Pierre Legrand’s Pink Flamingo Bar

This is a debate I have been having with a friend who has ok’d me posting this exchange. I will post any responses. His parts are bold, italics are used for quotes supporting my arguments and bold italics are my original points.

Based on my pitiful editing of this article I went back today and edited some of the errors…consider it a lesson learned, edit carefully first, not later.

On September 11, 2001 we were attacked by an enemy whose goal for that attack was unique in our history because instead of trying to destroy our military or gain territory the enemy’s sole desire was to strike terrible fear in the United States. So much fear that we would demand that our government withdraw from all entanglements in the world, starting with the Middle East but not ending there. That this was a very naive overall view of the integrity of our citizens doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a significant portion of the population that wanted to do just that on 9/11. In addition it was a view that had been reinforced by our actions extending all the way back to the Vietnam War. We are an incredibly rich and spoiled society with a significant portion of the population who believe we shouldn’t have to as John F Kennedy put it; pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

It is claimed that Al Queda was responsible for the attack on 9/11 and I see no reason to absolve them of this blame. The question is who else was in the loop of the attack. Whether there is evidence of State involvement, specifically Iraq, is very much the central issue in our debate. If there is evidence then your position is untenable, we had to attack Iraq. If there is no evidence then my argument for liberating Iraq is much weaker. This mirrors the larger debate going on right now somewhat unevenly in the wider world. Though its worth noting that even if Iraq had NO involvement we were justified because of many other indications including John F Kennedy’s admonition to us. It has mystified me that the Democratic party has moved so far away from its basic goodness of supporting liberty and justice. It was said by those who supported the war that even if they were wrong about the links to terror of Saddam we would be rid of a tyranical dictator who committed massives crimes against both his people and those who lived around him. While if we didnt go to war and those who advocated not going to war were wrong about his being involved in Terror we would be subject to even larger attacks committed by a madman freed from sanctions. The Sanctions were failing and every country that was against our going to war with Iraq was against continuing sanctions.

OK, so we create another 100,000 Abu Nidals by venturing into a war because there “might” be a connection with Al Qaida when there are known connections throughout the world.

There is no might to the connections between Saddam and Al Queda. Tenet did not say might be connections he said there are connections that extend back 10 years.

– Iraq is harboring senior members of a terrorist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a close associate of Usama Bin Ladin. We know Zarqawi’s network was behind the poison plots in Europe that I discussed earlier as well as the assassination of a U.S. State Department employee in Jordan.
– Iraq has in the past provided training in document forgery and bomb-making to al-Qa’ida. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al-Qa’ida associates; one of these associates characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.
Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources. And it is consistent with the pattern of denial and deception exhibited by Saddam Hussein over the past 12 years

And here is more information regarding these links. That there was an alliance is no longer a point that can be argued by anyone except those who will willingly ignore information hoping to defer the magnitude of what we face in the hopes that we might put off this battle to our children. I will not defer this battle?

CIA reports of Iraqi-al-Qaida cooperation number nearly 100 and extend back to 1992, according to a reporter for Vanity Fair whose sources include senior Pentagon officials. David Rose, writing for the magazine and the United Kingdom’s Evening Standard , says he is convinced of the links between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad regime. “My own doubts emerged more than a year ago, when a very senior CIA man told me that, contrary to the line his own colleagues were assiduously disseminating, there was evidence of an Iraq-al-Qaida link,” Rose writes. “He confirmed a story I had been told by members of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress that two of the hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, had met Mukhabarat officers in the months before 9-11 in the United Arab Emirates. This, he said, was a pattern of contact between Iraq and al-Qaida which went back years.” Rose reveals in the new issue of Vanity Fair that the Pentagon established a special intelligence unit to re-examine evidence of an Iraq-al-Qaida connection earlier this year. The CIA cooperated by supplying the unit with copies of its reports going back a decade. “I have spoken to three senior officials who have seen its conclusions, which are striking,” he writes. “‘In the Cold War,’ says one of them, ‘often you’d draw firm conclusions and make policy on the basis of just four or five reports. Here there are almost 100 separate examples of Iraq-al-Qaida cooperation going back to 1992

Now you may choose to ignore or dismiss this by saying we don’t have anything concrete, but then exactly what constitutes concrete evidence? What sort of evidence are you seeking? To most if not all intelligence operatives this is as concrete as it gets. At some point or the other you have to admit that no evidence will convince you of the linkage because you simply do not want to accept that this war was part of the war on terror, but if you are teetering on the edge then there is the Feith memo as further proof that there was an alliance. Never forgetting that one of the first demands made by Bin Laden was to stop the sanctions and oppression of the Iraqis people which is a strange request coming from a person who supposedly is not allied to Iraq. You may say that he was just saying that because the Iraqis are Muslims but my god there are so many other nations that are Muslim that he could cite but he picked Iraq. Here is a snippet of his 1998 Fatwa; The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

