Pierre Legrand’s Pink Flamingo Bar

Told you so!

Brilliant article by Andrew C. McCarthy at NRO. Go read it now then come back and I will tell you why the President failed to keep the American people in the war. Besides the President’s lack of effort, the President also failed to drive home one clear fact about the war.

Iraq is a single front in a much larger war. If we don’t suppress Iran, Syria, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the Sunni terror funding stream in Saudi Arabia, we can’t win in Iraq, no matter how victory is defined. You can’t win if you don’t take on the forces determined to see you lose.

“You’re nuts,” I’m told. “You want to go to war with everyone?”

I’ve heard it all before. Some people point to Iran and say, “1938 all over again.” It’s a good comparison, but from my standpoint it is, at the very least, 1993 to 2001 all over again. We’re making the same mistake we made before 9/11.

No, I don’t want “to go to war” any more than you do. And if you say there are meaningful, non-military means to quell and depose our enemies, I’m all ears, albeit skeptical. Rest assured, though: the war is on whether you and I choose to acknowledge it or not. It was on after the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, and we put our heads in the sand for eight years — through attack after attack — until 9/11 forced us to take notice … although, it now appears, as little notice as possible.

There is a global jihad. It’s on, now. Like it or not. Rise to the challenge or not. You don’t want war with Iran? Fine. But never forget for a second that Iran is already at war with you. Source: Andrew C. McCarthy on Iraq on National Review Online

In September 2003 I wrote a letter to the President and Sec of Defense which I both mailed to their offices and posted on my blog. Knowing how ridiculous it was for me to send such a letter I titled the post on my blog “Don Quixote’s letter to the President, tilting at windmills can be fun.” The main thrust of my letter was a reprimand to the President and his officers for allowing the debate over Iraq to be turned by his enemies. From that letter this snippet.

Saddam must be linked to the Al Qaeda, its why many of us who supported the war, did so. I know that your reasons to go to war revolved around three or four issues. For many of us it revolved around one main issue, the linkage between Saddam and Al Qaeda, with the dreadful possibilities that follow from that match. That you wanted to free the Iraqis people was certainly a way for us to feel good about the war, but we both know that had you tried to sell this war by just saying how great it would be to free the Iraqis we would have said fine send them money and arms, but no U.S. Armies. Had you tried to sell this war on just the fact that the Iraqis were ignoring the United Nations resolutions we would have laughed you out of the White House for all the respect we have for that free parking institution. And the fact that Saddam had an active WMD program certainly is a concern to us but fact is, there are a lot of crazies who have weapons of Mass destruction, I don’t/won’t support wars to depose all of them. No this war revolved around the dynamic of Saddam giving those weapons of mass destruction to the Al Qaeda or other terrorists intent on using them here, it revolved around the evidence of linkage. 

Throwing an “I told you so” at our President seems to be pretty lame now because our fates are linked…but dammit I did tell him so. We are losing this war now because we have forgotten why we went to war. We did not go to war to bring democracy to the Middle East or to uphold United Nations resolutions, though those may be worthy goals, they are secondary. The American people went to war to stop terror attacks against the United States of America. Saddam Hussein was a central figure in a constellation of figures involved in the terror war against the United States. The moral case for war on Saddam was self defense, by allowing the opposition to discredit that case the Bush Administration lost the war. From another told you so moment: November 21, 2005

Pre War Open Source Intelligence Regarding Saddam’s Threat to the United States What has always been tremendously frustrating for me regarding the Bush administration, was their allowing WMD’s to be portrayed as the central issue for going to war. Even though the Administration certainly made other tremendously strong arguments such as its violations of treaties and Saddam’s connections to terror they basically allowed the Press and Democrats to set those arguments aside by not defending them. There was so much available open source information that could have been used to destroy the meme of Saddam not having serious connections to terror that one must consider this to be one of the gravest errors of the war.

