' dilemma
Posted: December 18, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By William Rusher
© 2003 Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
By dragging Saddam Hussein out of his hidey-hole in a farm hut south of
Tikrit, the 4th Infantry Division has inflicted a severe blow to the
Democrats' thesis that everything is going badly in Iraq.
Counting the number of schools that have reopened has never been a very
convincing response to the almost daily reports of one or two American
soldiers killed by terrorists. But the capture of Saddam is a devastating
blow to the whole concept of resistance to the American occupation of Iraq,
and here at home it will force the Democrats to fall back on less vulnerable
ways of criticizing President Bush.
One way, which the Democrats have been testing gingerly in recent weeks, is
to charge that Bush simply tricked America into attacking Iraq. Rob Reiner,
the noisily liberal actor, put it succinctly in introducing Howard Dean to a
Democratic audience in Iowa recently: "George Bush said we had to go into
Iraq because it had weapons of mass destruction. He lied."
Reiner is peddling the theory that Iraq never had any weapons of mass
destruction, or had destroyed them before the American attack in March, and
that Bush knew it. Since no caches of such weapons have yet been found, the
charge has at least a superficial plausibility. All we need to do, to make
it mesh with the known facts, is assume Bush is a liar.
But before Democratic orators follow Reiner down that seductive path, they
had better look over their shoulder and notice what prominent Democrats were
saying, according to media sources, just a few years ago:
We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction program.
- President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998.
[T]he risk that the leaders of [Iraq] will use nuclear, chemical or
biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security risk we
face.
- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Feb. 18, 1998.
[We] urge you ... to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's
refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.
- Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Tom Daschle, Carl Levin,
John Kerry and others, Oct. 9, 1998.
We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing
weapons of mass destruction.
- Sen. Ted Kennedy, fall, 2002.
We know [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical
weapons throughout his country.
- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002.
We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam
Hussein has ... a developing capacity for the production and storage of
weapons of mass destruction.
- Sen. Bob Graham (chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee), Dec. 8,
2002.
Now, when President Bush made exactly the same charges in justifying our
attack on Iraq, there were just three possibilities. Either (1) the above
Democrats were conscious liars, and Bush was just a belated joiner of their
conspiracy, or (2) they were misled by faulty intelligence, and there is no
reason to suppose Bush wasn't just as misled as they were, or (3) they were,
and still are, right about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (as, on this
theory, time will in due course demonstrate), and so was, and is, President
Bush.
In short, whatever theory the Democrats adopt to justify the above-quoted
statements of their highest and best-informed leaders will serve equally
well to justify Bush.
How about it, ladies and gentlemen, what's your choice?
William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the
Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. If you wish to write to Mr.
Rusher, you can contact him c/o United Media; Editorial Dept., 4th Floor;
New York, N.Y. 10016.