Saddam Had To Go

There is a bizarre inversion of the direction of hostility going on that is aimed not at our enemy-- the apprehended Saddam and the climate of Terror he presided over and is still kicking-- but at President Bush for sending the troops in to take him out.

It is understood that the opposition party, its allies in the media, and its politically-active sympaticos in the population--all rife with "Blame America First"/Anti-War Bush-haters-- will engage in all sorts of spin and demagoguery to darken the portrait of the sitting president, but to propagandize with the obvious intent to defame the president’s signature issue-—his prosecution of the War on Terror—-by pessimistically and essentially mischaracterizing the war, is unconscionable, as it results in the demoralizing of our troops and the emboldening of our enemies (precisely as the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era did, which seems to be the pattern the Bush-Haters are trying to replicate).

The Global War on Terror should not be defined as a multi-billion dollar manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. The massive mobilization of the greatest military force in history is not the rounding up of some posse on behalf of a lynch-mob mentality, hoping to hang the man behind the crime of 9-11 which killed 3,000 + civilians one fine day, and then walk away, leaving the status quo largely intact--and burgeoning.

It is a long-term operation which endeavors not to simply excise a malignant, symptomatic growth -—Bin Laden-- but to aggressively confront and treat the underlying condition of Middle-Eastern Wahabism, an extreme, intolerant, and bellicose form of Islam which produced Bin Laden and has declared war and death upon the West in terms of satan and scorpions and which considers women and children legitimate military targets in the pursuit of their own agenda.

It is a very bold and ambitious endeavor, and the domestic argument should not be about whether Saddam’s Iraq qualified as a strategic target in the broad outlines of the Global War on Terror. It does, and that should be obvious by the suicide bombings, the cafe attacks, the decapitations, and the civilian massacres employed by the Iraqi “insurgents.”

THEY'RE TERRORISTS.

Instead, the argument proper should be about whether we should (a) aggressively proceed in intrusive efforts to re-wire—-if not destroy—the Medieval zeitgeist which emanates hate and death out of the Middle East and reverberates around the 21st Century world, explicitly threatens the welfare of the West, and creates instability in an otherwise cooperative movement towards globalization, or (b) to back off, mollify it, contain it, work around it, and spray it from time to time as needed ad infinitum in an obviously failed policy which President Bush accurately described as “Swatting flies” while wasps swarm.

It is a question of whether one supposes that the “nuisances” of the “pesky” regularities of terrorism throughout the 1990’s that reached an intolerable crescendo on September 11, 2001 were acceptable and willing to be endured as they obviously escalated in magnitude, from the 1993 Al Qaeda-orchestrated downing of two Black Hawk helicopters and the killing of 18 American soldiers and the dragging of their corpses through the streets of Mogadishu (who were there on a humanitarian mission)...to the first World Trade Center attack of that same year (when it was hit low), which killed six civilians and injured 1,000... to the 1998 bombings of our sovereign embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 258 and injured 5,000... to the year 2000 bombing of the U.S.S Cole (a guided-missile destroyer of the United States Navy), which killed 17 United States servicemen and women... to the attacks of 9-11, when 3,000 + human beings of diverse backgrounds were killed by the hijacking and destruction of four commercial airliners, the ensuing collapse of the World Trade Center (when it was determinedly hit high this time around), and the blind-siding of the Pentagon (the brain center of the Armed Forces of the United States).

The fourth plane, brought down in the Pennsylvania countryside by Todd Beemer and the boys--well, the real men, actually-- was heading for the White House or the Capitol Building.

Much is being made of the fact that Bin Laden’s head has not been delivered on a pike, and the Bush-haters are using that fact as some indication that President Bush is not properly or succesfully prosecuting the war.

First of all, the war plan is much bigger than Bin Laden. Bin Laden was simply the last straw in a haystack which needs to be bailed or burned.

Secondly, we did get him, for all intents and purposes. He is in all probability laying very, very low in a cave somewhere, a la Saddam in his spider-hole, fearful of even using a cell-phone (which is preferable, actually, as he can behold the “paper tiger” turned awakened Giant and ponder his folly). Let him disseminate on videotape his sermons and lectures in the hopes of defeating his arch-enemy, George W. Bush.

One thing is certain: His capture or his coerced cavorting with 70 virgins in some unearthly realm is inevitable and will certainly satisfy some aspect of justice, but it would not end the conflict, as it will provide nowhere near the finale for the war that, for example, Emperor Hirohito’s formal surrender to President Truman on the U.S.S. Missouri did for WWII.

President Bush has said repeatedly that the nature of this new kind of war, and the measurement of its success, cannot be gauged by previous standards of armies routed and leaders signing surrender papers. That will not work with Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network, or like-minded extremists who do not belong to Al Qaeda proper, but are brothers in arms in outlook.