If you are saying that by attacking them in Iraq we create more then what do you advocate, retreat? No matter where we attack them we temporarily create more as their side calls for more volunteers to fight. Then the tipping point is reached and we rapidly dismantle them. That was the point of the Japanese analogy in the last email. The Japanese no doubt increased enlistment when we first started fighting back. But even as dedicated as the Japanese were and arguably they were the most dedicated fearless foes we have fought, they were forced to play down our victories if not deny them outright because of the problems that would have on moral. Victory on the part of the enemy brings far more converts than does massive casualties, massive casualties only brings those into the fold that are so committed that nothing we do will convince them one way or the other. Death is the only cure for that lot.

I totally agree with Clarke when he contends that we missed a golden window to pursue and eliminate Al Qaeda after 9/11 and Afghanistan by pursuing the Iraqi war against a toothless tyrant. Hell, we’ve managed to get the shiite’s and sunnis working together to kill Americans! Total mismanagement and lack of foresight-Colin Powell has admitted they didn’t anticipate the current state of affairs, which doesn’t surprise me given the arrogance shown by this administration. They should have considered ALL the possibilities. No doubt about it, there’s lots of bad people in the world that hate us and our way of life. Now there’s even more.

Clarke has so many contradictions going that he is another argument altogether. I haven’t seen his claim that the War in Iraq diminished the war in Afghanistan but it’s hard to see what exactly hasn’t worked the way it was supposed to in Afghanistan. And repeating that Saddam was a toothless tyrant over and over again does not make it so. Exactly because he was unable to confront us in open battle forced him to continue the war through means other than direct confrontation. Indeed we can see in the current fighting in Iraq that Saddam understood fighting by using terrorist’s tactics. Terrorists were the perfect way to proceed since the Clinton Administration had made it known that States did not sponsor terrorism anymore and that Stateless Terrorism was the new paradigm. Richard Clarke had a lot at stake on that policy and its hard to understand what they were thinking when they announced that new paradigm. Didn’t they realize they were giving States a free pass on using terrorists. Remember war isn’t about winning battles on the battlefield it’s about changing a nation’s behavior to force them to accede to your demands. How close they came on 9/11 to changing our behavior is left to speculation but I know of people who wanted to drop everything in the Middle East and retreat with no thought of the results of such a disastrous policy.

As far as the way the war is going right now, war is unpredictable. That is a known factor; it is why the Armed Forces, the Marines in particular teach their men to improvise adapt and overcome, because plans don’t survive the first contact with the enemy. Now we are smashing the enemy and he is learning that we will stand and fight and when we do he loses. They must relearn the lesson that the thugs of 1946 understood, the United States will indeed bear any burden and that we are fearsome enemies. It’s outrageous to claim that the war is being mismanaged, especially when you don’t outline in what ways you believe it is going wrong. Yes the Shiites Mullahs of Iran are busy trying to prevent democracy from coming to Iraq as that would mean they are that much closer to losing power since young people now are rioting in the streets against them. Those youngsters in Iran look to the US to save them and those youngsters are praying for our success in Iraq. We are gaining allies, freedom is contagious and the Mullahs know it. But then again Iran and Iraq had healed their wounds a while ago.

2. Saddam attempted to assassinate Former President Bush in a particularly interesting way. With a huge Car Bomb that would have killed not only Bush but his wife, Laura Bush, Jeb Bush and several hundred other people standing around in Kuwait as well as most of the government of Kuwait. Both the FBI and CIA confirmed that the Bomb was Iraqi made and that the operatives were Iraqi agents. Clinton then bombed the Secret Service headquarters in the middle of the night in retaliation….Saddam was unimpressed. This is the act of a terrorist who sleeps with terrorists.

No doubt about it, he’s a bad man. All this proves to me is that if he was indeed in bed with Al Queda, he would have been successful in his assassination attempt. They are obviously much better at the terrorism game. I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that Bush’s motive for the Iraq war had much to do with avenging his father’s assassination attempt. Mix in the fact that he’s a “born again Christian” soldier and look where we are! Fine on a personal level-hell, suit up, join the rangers and go get him! I’d be pissed too if it was my Daddy! Not fine if you’re the leader of the most powerful nation on earth and taking your country into what may develop into WWIII.