From another told you so moment April 2004 in a comment published by Opinion Journal

OpinionJournal - Featured Article Responses: “Terror Links Are Enough to Go to War Pierre Legrand - Baton Rouge, La. The Bush administration failed to pursue its strongest reason for going to war with Saddam. The ties to terrorism and al Qaeda not the WMDs should have been its focus. While Mr. Bush has been walking out to the edge of the plank looking for the WMDs the Democrats and media have been busy little bee’s sawing off the other end by falsely stating that there were no ties to al Qaeda. The Bush administration believing it had to have the sort of evidence one would bring to court to make any of the serious charges on ties of Osama bin Laden and Saddam decided to not do anything. Nature abhors a vacuum. The Democrats stepped in and defined the terms for them and now it will be almost impossible to make the case for those ties. Had that case been made early with the evidence that is available unclassified they wouldn’t have to worry about the people losing heart in the war, instead they didn’t and now people are starting to believe the nonsense about their being no ties which leads to why are we there.

We have forgotten why we went to war because instead of harping on the connections between Saddam and terrorism, something the American people once believed to be a fact. Here is another couple of snippets from that letter to the President. The first is an exchange between Russert and Vice President Cheney. The Vice President gets the answer correct.

MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: 69 percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks. Are you surprised by that? VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I think it’s not surprising that people make that connection. 

Here are both Rumsfeld and Bush getting the answer wrong. It was this exchange that forced me to write the letter. This was the beginning of my worries regarding the Bush Administration.

Sec. Rumsfeld when asked if there is a linkage. Rumsfeld: I’ve not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that. We know he was giving $25,000 a family for anyone who would go out and kill innocent men, women and children. And we know of various other activities. But on that specific one, no. 

President Bush also was quoted saying about the same thing as Rumsfeld. That was the beginning of the end of the battle of Iraq. Our only hope at that point was to win it quick before public opinion forced us out. Winning quick was out of the question since we don’t have enough troops, the troops we do have are hamstrung, our “allies” the Iraqis are helping our enemies the Iranians and the Syrians are helping as well.

The Bush administration in an apparent attempt to be invited to all the “right” cocktail parties accepted the terms of the Anti War’s faction debating rules, ie that only court room quality evidence would suffice to tie Saddam to terror. Once those terms were accepted by the Bush administration the debate was lost. It was lost by an Administration and it’s supporters who never once understood that by surrendering prematurely on the connections to terror that they were going to lose the war. In the rarified world of DC Politics perhaps they thought political justifications like the UN Resolutions really mattered to Moms and Dads saying goodbye to children going off to war, they did not. Saddams links to terror did.

At the point that Bush and Rumsfeld made those terrible mistakes, quoted above, support for the war was high and mirrored the polls showing the publics belief that Saddam was linked to terror. Once that debate was lost the American people lost faith and from there on every single American death in that war was a waste unless by some miracle we could find a victory hidden in the muddled do-good foreign policy of bunch of amateurs advised by some of the worst immoral politicians on the face of the earth.

James Baker should do us all a favor and visit the Kurds…I bet they would give you a warm welcome. Memories run long in the Middle East and they remember that Baker was the one who advocated leaving their children to die under Saddams helicopters filled with WMD’s.

If you present political justifications for the war you break the faith with those who fight. Soldiers, rightfully, do not trust political justifications for war. Political justifications change on a whim, ask the Kurds. No one wants to risk their life or their children’s lives on whims. Moral justifications such as Saddam was at war with us are concrete. When you allow craven politicians and their allies in the press, whose only goal is power, to undermine the justifiable reasons because you are busy defending your political justifications…well one need only look at the wreckage that is United States Foreign Policy.

Why we went to war

For the longest time I have quoted another part of this article by Christopher Dickey of Newsweek written Sept 02

That was in January 1993. I was there, and every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a “secular Baathist ideologue” who has nothing to do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they’re talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam’s version of it.

Then while doing research for this article I re-discovered this brilliant paragraph by a writer that I simply do not admire for his waffling after this well thought out and damning article on Saddams ties to terror. And yet this paragraph is brilliant and the truth of the statement demands our attention.

What makes Saddam’s clique so confident? They know real evil is hard to imagine. Reasonable people do not want to recognize it, even when it stares them in the face; easier to listen to those who tell us that Saddam couldn’t possibly see eye to eye with Islamic fundamentalists and couldn’t possibly be so foolish as to entrust them with weapons of mass destruction.