They can't be ignored. They can't be contained. They want to kill or enslave anyone in dhimmitude outside their exclusive belief system, and are willing to die in the endeavor.

Here is a glimpse of the mentality we're dealing with, within the ranks of Al Qaeda, Iraq, and elsewhere.

This particular sermon is by a sheik preaching to Palestinian Authority TV. It aired last month, on May 13, 2005. It is quite typical:

Allah has tormented us with "the people most hostile to the believers" – the Jews. 'Thou shalt find that the people most hostile to the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists.' Allah warned His beloved Prophet Muhammad about the Jews, who had killed their prophets, forged their Torah, and sowed corruption throughout their history.

With the establishment of the state of Israel, the entire Islamic nation was lost, because Israel is a cancer spreading through the body of the Islamic nation, and because the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers...

Enough of that. The next several paragraphs are Protocols of the Elders of Zion stuff.

Okay, everyone knows how Jihadists feel about the Jewish people, but they have plans for the rest of the infidels, too:

Look at modern history. Where has Great Britain gone? Where has Czarist Russia gone? Where has France gone - France, which almost ruled the entire world? Where is Nazi Germany, which massacred millions and ruled the world? Where did all these superpowers go? He who made them disappear will make America disappear too, God willing. He who made Russia disappear overnight is capable of making America disappear and fall, Allah willing.

We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world...

So who has the imperialist agenda? Israel? Us?

The invasion of Iraq is blamed by the Bush-haters for inciting that sort of polemic. But there is no mention of Iraq.

The Bush-hating crowd is moving the precursor (i.e. that mentality) ahead of the Iraqi invasion on the timeline and making the invasion the catalyst for that mentality that's been praying for a return to sharia, and world domination, well before 9/11.

The same thing is done with the BIF crowd (i.e. "Blame Israel First"). They say that the "illegal occupation of Palestine" is what incited the terrorism against Israelis (and by extension our alliance with Israel inciting the terrorism against us). But that's not true. He did mention "the establishment of the state of Israel," but that was just saucing on an ancient goose of hate. Hostility was directed towards the Jews from that crowd long after Rome gave them their walking papers and banished them to the four corners of the earth in the first century, and over a millenium before they returned to their ancestral homeland and "caused" the hostility.

Here is the conclusion of the sheik's sermon:

The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews - even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.

It's an ancient hate.

Differences can easily be drawn between the Jihadist terror network of Al Qaeda that was operating out of Afghanistan—-which was directly responsible for the hatching and carrying out of the plot of 9-11—-and the secular Baathist-run nation of Saddam’s Iraq, and it is those rather superficial and circumstantial differences which are amplified by the various Bush-hating organizations and propaganda outlets on a daily basis to form a wedge which separates Saddam’s Iraq from the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

But let’s review the record of Saddam, and decide if such a character with global influence was not only as worthy of attention as Bin Laden (if not more), but should have been tolerated as the civilized world marches into increased modernity in the 21st Century while being harassed by Jihadist terrorists along the way who have declared war on the West in no uncertain terms:

(1) Saddam fancies (or fancied) himself to be not only the heir to the Medieval Saladin (while minding the connotative fact that Saladin expelled the Anglo Crusaders from Jerusalem and made the Jewish city Muslim) but also some reincarnation of the ancient, Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar (while minding the present-day connotation of the fact that Nebuchadnezzar had exiled and subjugated the ancient Israelites).

(2) Saddam built and lived in monumental, luxurious palaces and his eldest son Uday amassed a fleet of expensive automobiles while the Iraqi civilian population suffered under sanctions that Saddam himself brought upon them. It should be added that the maintaining and even expanding of the luxurious lifestyle despite constrictive sanctions was apparently enabled by lucrative kickbacks of sorts from the United Nation’s Oil-for-Food program, and side-deals with UN members, who conducted business with Saddam and also profited while the United States was roundly condemned by the BAFs (i.e. pre-war Blame-America-Firsters) for “starving” the people of Iraq with the sanctions specifically designed to ensure that the Iraqi people would not starve.

What the corrupt UN members were doing was buying oil from Saddam beneath the publicized price, and kicking back half the difference, which, when dealing with the world’s second largest oil producer, was quite a difference for both pockets, and, by the secretive nature of the transactions, had the same unaccountability as cash. And it was those very nations-—France and Germany-—who resisted forced change of that status quo on the grounds of “legality” and “principle.”

(3) Saddam had thousands of political opponents tortured, murdered, and buried in unmarked mass graves.

(4) Against International Law, Saddam fumigated ranks of thousands of Iranian soldiers and Iraqi Kurds alike with chemical weapons (as if spraying cockroaches with Raid).

