A fine op-ed piece on how the media has spun the previous Awful Thing Bush Has Botched (his inability to capture Saddam Hussein) into irrelevancy, and how the anti-Bush forces can plan for any eventuality now that Saddam has finally been captured:
What To Say If:
Saddam refuses to co-operate with his interrogators.
The arrest of this man is a sideshow. He clearly knows nothing about the current state of resistance and has played no role in the planning of insurgency. His trial will simply be an exercise in vengeance with no constructive outcome for Iraq.
Saddam sings like a canary, identifying the perpetrators of insurgency.
Saddam is obviously being tortured by his American captors. Or else, they are lying about his testimony and justifying their own persecution of innocent Iraqis on the basis of his alleged “confession”. (Note to broadcasters: these hypotheses need not be stated baldly. They can simply be hinted at or implied by leading questions and incredulous facial expressions.)
RTWT.
(via InstaPundit)
And if all else fails….fall back to the Why hasn’t Osama been caught yet?
Well, Madeline Albright thinks he already has been caught, and is being held by the Bush Administration as a secret October Surprise for next year. Or maybe she’s just joking. Or maybe not.
Why is it a “fall back” to ask about Bin Laden? He’s the threat to us — Hussein never was. Hell, he could barely keep a lid on his enemies in Iraq. He wasn’t going to be threatening any other nation soon.
And before folks get into “we liberated the Iraqi people,” I ask you this: what about Karmov, who is the president of Uzbekistan, one the partners in the Coalition of the Shilling?
He boils his opponents alive. He’s as bad as Hussein, but wait! He has oil and is harder to reach than Hussein was. Let’s be friends!
Sorry, but Hussein wasn’t relevant, and never will be. It’s a sideshow, plain and simple, and has only made the world a more dangerous place, since Al Qaeda is far from broken.
Or have you missed all the bombings around the Middle East since about May or so?
Hussein and Iraq weren’t relevant, weren’t a danger? What planet do you live on, Scott? Hell, even Dean said he was — a year ago. The man launched two major wars in a critical geopolitical area, had confirmed biological, chemical, and nuclear programs, harbored terrorists and terrorist groups, and paid off others. That’s aside from the barbarity of his rule, where the “lid” he kept on his opponents is demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands of bodies in mass graves.
Karmov is irrelevant to the discussion — it’s like arguing that one shouldn’t arrest rapist A because rapist B is still on the loose. Since you reject the idea that grotesque human rights violations can be a contributing justification to invade “a sovereign nation” (though clearly “oil” isn’t sufficient, either), it doesn’t seem worth discussing.
None of this means that OBL shouldn’t be run to ground (assuming he actually is still alive), that al Qa’eda shouldn’t be further targeted, or that the “War on Terrorism” is over and, with the successes in Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein that the world is a perfectly safe place for bunnies and little kids. I think we are safer, but we have a long ways to go before we are as safe as can be practically achieved, and nobody (at least that I’ve heard) is saying otherwise.
In regards to the War on Terra, they’re irrelevant.
I don’t reject the idea of grotesque human rights violations, and you know it. That’s a simple straw man argument tossed out far too often. Our focus is wrong — it should be on AQ and other terrorist organizations. Iraq was not relevant in that war.
Now, does this mean I think it’s okay Saddam was allowed to stay in power? Hell no. He should have been tossed out on ’91, but Poppy didn’t have the courage to follow through. He decided to let that fight pass and proceeded to set up an even worse scenario that now comes to a head.
Hussein never, ever, posed a threat to the US after the ’91 war. He simply lacked the ability to do anything outside of his own borders, thanks to the embargo and the no-fly zones — which, I might add, didn’t help the uprisings Poppy encouraged.
so don’t start on me about Iraq being the Right Thing to do. It wasn’t. It’s only made it worse.
Senator John Glenn had this to say, and I agree:
BLITZER: Senator Glenn, while I have you, I remember interviewing you many times where you were in the U.S. Senate, a member of the Armed Services Committee, a member of the Intelligence Committee. In terms of the war on terrorism, is the American public safer today now that Saddam Hussein has been captured?
GLENN: The American public? Well, I’d be hard pressed to say that, that the American public. I didn’t see Saddam Hussein as being quite the danger that some other people did.
His neighbors were not really afraid of what he was doing over there. We haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction yet. I’m glad we have him. He was a bad man, there’s no doubt about that.
But as far as, do I feel safer because he’s been captured? Well, I’m glad he was captured. But do I feel safer? No, I guess I don’t feel that much safer.
When resources are limited there are times when it certainly is more beneficial to arrest Rapist A while Rapist A is still on the loose.
Say we know where Rapist A is, we are watching him closely, and we can go get him at our leisure, and he can’t do much damage to us in the meantime. Meanwhile, Rapist B is well-hidden, training more rapists, and actively raping people at an ever-increasing rate.
Saddam Hussain != Osama bin Laden.
By stealing resources from the hunt for ObL to go after Hussain, who is considerably LESS a threat to us, we have made American lives *less* safe.