We simply do not recognize real evil. Our enemies disarm us by being so over the top evil that we simply do not register the possibility that they exist on the same planet as us. Instead perhaps we imagine that those video’s of Berg crying out while his head is sawed off of his body to be some sort of sick reality show that we can ignore because those people really don’t exist.

Saddam was more than linked to terror, he was one of the main enablers of terror. Not the only one by a long shot but he was as good a second target as any other Terrorist. The proof of his terror connections did not lie with his funding of Palestinian suicide bombers as evil as that was, no it lay with this list of plots, plans and actions over the course of years. 

From the beginning Saddam showed a shrewd understanding of our inability to grasp evil when it is presented to us in the open. Instead of the devil sneaking in from the back door this devil knocked boldly on the front door and announced his intentions. It was so bold it was ignored by everyone. The evidence was overwhelming and it was not used by our Government.

• SEPTEMBER 23, 1990 On July 25,President Saddam Hussein of Iraq summoned the United States Ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, to his office in the last high-level contact between the two Governments before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2. snippet:

If you use pressure, we will deploy pressure and force. We know that you can harm us although we do not threaten you. But we too can harm you. Everyone can cause harm according to their ability and their size. We cannot come all the way to you in the United States, but individual Arabs may reach you.

Giving aid and comfort to a terrorist who attempted to drop one 110 story building into another killing tens of thousands certainly qualifies Iraq as a target for our Armies. Ramsey Yousef by his own words when confronted with the possibility that he might have killed 250,000 had his plan worked, was sorry it didn’t.

• Safe Haven to Terrorists

Let’s just start with the fact that under safe haven in Iraq they conveniently forget to list Abdul Rahman Yasin. Oops. Though I can understand why that might be just a bit embarrassing to the Government. After all he was only one of the main bomb makers for the World Trade Tower 1993 attempt to murder thousands of us. He didn’t slip out of the country after that attempt to collapse one tower into the other. No sir, he was let go after being questioned by the FBI. Did he go to Afghanistan, Sudan or any one of the other failed states where Al Qaeda had offices. Nope. He went to Iraq and was given safe haven there.

In the spring of 1994, a Jordanian stringer working for ABC News spotted Abdul Rahman Yasin outside his father’s house in Baghdad and learned from neighbors that he worked for the Iraqi government.

After that the Iraqi Government moved him to a house where he continued to have access to his ailing mother. Furthermore in 2002 he was interviewed on TV by CBS News. Remember that his boss Ramsey Yousef is now serving time in our highest security jail in Colorado. Ramsey Yousef the main bomb-maker also known in terrorist circles as the “The Iraqi” must be jealous of Abdul’s celebrity status.

 

Why did President Bush not emphasize the outrageous act of war by Saddam when the attempt on the former President’s life was made. Many countries have gone to war for such acts.

• April 16, 1993 How Do We Know that Iraq Tried to Assassinate President George H.W. Bush? In late-April 1993, the United States learned that terrorists had attempted to assassinate Bush during his visit to Kuwait. The Kuwaiti authorities arrested 17 persons suspected in the plot to kill Bush using explosives hidden in a Toyota Landcruiser. The Kuwaitis recovered the Landcruiser, which contained between 80 and 90 kilograms of plastic explosives connected to a detonator ( the Bush device or Bush explosive device ). The Kuwaitis also recovered ten cube-shaped plastic explosive devices with detonators (the cube-bombs ) from the Landcruiser. Some of the suspects reportedly confessed that the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS ) was behind the assassination attempt.

We often hear from the left the fact that Saddam has never directly attacked us. Which among other things ignores this little act of war. Unless one government plotting to blow up another Government’s buildings is not an act of war.

• 1998 Radio Free Europe Saddam plots the destruction of Radio Free Europe BIS allegedly had been aware that Iraq had requested its consul, Jabir Salim, to organize the terrorist operation against RFE/RL, apparently in retribution for the start-up last year of Radio Free Iraq.The Czech press says Baghdad sent the consul $50,000 to organize the attack but the consul asked for more money. Baghdad allegedly sent an additional $100,000. The consul then fled to London in December, taking the money, his family and the embassy codes. The government reportedly only found out about the plans to attack RFE/RL from British intelligence.

