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Yesterday I noted:
The Left has been on the wrong side of history. In fact, it’s becoming so evident, that I would not be surprised if the Left were to start to wake up.
I’m on the West Coast, but the New York Post is distributed near me. Last night I saw this NY Post front page headline:
Per Al Rantel last night on his radio show, New York is traditionally 4 to 1 Democratic. Yet the following is from this front page editorial:
April 14, 2004— The national 9/11 commission has been hijacked by political shills—men and women eager to subordinate truth to partisan advantage; who hold a transitory victory on Election Day more dear than American victory in the war on terror.Tawdry ambition has eclipsed sacred duty; all Americans are diminished, but none more than the families of the 9/11 victims—who expect better from the commission, and certainly deserve it.
...John Kerry could shut it down in a heartbeat, simply by saying: “Stop it!”
Kerry needs to do just that. He must state the obvious: that 9/11 was the work of Islamist fanatics, and that the danger will not have passed until those who make war on America are either killed or in captivity.
It is simply disgraceful that he hasn’t already done so.
Patterico has noted that “the famous PDB was prepared in response to a request from Bush.” The NY Post editorial backs this up:
In sum: The briefing paper was written specifically for the president in direct response to an order from the president!
Read the whole thing.
It seems to me that one of the most important things Bush said last night was this:
For the first time, the civilized world has provided a concerted response to the ideology of terror—a series of powerful, effective blows. The terrorists have lost the shelter of the Taliban and the training camps in Afghanistan. They have lost safe havens in Pakistan. They lost an ally in Baghdad. And Libya has turned its back on terror. They’ve lost many leaders in an unrelenting international manhunt.
This is a key point. Until Bush’s response to 9-11, the civilized world had not determined a suitable response to terrorism.
Many said that it was impossible to find terrorists due to their ability to hide within the populations of nations.
And we all remember how we were told that it would be impossible to root terrorists out of Afghanistan because of their supposedly impenetrable caves.
And so terrorists found that they could go around the world, killing with impunity, losing at most an operative here or there. No country took the actions required to destroy them.
Since 9-11 the world has changed for the terrorists. Now they face the might of entire nations, devoted to hunting them down all over the world. Not surprisingly, terrorist operations are being hounded and dismantled.
Many on the Left would have us turn back the clock. Many on the Left would have us continue to respond to terrorism as if it were a job for the police, ineffectively arresting an operative here or there.
But the clock cannot be turned back. George Bush has seen the inevitable movement of world history. It is inevitable that, when confronted by an unending series of mass murders, the targeted nations would eventually wake up to the danger and use every possible means to bring the terrorists down.
The Left has been on the wrong side of history. In fact, it’s becoming so evident, that I would not be surprised if the Left were to start to wake up.
Along those lines, see this post from American Digest. (via Instapundit).
In a post yesterday, accompanied by two excellent Ramirez political cartoons, I noted that:
In the real world, the CIA and the President are flooded night and day with threat assessments from any number of sources. If you declassified all the documents, you’d see lots of other threats that were possibly imminent.
Today’s Ramirez cartoon:
James Pinkerton claims in Newsday that the recently declassified President’s Daily Brief memo was damaging to Bush:
The Washington Post reported in May 2002 that Bush had received a President’s Daily Brief on Aug. 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But, of course, not everything that’s reported becomes widely known, or is necessarily true. And so for most Americans, yesterday’s 9/11 hearing provided their first occasion to learn, from the highest sources, just what was in that document.
...And we all know what happened the following month.
What we don’t know is the precise sequence of events that led to the government’s Pearl Harbor-like cluelessness on 9/11.
The memo was in August, and the Left claims Bush had the entire month of August and even a week in September 2001, to track down the 9-11 plot and halt it. Sure, that makes sense. Sometimes it seems like people can’t tell the difference between what works in a Hollywood movie, and what makes sense in the real world. In movies, a month is plenty of time to stop any sort of a plot. Even 24 hours is plenty of time. But in the real world, it’s a different story. In the real world, the CIA and the President are flooded night and day with threat assessments from any number of sources. If you declassified all the documents, you’d see lots of other threats that were possibly imminent. What does the Left think Bush should have done—shut down all airlines for the rest of the year just in case Al-Qaeda was going to do something using an airplane?
In any case, the Left has misunderstood the memo. Deborah Orin, in Newsday, gets it right:
The CIA’s Aug. 6, 2001 memo for President Bush should pose serious new credibility problems for the nation’s spy agency, not for Bush.
Democrats such as 9/11 commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste have sought to paint the memo as a CIA warning that Bush ignored a month before the terror attacks – but it turns out to be nothing of the sort.
Far from sounding the alarm about an imminent risk that al Qaeda would hijack airplanes, the CIA pooh-poohed the idea as a “sensational” claim that couldn’t be verified.
“We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting such as that from a [foreign intelligence] service in 1998 saying that [Osama] bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Sheik” [Omar Abdel-Rahman] and other U.S. extremists,” the CIA wrote.
That foreign intelligence report came in while Bill Clinton was president, but three years later the CIA had found nothing to back it up and thus seemed to downplay it – the very opposite of issuing a red-alert to Bush.
