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If Bush and Blair actually were clever enough to concoct sufficient risks to justify hostilities, they surely would be crafty enough to "discover" enough botulinum somewhere to vindicate Gulf War II. Not yet having found these weapons, however, these two either have half a brain each or honestly still seek the munitions that Hussein hid in Iraq or elsewhere, or possibly destroyed to avoid embarrassment. As this search continues, those craving Bush's and Blair's scalps should recall what Coalition forces have discovered in Iraq:
"More than 250,000 people were detained or murdered by the government of Saddam Hussein," declares a Human Rights Watch statement, "and almost all of them have relatives who now want justice, or physical remains, or at the very least information about what happened to their loved ones." These Iraqis were given the death penalty, most likely with neither appeals nor legal counsel. Any of them gladly would have traded places with convicted cop killer and celebrated American death row denizen, Mumia Abu-Jamal. Listen: Has the Left ever been this atypically quiet?
"We've found plenty of torture chambers," Bernard Kerik said in the June 1 New York Post. The former NYPD chief is in Baghdad attempting to restore order. "I can't fathom why every government building here has a jail in the basement."
In an article in the June 30 National Review, Mansoor Ijaz, a terrorism expert and chairman of New York-based Crescent Investment Management, chillingly connects the dots between Iraq and international terrorism. He recalls that Abu Abbas, architect of the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking recently was found living in Iraq, as was Khala Khadr al-Salahat, the alleged designer of the radio-bomb that demolished Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, killing all 259 on board and 11 on the ground. Ijaz cites an Iraqi intelligence document in which the secret Mukhabarat invited a senior al Qaeda operative to Baghdad from the Sudan. The correspondence said: "We may find in this envoy a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden." The al Qaeda representative indeed visited Baghdad in March 1998, five months before the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania exploded, killing 224 people, 12 of them American, and wounding some 5,000 others, many of them Africans and Muslims. Manhattan federal judge Harold Baer, meanwhile, ordered Hussein and Iraq's former government to pay $104 million in damages to the families of two men murdered in the September 11 World Trade Center attacks. "I conclude that plaintiffs have shown, albeit barely...that Iraq provided material support to bin Laden and al Qaeda," Baer ruled May 7. He found that expert testimony by former CIA chief James Woolsey and remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations constituted "sufficient basis for a reasonable jury to draw inferences" of Iraqi guilt. Attorney James Beasley Jr., who represents the bereaved families of Timothy Soulas and George Smith, told the New York Daily News: "This is the first finding, a judicial finding, that says Iraq was involved in 9/11."
"This place is disgusting," one U.S. Marine told Newsweek about an Hussein palace equipped with gold-handled toilet plungers. "All the people we saw in the south were starving."
"We were here to protect people and property," one soldier said of his April mission. "But in the early days, we had to choose, and we chose people." Deep down, those who scream for Iraq's weapons of mass death right now! probably hope they remain concealed. If they never materialize, these people will focus on the absence of equipment rather than the presence of evil, now vanquished, and thus dismiss Iraq's liberation as a worthless escapade. But if the mustard gas canisters do appear, these detractors will claim they were planted. Bush and Blair toppled Saddam Hussein, but opposite these naysayers, they never can win. — Mr. Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service. |
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Washington to London and beyond, critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom loudly
demand to see Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass murder. Did anthrax, nerve
gas, and perhaps even plutonium imminently threaten Western security,
or did President Bush and England's Tony Blair fabricate such things to
fuel their rout of the Baathist regime?
More than 80 mass graves have emerged in recent weeks, the Washington
Post's Sharon Waxman reports. They have contained prisoners, military
deserters, dissident Shiites and, often, children. At Salman Pak, one
grave with 115 bodies in it appears to have been filled in early April,
just before Baghdad was freed. So far, the remains of some 3,100 victims
have been identified, the Defense Department estimates. This figure could
climb far higher.