(5) Against International Law, in 1991 Saddam brazenly invaded his Muslim neighbor (Kuwait) to the south (however artificially drawn the borders were way back in Lawrence of Arabia’s day) in order to seize a good-sized gas-pump of the world’s NUMBER ONE energy resource (oil), a seizure which, if allowed, would have given Iraq under his fist-—and then the dreaded Qusay’s for another generation-- undisputed hegemony over the Middle-East and economic influence on a global scale, assuredly protecting, enabling, emboldening, bribing, and enlarging the already well-financed institutions of anti-Western Jihadists of which had only recently been aggressively addressed and begun to be dismantled.

Saddam, a secularist leader, obviously tolerated and even pandered to Jihadists within his own borders, as long as they spat their Jihadist venom at Israel and the West, and not at him.

(6) Saddam only high-tailed it out of Kuwait by force after being given a stern but patient warning by POTUS, whom he responded to by challenging to a fight in “The Mother of all Battles.”

(7) Saddam lobbed SCUD missiles into Israel during the expulsion in the hopes that Israeli retaliation would compel the Arab partners of the coalition to jump ship or to his side. If Israel did not have the discipline and presence of mind to restrain itself, such a ploy had the potential to incite full-blown Jihad and ignite global Armageddon, a price Saddam was spitefully willing to pay for his own survival (i.e. if he was going down, the world was going with him).

(8) In another fit of spite, Saddam ignited oil wells on the hasty retreat, unconscionably creating an ecological disaster and destroying a large supply of oil (which is, once again, the number one energy resource for the civilized world) in the process.

(9) Saddam signed a United Nations Security Council Resolution in 1991 in order to cease hostilities and stay in power and would violate that and FIFTEEN more throughout the 1990’s.

(10) Saddam was behind a 1993 assassination attempt upon the retired POTUS who drove him out of Kuwait.

A foreign leader putting out a vindictive hit on a former POTUS is tantamount to an act of war.

(11) Saddam had a tiled mosaic of the head and shoulders of that POTUS gracing the lobby floor of the international Rashid Hotel, subjecting the facial image to the soles of hundreds of shoes a day, which is a widely-publicized and extremely-undiplomatic Mother Of All Insults.

(and yet it is the very son of that POTUS, POTUS 43, who is held responsible-- by the Bush-haters-- for provoking the “failure in diplomacy” that led to Operation Iraqi Freedom)

(12) Saddam never accounted for the destruction of the documented and/or admitted possession of such bio-weapons as mustard, sarin, VX, and anthrax. All of the Western intelligence agencies, and President Bill Clinton in the 1990’s, and Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, to boot, believed that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction up his sleeve, was a threat to the stability of the Middle East, and, furthermore, was a likely candidate to slide such weapons under the table to terrorist organizations who are bent upon the destruction of Israel, the United States, and then the seizure of Europe by sheer default.

In the hands of Al Qaeda terrorists, a few boxcutters and airplane controls caused the devastation of 9-11. In the hands of an unknown terrorist(s), a few letters containing “high grade, very virulent and sophisticated” anthrax caused the evacuations and quarantines of the Senate Office Building and the U.S. Capitol Building, the potential murder of prominent newsanchor Tom Brokaw, and the actual murders of postal employees and unfortunate recipients of the lethal letters.

With Saddam's character and record considered (as briefly and incompletely itemized above and below), and in the context of weapons-proliferation in the post-9-11 world—-which is the number one issue of concern agreed to by both President Bush and Senator Kerry during the debates-—and the policy of zero tolerance, Saddam’s cooperation consisted of playing “Hide-&-Seek,” “Catch-Me-If-You-Can,” and “Maybe-I-Do-Maybe-I-Don’t” games.

Joe Wilson's claims to the contrary, Niger WAS dealing in yellow cakes and was contacted by North Korea, Libya, Iran, AND Iraq. Saddam was indeed concealing a nuclear centrifuge. And as late as March of 2003, Saddam was trying to acquire long-range missiles from North Korea.

We see how difficult it is, now, during the occupation with a 100,000 boots on the ground and nurturing a friendly government, to keep tabs on who and what is coming and going over the border, and what's being hidden where.

Yet somehow, the Bush-Hating crowd insists that everything would have been transparent and open if we had just let Hans Blix keep running around the country following leads from intelligence sources that we're often flying blind.

(13) On October 31 (Trick or Treat?), 1998, The Iraq Liberation Act was signed by President Clinton, which made regime change an official U.S. policy.

Here are parts of his statement:

Let me be clear on what the U.S. objectives are: The United States wants Iraq to rejoin the family of nations as a freedom-loving and law-abiding member. This is in our interest and that of our allies within the region...

