:: Da' Militant One's Lair ::

:: Wednesday, July 09, 2003 ::

Memo to Conservative Republicans:

Your boy is in hot water now and what do you do? You fall back on Bill Clinton and scream how he believed Iraq had WMD in 1998 and bombed Iraq. Let's go to the video tape:

Except from Dr. William Piece's Clinton War:

Well, I guess that's sort of a Democratic tradition, but still nearly everyone was surprised when he did it. I mean, that's such breathtaking chutzpah that even some Jews were embarrassed. They were not happy that the war against Iraq that they had been scheming for and urging for so long would be seen as merely a cheap trick to save Bill Clinton from impeachment.

But of course, that's exactly what it is, and that's obvious to everyone with an IQ above 70. That doesn't include the yahoos of the American Legion and similar groups, who like to put on all their medals, salute the flag, and proclaim their loyalty to the commander in chief. But the politicians and media people are not that stupid: crooked, but not stupid. Nevertheless, I was worried right after the attack on Iraq last Wednesday that they would be afraid to say anything against Mr. Clinton's new war. Some of them, of course, were publicly expressing their support for the attack immediately, saying things like, "We should have attacked Saddam a long time ago." And no one wanted to be denounced as an "anti-Semite" for saying anything against the Jews' crusade to destroy Saddam Hussein.

On the other hand, it was easy to see that the brighter ones had figured out that there was no way they could support commander-in-chief Clinton without the stink rubbing off on them. The Jews might be grateful to them at the moment, but in the long run it would look so bad that they didn't want to be associated with it, and so they began a tortured routine of praising the war without mentioning Mr. Clinton. And the impeachment process, which had been derailed for a few hours, was put back on track.

Right after the attack the Republican politicians all were saying darkly that they hoped Clinton had a good excuse for what Congressman Bob Livingston called his "unique" timing. And all Clinton could come up with is that he had to attack before the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which began on December 20, four days after he started the war. He said it would be very offensive to Muslims everywhere if he started the war during Ramadan. When two or three leading Republicans -- Mississippi's Trent Lott, for example -- suggested that he had started the war in an attempt to postpone impeachment, he pretended to be offended. He said, with a phony tone of wounded dignity, "I don't think any serious person would believe that any President would do such a thing." Of course, that's exactly what every serious person did believe. But as I had feared, the politicians didn't have the courage or the honesty to stand on that position, and Lott and the others who had questioned the timing quickly backed down.

One Congressman, who was afraid to let his name be used, told the Washington Times that he had found a great deal of cynicism among senior military leaders in the Pentagon about their commander in chief. They were in daily contact with the White House in the weeks before the war began, and the generals and admirals had noticed that the White House's eagerness to begin bombing Iraq grew in intensity as one undecided Republican after another declared that he would vote to impeach. When the Congressman discussed the timing of the war with the military leaders, they laughed with contempt. They all had the same question: "Why now?" They all considered Clinton's stated excuse to be a pathetic lie.

Clinton hadn't built a coalition against Iraq, he didn't have a clear war plan and hadn't given the Pentagon time to develop one. There was no strategic objective for the attack. Furthermore, on Sunday, December 13, Clinton had told the Pentagon to prepare to launch an assault against Iraq that week. That was two days before the U.N. report claiming that Iraq was not cooperating with weapons inspectors was sent to the White House, late Tuesday night. Clinton waited until receiving the UN report to actually start the bombing, but it was clear to everyone in the Pentagon that that was phony, that he already had made up his mind on Sunday, three days earlier. They were all convinced that they had been ordered to go to war solely to postpone Clinton's impeachment. That's what the top military leaders of our nation believed when they began firing cruise missiles into Iraq on Clinton's orders.

One person in the know who spoke out was former chief U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter. He's certainly no friend of Iraq, and he resigned last August in protest against what he believed was an insufficiently aggressive effort to discover Iraq's weapons facilities. But hours before Clinton attacked Iraq last week, when Ritter knew the attack was coming, he told the New York Post that Richard Butler, the U.N. official in charge of weapons inspection, is collaborating with Clinton and his Jewish advisers rather than doing his U.N. job honestly and correctly. Ritter said, "What Richard Butler did last week with the inspections was a set-up. This was designed to generate a conflict that would justify a bombing." Ritter said that officials in the U.S. government told him that when the weapons inspectors were sent back into Iraq on November 19, after Saddam had capitulated on November 14 to head off an imminent U.S. attack and said he would not interfere with the inspections, the inspectors were secretly instructed to provoke a crisis that could be used as a pretext to begin the war. Which, of course, is exactly what I told you would happen, in my broadcasts of November 21 and November 28. Richard Butler went along with the scheme and produced a phony report saying that Iraq was not cooperating, but Clinton, seeing impeachment looming, couldn't even wait for that report. And the International Atomic Energy Agency, also monitoring the situation in Iraq, reported that the Iraqis were doing everything they could to comply with the weapons inspectors.

END

As you can see, many folks including Scott Ritter believed that Clinton bombed Iraq to save his own hide. No one mentioned the need to bomb Iraq for WMD. So now to hear you use Clinton's decision to bomb Iraq as justification for Bush rings hollow. Keep trying. Basically Bush is as good a liar as you say Clinton was. The business about Iraq, Niger and uranium sales was bogus. The intelligence community knew it and the intelligence committee heard Bush reference the bogus information in his State of the Union Address early this year in January. The Bush Administration only came clean this week about the false claim. Are you saying that in the preceding six months no one in the intelligence community moved to inform Bush that the story was false? Even giving Bush the benefit of the doubt prior to his speech, his minions continued to push the story. Either the intelligence community is thoroughly inept or the Bush Administration perpetuated a lie. Take your pick. Either way, it shows a lack of knowledge and sophistication in dealing with the very volatile Iraq problem. Using Clinton as an alibi is like using Al Capone as a tax law consultant!

:: DM1 7/09/2003 11:23:00 PM [+] ::
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