Who To Thank?
Posted on Thu Nov 23, 2006 at 01:09:51 PM EST
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Who deserves the thanks of Iraqis for this?
Three suicide car bombs and two mortar rounds struck the capital's Shiite Sadr City slum Thursday, killing at least 150 people and wounding 238, police said. The attack by suspected Sunni Arab militants was the deadliest in the sectarian bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq since last winter. Shiites responded almost immediately, firing 10 mortar rounds at the Sunnis' holiest shrine in Baghdad, the Abu Hanifa mosque in the Azamiya neighborhood, killing one person and wounding 14. Fighting also flared in another part of Baghdad when 30 Sunni insurgents armed with machine guns and mortars attacked the Shiite-controlled Health Ministry.
More.
Who do Americans thank for this?
At least 2,867 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, including 49 this month.
Who do we thank for this? And this? And this?
How about that mushroom cloud?
The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied:• Bush and others often alleged that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign. Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design center at Rashidiya.
• The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002 cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no forbidden activities at the sites.
• Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S. government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts said new evidence had further undermined the government's assertion. The Bush administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible.
• In the weeks and months following Joe's Vienna briefing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others continued to describe the use of such tubes for rockets as an implausible hypothesis, even after U.S. analysts collected and photographed in Iraq a virtually identical tube marked with the logo of the Medusa's Italian manufacturer and the words, in English, "81mm rocket."
• The escalation of nuclear rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud" into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from Hussein, as a participant put it.
Two senior policymakers, who supported the war, said in unauthorized interviews that the administration greatly overstated Iraq's near-term nuclear potential.
. . . Answering questions Thursday before the National Association of Black Journalists, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said she is "certain to this day that this regime was a threat, that it was pursuing a nuclear weapon, that it had biological and chemical weapons, that it had used them." White House officials referred all questions of detail to Tenet.
In an interview and a four-page written statement, Tenet defended the NIE prepared under his supervision in October. In that estimate, U.S. intelligence analysts judged that Hussein was intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon and was trying to rebuild the capability to make one.
. . . Tenet said the time to "decide who was right and who was wrong" about prewar intelligence will not come until the Iraqi Survey Group, the CIA-directed, U.S. military postwar study in Iraq of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs is completed. The Bush administration has said this will require months or years.
But do not forget these names as well - Ignatius, Cohen, Klein, Broder, Hoagland, Brooks. And especially do not forget the name Thomas Friedman.
Thomas Friedman wrote this on September 18, 2002:
Iraq, Upside DownBy THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Recently, I've had the chance to travel around the country and do some call-in radio shows, during which the question of Iraq has come up often. And here's what I can report from a totally unscientific sample: Don't
believe the polls that a majority of Americans favor a military strike against Iraq. It's just not true.It's also not true that the public is solidly against taking on Saddam Hussein. What is true is that most Americans are perplexed. The most oft-asked question I heard was some variation of: "How come all of a sudden we have to launch a war against Saddam? I realize that he's thumbed his nose at the U.N., and he has dangerous weapons, but he's never threatened us, and, if he does, couldn't we just vaporize him? What worries me are Osama and the terrorists still out there."
That's where I think most Americans are at. Deep down they believe that Saddam is "deterrable." That is, he does not threaten the U.S. and he never has, because he has been deterred the way Russia, China and North
Korea have been. He knows that if he even hints at threatening us, we will destroy him. Saddam has always been homicidal, not suicidal. Indeed, he has spent a lifetime perfecting the art of survival — because he loves
life more than he hates us.No, what worries Americans are not the deterrables like Saddam. What worries them are the "undeterrables" — the kind of young Arab-Muslim men who hit us on 9/11, and are still lurking. Americans would pay virtually any price to eliminate the threat from the undeterrables — the terrorists who hate us more than they love their own lives, and therefore cannot be deterred.
I share this view, which is why I think the Iraq debate is upside down. Most strategists insist that the reason we must go into Iraq — and the only reason — is to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction, not regime change and democracy building. I disagree.
I think the chances of Saddam being willing, or able, to use a weapon of mass destruction against us are being exaggerated. What terrifies me is the prospect of another 9/11 — in my mall, in my airport or in my downtown — triggered by angry young Muslims, motivated by some pseudo-religious radicalism cooked up in a mosque in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Pakistan. And I believe that the only way to begin defusing that threat is by changing the
context in which these young men grow up — namely all the Arab-Muslim states that are failing at modernity and have become an engine for producing undeterrables.So I am for invading Iraq only if we think that doing so can bring about regime change and democratization. Because what the Arab world desperately needs is a model that works — a progressive Arab regime that by its sheer existence would create pressure and inspiration for gradual democratization and modernization around the region.
I have no illusions about how difficult it would be to democratize a fractious Iraq. It would be a huge, long, costly task — if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don't know if it is. All I know is that it's the most important task worth doing and worth debating. Because only by helping the Arabs gradually change their context — a context now dominated by anti-democratic regimes and anti-modernist religious leaders and educators — are we going to break the engine that is producing one generation after another of undeterrables.
Thanks Thomas Friedman, from the bottom of our hearts.
May you rot for your outrageous ignorant hubris.
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