I categorically reject arguments that this is unattainable due to Iraq's history or its ethnic or sectarian make-up. Iraqis deserve and desire freedom like everyone else. The United States looks forward to a democratically supported regime that would permit us to enter into a dialogue leading to the reintegration of Iraq into normal international life.

Give the man a cigar. That was well-put.

(14) Saddam encouraged terrorism against both Israeli military personnel and mall shoppers alike by rewarding the suicide bomber's families with sums ranging from $30,000 to $ 63,000, the total sum of bribes reaching $40,000, 000.

Meanwhile, his people were starving to death.

(15) Saddam felt free to take potshots at American surveillance planes in the No-Fly Zone right up to the time of the invasion itself, in continual contempt of the cease-fire agreement of 1991.

(16) The Al Qaeda terrorist Al-Zarqawi was operating in Afghanistan before he fled following the invasion that ousted the Taliban and decimated and scattered Al Qaeda. He has obviously found easy passage into Iraq, ready residence, and either has familiarity or assistance in finding his way above and below ground. He is identified as the masked judge, jury, and executioner who, with a knife, sawed off the heads of tied and kneeling American, British, and Japanese civilian contract and aid workers while they pleaded for their lives. He is but one of thousands of Jihadist terrorists now congregated in Iraq.

We do indeed see that Jihadist element of the Middle East--the stated enemy of the GWOT-- at work in Iraq right now. They are engaging in kamikaze civilian massacres, the disrupting of the civilian infrastructure, and the attempted sabotage of the germinating Constitutional and democratic government of the good Iraqi people.

From the July 18, 2005 issue of The Weekly Standard, there is a special report on the new evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda, by Stephen F. Hayes & Thomas Joscelyn. Despite the "Expert" insistence by the hyperbolic antiwar elitists--and from the 2004 Democratic presidential ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards-- that Saddam had "nothing to do with Al Qaeda," this follow-up on Stephen Haye's book The Connection makes plain a cooperative nexus between the two that vindicates the president's decision to eliminate Saddam in the early phases of the GWOT.

Here are but a few excerpts:

We have been told by Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden's longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, that Saddam Hussein welcomed young al Qaeda members "with open arms" before the war, that they "entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation," and that the regime "strictly and directly" controlled their activities. We have been told by Jordan's King Abdullah that his government knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents from Zarqawi's group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin Laden's top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999...At the same time, the Iraqis were cultivating a relationship with Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the current top deputy to bin Laden. According to Qassem Hussein Mohammed, a 20-year veteran of Iraqi Intelligence, Zawahiri visited Baghdad in 1992 for a meeting with Hussein.

In a 2002 interview with the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg from a Kurdish prison in northeastern Iraq, the IIS veteran described his duties as a bodyguard for Zawahiri during his visit. This was not Zawahiri's only meeting with top Iraqi officials. According to a May 2003 debriefing of a senior Iraqi Intelligence official, Zawahiri met with Iraqi Intelligence officials in Sudan several times from 1992 to 1995. A foreign intelligence service has corroborated that report, adding that at one of those meetings Zawahiri received blank Yemeni passports from an Iraqi Intelligence official.

In 1993, at Turabi's urging, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam Hussein that the al Qaeda leader and his followers would not engage in any anti-Hussein activities. The Clinton administration later included this development in its sealed indictment of bin Laden in 1998. According to the indictment: "Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.

They have been there and are still there, killing our troops piecemeal not in the hopes of defeating us militarily. They can't. They're fighting on in the hopes that the controversy cooked and stirred up by the Bush-haters here at home will win it for them, providing fuel for the protests by killing and causing mayhem.

Those are 16 reasons above that, cumulatively, more than warranted the removal of such a leader from the political world stage, and they include the 16 violations of the United Nations Resolutions that kept him in power--if obeyed.

And yet, incredibly, the Bush-haters have zeroed-in on "The Sixteen Words" regarding uranium yellow cakes from Niger in the pre-war State of the Union Address , which they insist is a LIE that qualifies as a High Crime and Misdemeanor that justifies regime change here.

What madness is this?

A correlation has become evident with the increased stridency against the Commander in Chief here by the Bush-haters, and the increased audacity of the Jihadists. The Bush-haters,in turn, linked in a symbiotic nexus with the Jihadists, are themselves spurred to greater stridency with each additional casualty, and so they dance together.

An impeachment march on Washington is actually being planned by the Bush-haters for September on the basis of the "illegality" of Operation Iraqi Freedom, with the Downing Street Memo serving as a banner.

Yes. Allah Akbar.

Republicus stands by the mission to defeat those forces and welcome a new Iraq into the global community. Republicus stands by the good Iraqi people who must not be left at the mercy of the terrorists.

Strength and Honor. Long Live the Republic.