Publius' Forum

-By Warner Todd Huston

Thursday, June 15th, was Democratic Party Cut and Run day in the House. Led by the increasingly senile Rep. Jack Murtha (D, PA) 149 Democrats voted to tuck our tails between our legs and run, run, run. Following their Party's Vietnam "victory" (That of defeating the USA) these 149 Democrats sent the clear signal to any and all terrorists that anything they do against us will work. That we are truly the “paper tiger” that Ossama bin Ladden claimed we were so many years ago after he witnessed the weakness of Clinton’s responses to terrorist outrages against us.

On the floor of the House these weaklings spouted one lie and misconstruction after another in their efforts to "prove" how Bush and our military are failures. One of the worst of all is the aforementioned former Marine, Jack Murtha.

Before I go on with an example of his dissembling, I should say that past military experience does not equate to automatic correctness in matters of policy. A veteran can be just as wrong on the issues as anyone else. After all both Tim McVeigh of Oklahoma bombing infamy and Lee Harvey Oswald of JFK assassination fame were both US military vets. I don't think too many would give either of them a pass merely because of their past service.

Now, to some of the lies spewed in the House. (These transcripts courtesy of Radioblogger.com)

Murtha said the following:

All of us want to find a way to prevail in Iraq. This is a civil war, and we're caught in this civil war. There's less than a thousand al Qaeda in Iraq. They've diminished al Qaeda. But we're caught in this civil war between 100,000 Shiias, and 20,000 Sunnis fighting with each other.

No, Mr. Murtha. You don't want to "prevail in Iraq" you just want to run home to Mommy like the kid that got hit too hard in the neighborhood football game. Further more, you know full well that these numbers you just used are not confirmable at all. You made them up out of your rear end, like you do most of your "facts". Furthermore, it was interesting how you seemed to tie the diminishing of Al Qaeda to the Iraqis. It is the US military, Mr. Murtha, that has diminished Al Qaeda, not the Iraqis involved in your mythical civil war. It is only the last 5 months that the Iraqi forces have become proficient enough to begin taking up their duties, allowing US forces to take a step back in many areas.

Another Democratic Party leader in the House, Rep. Jane Harmon (D, CA) who is the Democratic chair of the Intelligence Committee tried her hand at the smoke and mirrors game, as well.

We were all wrong. Overriding the advice of intelligence professionals, administration officials put stock in bogus sources like Curveball, and self-promoters like Ahmad Chalabi. But simply calling Iraq an intelligence failure ignores the larger policy failures that created the false momentum toward war. The administration cherrypicked intelligence, and hyped the threat. They talked in ominous tones about mushroom clouds, even though many questioned evidence suggesting Saddam had nuclear weapons capability. They made a mantra of the claim that 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta met with Iraqi agents in Prague, a claim that has been thoroughly discredited.

Mrs. Harmon, the intelligence that Bush used as a prelude to entering Iraq was the same intelligence believed by every nation on the planet that had interests or information on the subject. That includes other Middle Eastern nations who advised the US that Saddam surely had WMDs and was prepared to use them. So, there was no "cherrypicking" of intelligence if every OTHER nation thought the same things about Saddam's Iraq as did we.

Also, there is no reason to call Iraq an "intelligence failure". Perhaps some of what we thought we knew about Iraq previously was incorrect, but a few incorrect assumptions do not equal a total failure. And, if we were truly mired in a time of “failed intelligence”, why did we find a communiqué in the possession of Al Qaeda members in Iraq that said, "time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance." Seems to me like we are finding useful enough intelligence and have acted upon it quickly enough to deal Al Qaeda a severe blow, to put it mildly.

Now for her outright lie, no one talked in "ominous tones about mushroom clouds" in the run up to invasion. Bush talked about preventing Saddam even getting the capability to further threaten the world with his aggression, but no one said he was going to nuke anyone.

By the way, the Prague claim is still believed by some foreign intelligence services. Besides, there is plenty of other evidence of an Iraq connection to terror groups so we don’t have to rely on the admittedly shaky grounds of the Prague claim (not that it was thought shaky then). Zarqawi is known to have been in Iraq before we entered that country, as is his putative replacement, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir. Not to mention the thousands of dollars that Saddam paid to families of suicide bombers in the Palestinian Authority. Saddam was not in any way innocent of supporting terrorism, the kind that threatens not only the US but every other country as well.

It should also be noted that we would never have killed Zarqawi, a man responsible for so many murders and terror attacks that it is impossible to count, if we had pulled out of Iraq and ran home like the Democrats wanted us to do so many years ago. And, since he was already IN Iraq before we got there it simply cannot be said that we somehow “created” him.

Last I will excerpt some of Representative Ike Skelton's (D, MO) comments.

There are two ongoing wars. The war against terror, which has genesis in Afghanistan, and we did the right thing going in there. We're still chasing bin Laden, and someday we'll get him. We toppled the Taliban. And then of course, we went into Iraq, based upon the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and we're there. ... We have an insurgency there, which is different and distinct from terrorists. The insurgency is composed of Baathists, Fedayeen, Sunni who were basically in charge under Saddam Hussein. This is their attempt to knock down the government that is there, and to establish their own, far from being the terrorists that we went after in Afghanistan.

Wow, is that one filled with nonsense.

How is terrorism localized solely in Afghanistan? Has Skelton not heard of the attacks in Indonesia, England, Spain, Egypt and so many other Nations. Perhaps he missed that little thing we like to call “9/11”? No, Mr. Skelton, terrorism is not a product of Afghanistan, but one of a worldwide ideology that has been threatening and killing since the 1990’s.

Again, this mantra of having gone into Iraq “based upon the threat of weapons of mass destruction”. This is not now, nor was it ever the sole basis for going into Iraq. It was only one of many reasons.

And this claim that the insurgency is “different and distinct from terrorists” is also a half-truth. There certainly are old Ba’athist holdovers that are using terror tactics to attempt to regain power, but saying that all these insurgents are somehow distinct from terrorists is absurd when many of them are funded by Iran and Syria, two of the biggest state sponsors of terrorism in the world.

Still, what does it matter if we have in one group Wahhabist terrorists under Al Qaeda and another being supported by Sunni terrorists from Iran? BOTH are terrorists groups, BOTH have declared war on the USA and BOTH are dangerous to the entire world. Why attack one but not the other, especially when they often share goals and work together even if loosely or infrequently?

This mindless focus on only Al Qaeda is the sort of foolishness that proves that Democrats don’t understand how complicated this entire issue even is. It shows us that they have no clue how many goals coincide between these groups and how intertwined they are in many ways.

This along with their opposition to the president’s intelligence gathering with the NSA (the inaptly named “Domestic spying” program) shows that Democrats do not want to beat the forces aligned against us, that they want to wrap the USA in a cocoon of isolationism, and that they don’t care about what is good for the USA but only what will defeat George W. Bush.

It should be noted that the NSA surveillance program has been proven as the reason that Al Qaeda dropped their plans to gas attack the New York subways that was just revealed in the last few days. So, the Democrats were wrong in opposing that plan as well.

Democrats are weak on defense, against the US military, and want to retreat from the world. Every political move they make proves this conclusion correct.