This guy is simply so amusing that he needs to be included. So many lies so little time but back when it wasn’t in his interest to lie he stated the problem of Iraq thusly. Sheesh on and on with the evidence, it was simply overwhelming and that the Bush administration let the debate get away from this was criminally negligent.

• The Contradictions of Michael Scheuer celebrated author of Imperial Hubris:  The left bless their black little hearts don’t say much about what he wrote in his first book concentrating instead in his new career as a Bush basher. They miss marvelous stuff like this from his earlier book “ Through Our Enemies’ Eyes”:

In Sudan, bin Laden decided to acquire and , when possible, use chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons against Islam’s enemies. Bin Laden’s first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with NIF Leaders, Iraq’s intelligence service, and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad through its intelligence officers in Sudan, and by a Turabi-brokered June 1994 visit by Iraq’s then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan’s Corriere della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for “nurturing Iraq’s ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors.” Turabi had plans to formulate a “common strategy” with bin Laden and Iraq for subverting pro-U.S. Arab regimes, but the meeting was a get-aquainted session where Hijazi and bin Laden developed good rapport that would “flourish” in the late 1990s.

 

• January 7, 2002 Iraq’s Tie to Al-Qaeda Terrorists, Airline Hijackings From: Aviation Week Space Technology Headline: Satellite images of a facility near Baghdad show an airliner that Iraqi defectors say is used to train terrorists in the art of hijacking. Space Imaging, which operates the Ikonos civilian surveillance satellite, was prompted to look for the aircraft in existing photos after a ‘’Frontline’’ television show interviewed two Iraqi defectors who described the hijacker training and the aircraft used for the mock attacks.



• Salman Pak / Al Salman Former Iraqi military officers have described a highly secret terrorist training facility at Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations. The Salman Pak biological warfare facility was located on a peninsula caused by a bend in the Tigris river, approximately five kilometers (km) from the arch located in the town of Salman Pak. The facility area comprised more than 20 square km, and might have been known as a farmers (or agricultural) experimentation center. The peninsula was fenced off and patrolled by a large guard force. Immediately inside and to the east of the fence line were two opulent villas: the larger built for Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the other for his half-brother, Barazan al-Tikriti. A main paved road ran through the center of the Salman Pak facility/peninsula. GulfLINK

• Marines capture suspected terrorist training camp SALMAN PAK
  The rusted shell of an old passenger jet sat out in a field, its tail broken off. Good for hijacking practice, U.S. Marines speculated Sunday as they examined an Iraqi training base about 20 miles south of Baghdad.The Americans also found a full obstacle course — with wooden walls and other barriers to be climbed over or crawled under — as well as a three-story concrete tower draped with ropes, apparently for rappelling.

President Saddam Hussein’s regime has said the camp, part of a larger military reservation in a bend of the Tigris River, was used for anti-terrorism training for Iraqi special forces.

But U.S. officials and others have long suspected the camp trained terrorists. Two former Iraqi military officers told The New York Times and PBS’s “Frontline” in the fall of 2001 that Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs were brought here to practice hijacking planes and trains, planting bombs and staging assassinations.

 

• BRIG. GEN. VINCENT BROOKS CENTCOM Confirms Salman Pak as Terror Training base
  We continue the operations in and around the area and beyond. There was a raid last night by First Marine Expeditionary Force, but what they raided was a training camp near Salman Pak. You can see the explosion along on the map near Salman Pak. This raid occurred in response to information that had been gained by coalition forces from some foreign fighters that we encountered from other country, not Iraq, and we believe that this camp had been used to train these foreign fighters in terror tactics. It is now destroyed.

 

With regard to Salman Pak, that’s just one of the a number of examples we found where there’s training activity happening inside of Iraq. It reinforces the likelihood of links between this regime and external terrorist organizations. Clear links with common interests. Some of these fighters came from Sudan, some from Egypt, some from other places. We have killed a number of them and we have captured a number of them. That’s where the information came from. We continue to be on the lookout for the fighters. It won’t stop us operationally. We will encounter them when we encounter them, but it does say an awful lot about the approach the regime is taking on battlefield right now.

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