Not sure if you are serious or just trying to bait me. Are you seriously saying its ok to attempt to assassinate a former President? Are you seriously saying that something that no other world leader has attempted to do to, assassinate one of our Former Presidents doesn’t implicate Saddam in the worst way with terror? Clinton himself retaliated, but completely ineffectually, indeed he may have done far more harm than good because of the example that set. And yes when a countries leader attempts to murder the former leader of another country that means war. That’s why no one ever tries it in the major leagues. Saddam did in fact try it. That he did speaks volumes for how safe it would have been to allow him to be free of sanctions. The Born Again Christian slur is a cheap shot, and characterizing it as his daddy is another cheap shot. The fact remains that he faces far more danger than most other people in the military. What’s next the Chicken hawk slur?

Furthermore you ascribe too much brilliance to the Al Queda and assume too much incompetence to Saddam. Ramsey Yousef was either one of three things, an Iraqis Agent of the Mukhabarat, an Agent of Al Queda trained by the Mukhabarat, or an Al Queda agent with no training. He was caught after he burned his house down in the Philippines when his bomb making lab went astray. You take your pick if you believe that Al Queda is godlike and the Mukhabarat incompetent, though it’s an accepted fact that the Iraqis secret service was extremely good. They were trained after all by the Soviets and styled after the KGB. Nonetheless it doesn’t diminish the attempt to assassinate Former President Bush along with family and Kuwaitis Government Officials. The Al Queda have attempted to assassinate others and have failed as well so don?’ make too much of your theory that the failure proves they weren’t aligned.

3. Indeed when we started killing the Japanese we made even more Japanese eager to fight us…then we killed enough of them and they stopped. The Jihadists aren?t nearly as committed as the Japanese or nearly as brave. We beat the Japanese. This entails killing the enemy in large numbers.

Different time and place, stupid arguments. I’m not going to go into the differences. Not sure how you measure commitment and bravery. Being willing to die for your cause is pretty much the bottom line and there seems to be no shortage of that in the fundamentalist Muslim world.

Not much new under the sun in human nature especially in the last 100 years. Killing your enemy by breaking his will has long been the accepted way of winning wars. Until Vietnam we were known for not breaking under the strain. When the Vietnamese discovered that they could break our will it did not go unnoticed. Then when we allowed Hezbollah to murder 250 Marines it did not go unnoticed, Somalia and on and on.

Again, my whole point is that we took our eye off the ball and made the situation 100X worse by venturing into Iraq when we should have been pursuing and finishing Al Qaida. We’ve greatly increased the terrorists “bravery and commitment” and numbers in the process. Thanks for the primer on what war is all about anyway.(kill more of them…duh!)

You don’t seem to understand it which is why I thought it good to explain after all you claim that by killing your enemy you create more and that is a basic misunderstanding. Bravery is not something the terrorists know about; the ones dying are doing so out of religious fervor not bravery. They feel no fear and so cannot understand bravery. Bravery isn’t being fearless; it’s being fearful and still carrying on the mission. Not sure what example you can give about us taking our eyes off the ball as we have been rolling up networks of Al Queda in Iraq, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Philippines, Spain, France, Germany and hell just about anywhere one cares to look.

There is little evidence if any of Al Queda benefiting from the invasion of Iraq, if you have such proof I would be glad to see it, hard numbers. If you mean that we are being attacked by terrorists in Iraq yes that’s the idea. It is the terrorists that are making the mistake right now. They were smart when they did not confront our forces but now they are forced to by events. They cannot allow us to establish a democracy in the Middle East. By forcing the issue we have drawn them out into the battlefield and now we can kill them. On a much smaller scale this is exactly what the Marines did when they entered Iraq, they challenged those they were fighting by mounting loudspeakers on their APC?s describing their enemies as dogs and women forcing their enemies to stand up and fight. Drawing your enemy out is a legitimate tactic of war.

Furthermore our liberation of Iraq has brought to light many other bits of information showing the complicity of Saddam in world wide terror. The Marines liberated a terror training base in Salmon Pak where they found just as defectors had claimed a passenger jet used for the practice by Arab Terrorists in the art of weaponless hijacking. Saddam admitted that this jet was used by his counter terrorism soldiers. On that same base we found explosive belts and other accoutrements of the terror trade.

4. The indications that Saddam was also involved in 9/11 have not gone away. The Czech foreign minister who originally made the charge that Atta met with Al Ani the Iraqis Foreign Minister in Prague stands. Indeed he has forcefully backed up his statements and the findings of his secret service. Atta made at least 3 visits to Prague. Al Ani was expelled by the Czechs when it was discovered by the Czechs that he was involved in attempting to blow up Radio Free Europe for Saddam. The fact that he had an aircraft on the property of Salmon Pak has been confirmed by the Marines who took control of the base. It was just as the defectors announced a terror training base. Saddam explained away the Aircraft by stating that it was used to train his Anti Terror Squads. James Woolsey Clinton?s former CIA director believes that there is a good case to be made that Saddam was involved in 9/11.