Andrew Sullivan has these moving words on Iraq:
But the response to this cannot be withdrawal. Military power still matters; and the coalition has the overwhelming advantage. In some ways, perhaps, the war has now entered the most critical phase – more critical than Afghanistan or the war against Saddam. This war is for the future against the past, for representative government against a vicious theocratic dictatorship from the Leninist vanguards of the Sadrists.
Damn right. Turning Iraq into a democracy would be a massive step forward for the entire world. It would deny the power of the nation state of Iraq to the terrorists; it would show the Arab world the way to the their own future, a future of wealth instead of poverty, freedom instead of oppression, and achievement in place of dispair.
But no one said it would be easy. In calling for us to cut and run at the first sign of any real difficulty in our efforts there—which is exactly what this is—the left seeks to abandon the war on terror and to strengthen those who want to bring more terrorist attacks to U.S. soil.
And let’s face it—the rioting appears to be confined to only two cities in Iraq:
The top U.S. commander in Iraq acknowledged today that two cities remain at least partially under the control of Iraqi insurgents and that the latest violence could go on “for some time.” Amid heavy fighting with Sunni and Shiite Muslim rebels, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said that forces controlled by radical cleric Muqtader Sadr have been attempting to sabotage Iraq’s move to self-governance and are trying to intimidate Iraqi moderates. “My assessment is that we will continue to see this violence for some time until Muqtader Sadr turns himself in or his militia is destroyed,” he said at a news conference.
If there are some Iraqis who hope to be the new Husseins, who hope to return to the old ways of rule by terror and torture of their fellow citizens, with themselves in charge—then they are the enemy. Let them understand that the Coalition of nations they are now facing, will deny them that opportunity.
Kennedy: Iraq is Bush’s Vietnam
Yadda yadda yadda—according to former Clinton advisor Dr. Lauri Milroy today on radio host Al Rantel’s show, the vast majority of Iraq is peaceful; the rioting is limited to a small geographic location.
The lack of rioting in Baghdad is attested to in words and photos here by an American working there.
Two days ago Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for his supportes to “terrorize them,” meaning the Coalition forces. This led to Sundays violence in Iraq.
Today an Iraqi court has issued al-Sadr to be arrested on charges of murder:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – An Iraqi judge has issued a murder arrest warrant for a radical Shiite Muslim cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, for the slaying of another Shiite leader, coalition officials said Monday....Al-Sadr and his supporters were responsible Sunday for some of the worst violence since the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Don’t miss this post regarding Fallujah from Iraqi blogger Mohammed, at IraqTheModel.
Like most Iraqis I was shocked to what happened in Fallujah and till now the Iraqi street condemns what happened and reject it. Even the mosques today including the major one in Fallujah condemned the horrible crime.
Notice he says “Even the mosques… condemned the horrible crime.” That sounds like it’s unusual when the mosques condemn a terrorist action. That’s not a surprise at all. What’s a surprise is the difference this may show us between what the mosques say and what “most Iraqis” believe. Can it be that a majority of Iraqis believe that the mosques are bloodthirsty and out of touch with their beliefs? I’ll ask about this in a comment on IraqTheModel, and I’ll post here later on any responses I get.
Back to this great article:
But what I want to do today is an attempt to remind the others of our tragedy. You can now comprehend the extent of the crime that took place in Iraq for the past 35 years. We were ruled by people like those who committed the crime in Fallujah. Every day we were shocked by scenes like these for our beloved ones our children our thinkers and artists; our bodies were mutilated for 35 years. You have the right to be shocked and we have the right to scream out loud this is the scene we were forced to see again and again for decades; amputation of limbs decapitation, cutting tongues, casting limbs in concrete, mincing human flesh. You probably have heard of Uday’s iron coffin but have you heard of the the Ba’ath flame? Which meant that the prisoner would be chained and stripped of his clothes and then he would be splashed with gasoline to be set on fire until he dies. You can imagine what the comrades of such prisoners would feel while the see and hear the screams and feel the smell of the burning human flesh. I wonder if you saw the tape that Al-Jazeera put right after the war where 3 prisoners were wrapped with dynamite to be blasted in a bloody party so that the barbarians can enjoy their revenge.... We used to see brothers and friends disappear after going to work or shopping without knowing what happened to them.
...We’re not cowards and we will never allow those people to make a come back.You must remember very well that we’re fighting together and we face death every day, more than 500 IP members were killed and many Iraqi contractors or labor men and women who worked with the CPA to build a new Iraq but we will never despair and we’re ready to give more sacrifices so that what happened will never recur.
...My sincere condolences to the families of the victims. Our fight is one and your loss is ours.
Is that not moving? Read the whole thing.
How, after becoming aware of this, can any Americans continue to support the current positions of the Left?
In opposing our efforts in Iraq, in calling for the return of our troops, the Left in the U.S. is assisting terrorists such as those in Fallujah, and seeking to leave those terrorists free to attack the U.S. and all the world’s democracies. The drive by the Left to obtain political power is at the expense of the safety of our nation.
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