Rat's Nest
Bloggage, rants, and occasional notes of despair

New World Order, Old World propaganda.

The big thing in the current version of the Petulant Left’s campaign against the Antichrist Bush is the question "what did he know and when did he know it?" about Iraq? The approved answer is that he knew along that Hussein had no WMDs, but that he deliberately lied to the Congress and America about it to go to war with Iraq, despite the best efforts of wiser heads such as Annan and Chirac.

Bush certainly put the best spin possible on the intelligence that he had that pointed in the direction that he wanted to go in, and downplayed any that didn’t. Of course, the English-speaking media pointed this out in endless detail at the time. That they claim now that we should be shocked, shocked, to discover this is their admission that their credibility with alleged news and opinion consumers is effectively zero.

The same intelligence was available to -- and believed by -- Clinton, who chose to ignore it for domestic political reasons. It was available to -- and believed by -- Blair, to chose to add the U.K.'s weight to that of the U.S. It was available to Annan and Chirac; no one can say what, if anything, they believe, but certainly the bribes by Hussein out the "Oil for Food" program played a part in their vehement, if impotent, opposition.

Most important, Hussein himself did everything in his power to affirm that intelligence, since to do otherwise would reveal Iraq, not the U.S., to be the toothless tiger of jihadi rhetoric.

Was the intelligence wrong? Almost certainly. The Petulant Left has spent decades trying to ensure that the intelligence we receive must be worthless. I tell you three times: there is no substitute for HUMINT. HUMINT, however, comes from thugs and traitors; people who can be bribed, bullied, blackmailed, or seduced. The left as embodied in Congressional Democrats has insisted that the CIA must stay far away from such people. Perhaps they have some childish delusion that HUMINT will be provided gratis by principled whistleblowers, although they seem not to realize the contradiction between shrilly demanding that American whistleblowers must be protected by law against even the most minor of retaliations, and their acceptance of tyrants murdering, raping, and torturing foreign whistleblowers and their families.

The Petulant Left is responsible for their belief, held with the unreasoning vehemence of a fundamentalist insisting the teaching evolution is a Satanist plot, that neocons are fascists and that Bush would be Hitler if only he had the brains and guts. The Petulant Right, however, joins with them in the responsibility for insisting that the clock could easily be turned back to 10 September 2001 -- or perhaps 10 September 1801 -- if it were not for the imperialist ambitions of Rumsfeld and Perle, and the greed of Cheney and his buddies at Halliburton.

John "Akatsukami" Braue Monday, February 09, 2004

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