I note that you did not address the ties between Al Ani and Atta or between Iraq and the plot to destroy Radio Free Europe, is it that you just cannot stand to admit that Iraq has ties to terror or do you deny that these plots exist?

Zell Miller;
It?s obvious to me that this country is rapidly dividing itself into two camps: the wimps and the warriors. The ones who want to argue and assess and appease, and the ones who want to carry this fight to our enemies and kill him them before they kill us. And, in case you haven?t figured it out, I proudly belong to the latter. This is a time like no other in the history of this country, and this country is being crippled with petty partisan politics of the worst possible kind. In time of war, it is not just unpatriotic; it is stupid, and it is criminal. So, I pray that all this time, all this energy, all this talk and all this attention could be focused on the future instead of the past. I pray we would stop pointing fingers, assigning blame and wringing our hands about what happened on that day David McCullogh has called the worst day in our history? more than two years ago. And instead, pour all of our energy into how we can kill these terrorists before they kill us - again. For make no mistake about it. They watch these hearings. They are scheming and smiling about the distraction and the divisiveness they see in America. And while they may not know who said it years ago in America, they know instinctively that a house divided cannot stand
I am exceedingly offended when I hear the “wimps and warriors” argument and accused of being un-American when I question the wisdom of this venture. I am even further offended when such questioning is equated as lack of support to the troops. George Bush needs to explain to the poor soldier that has survived a year in Iraq and is now being asked to stay another year why he hadn’t planned for this.

But that is exactly where the issue stands; wimps advocated not going into Afghanistan, wimps claimed that we would be bogged down in endless war in Afghanistan; wimps claimed that only by surrendering in the ME could we hope to survive the mean men with the funny hats. I know that’s not your position so I don’t believe you have to take it personally. I believe that you would state that instead of going into Iraq we should have gone into Iran or Syria or Saudi Arabia, not that we should have stopped after Afghanistan or worse never have gone into Afghanistan. I know you understand that indeed this is WW4 or 3 if you don’t count the Cold War as 3. This war wasn’t started by us but nevertheless we must fight it because we are the only ones able to. But I worry, because your argument about us making more enemies by killing them could be made in any arena we fight in. I am hoping that you don’t mean we shouldn’t fight them in any arena. I’m hoping that you don’t mean we must wait for them to appear on our shores before we are finally moved from our slumber and sloth to defend ourselves.

All along the Terrorists have made consistent demands upon the west. None of which we can allow (obviously I need to edit more carefully since I contradict myself one sentence later oops). Bin Laden demanded that we stop the sanctions against Saddam; we stop the occupation as he called it by the Crusaders of Saudis Arabia, and stop supporting the State of Israel. Of those three demands we can and have withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, right now we have been dismantling our Airbases and support headquarters. We have relocated all of this to Qatar. Personally I believe he will still be upset by this. I think what he really wants from us is to sit down and die quietly. I refuse.

In the wider world I hope that those who advocate the abandonment of Israel have brought the conclusion of that policy to its logical extension, the murderous rampage that would follow our abandonment of Israel would make this Iraqi conflict pale in comparison. I hope that they understand what conceding the Middle East to the fanatics would mean to Europe, where a goodly portion of the population is Muslim. Surely people remember that the longest running conflict was not between the Soviets and the West but between the West and Islam. I know history is no longer taught in schools but certainly a war that ran for so long with so many brave battles cannot have been completely forgotten. The task before us is to show several things, we cannot be moved by terror, and that the only way for the Islamic world to deal with the rest of the world in general is moderation and conciliation. Islam is known as the religion of the sword, the war we are in now is about that, not about some single terror organization however grievously they managed to attack us. Saddams place in that mixture was his attempt to become the next Caliph (The person acting in Muhammad’s place after his death, i.e. the leader of Islam (sunni) as he declared several times. Others will step up. Whether we will or not the war is upon us and we have the choice to either surrender or fight. I choose to fight.

Finally this issue of Iraqis involvement in the terror attacks is central; it is one of the areas that I believe the Bush administration has failed. They have accepted the standard of evidence that says unless you can admit it in court you cannot use it to support defending the country. This is patently an absurd policy, no country leaves that sort of evidence and given our handicaps during the 90’s even if they had we wouldn’t have been able to find them. I have always like Laurie Mylroie’s explanation of evidence let me paraphrase; we have the evidence of a smile that you may be pleased with me and the sort of evidence that is presented in a courtroom. Intelligence agencies as a rule deal mostly with the first not often with the second. In this day of the possibility of massive attacks causing untold casualties we cannot wait till we have courtroom quality evidence. Besides which, the belief that we have created more enemies by going into Iraq stands in stark contrast to just how much more angry can they get? Ramseh Yousef wanted to kill 250,000 of us back in 1993.

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