Thursday, June 17, 2004
Commission Impossible
From tonight's Capital Report Interview on CNBC:
GLORIA BORGER: In hindsight, Mr. Vice President, are you disappointed in the quality of the intelligence that you received before launching an attack against Iraq?
Vice Pres. CHENEY: I can't say that, Gloria. I think the decision we made was exactly the right one. Everything I know today, everything the president knows today, we would have done exactly the same thing. Saddam Hussein was an evil man. He'd launched two wars. He'd produced and used weapons of mass destruction in the past. He had provided safe harbor and sanctuary for terrorists. He was paying $25,000 a pop to the families of suicide bombers who'd kill Israelis. He hosted Abu Nidal in Baghdad, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, had established a relationship with Al Qaeda. This was an evil man who had tried previously to expand his influence in the area and we did exactly the right thing.
Now could we have better intelligence? You always want better intelligence. If you had complete knowledge on these kinds of decisions and issues, you wouldn't need a president to make the decision; some robot could. The President has to make judgments. You go to the president of the United States and you lay down a very strong case that this guy is all the things I've said plus had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction program, tell him it's a slam dunk case and you've got the ongoing evidence of a relationship with Al Qaeda and we had 9/11. 9/11 changed a lot. Remember what happened after 9/11. We said henceforth we will no longer make a distinction between the terrorists and states that sponsor or have safe harbor sanctuary for terrorists. If you're going to host a terrorist, you're going to be held responsible for their actions just as much as the terrorists are, which is what we did in Afghanistan. And it's very important for us to remember that when 9/11 occurred, it forced us to look at the world a new way, that part of the world in particular, where in fact Saddam Hussein operated.
Amen, Cheney. What people keep missing in this whole Iraq/Al Qaeda issue is context. People see a misleading headline such as "9-11 Commission Finds no Ties Between Iraq and Al Qaeda" and don't bother to read the article. There are two separate questions -- whether Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborated on 9-11, and whether Iraq and Al Qaeda had a relationship at all. The first is separate from the second, and the lack of distinction in recent political discourse is contributing to why the public is confused. Many on the political left are more interested in deceiving the public (to discredit Bush) than discovering the truth. If this wasn't an election year, you can bet some of the methods of reporting would be different.
Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda independent of 9-11 have been well-documented. Obviously, we don't always know what was said. Although there's evidence of numerous connections and meetings, there's some debate as to whether it was in the context of collaboration, planning, conversation, etc. We know bin Laden met with Iraqi intelligence in 1995 and 1996 for assistance with making weapons; we know about Zarqawi's relationship and think we know about Atta's. But in many cases, we just knew the two forces were talking to each other; so in essence, the debate is whether the Bush administration theory that they were conspirators is supported by the facts. What's getting lost is the fact that not finding a lot of evidence to support one theory isn't the same as finding evidence to support an opposing theory.
Regardless, the action in Iraq had more to do with the timetables set up under Bush I, Clinton, and U.N. resolutions -- specifically, noncompliance of resolutions 660 and 678 (in 1990), 687 (in 1991), 1284 (in 1999), and 1441 (in 2002) made his ouster justified (hell, even mandated/required) by international law. The fact that a few European countries were derelect in their duty to fulfill these obligations (often because they had economic interests in Saddam's Iraq) does not make the decided action less justified. The only people who are upset that Iraq wasn't involved in 9-11 are those who mistakenly believe that was why we went in -- they were only related in the sense that, as Bush put it, it's clear that the stakes are higher now, that the problems of other nations could be problems in our backyard as well. Whether Iraq would have ever attacked us personally is somewhat of a non-issue, since it was never claimed that Iraq was an imminent threat -- only that we should pre-emptively act, as Bush repeatedly stated, before the threat was imminent. If we also knew Iraq was having conversations with Al Qaeda, the PLO, and Abu Nidal, it's not unreasonable to assume they may have had some similar interests or goals. But again, whether or not Saddam and Al Qaeda had relations or not is somewhat of a non-issue, since the resolutions Iraq was in breach of spanned 12 years and probably would/should have been acted on whether 9-11 happened or not.
Update: The Drudge Report reminds us today of Clinton's Justice Department's detailing of the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq in 1998, during the original Grand Jury Indictment of bin Laden (read the full text here.) Documents like this (and there are many) help illustrate how the Bush-haters' attempts at partisan revisionist history just won't work on the literate.
From tonight's Capital Report Interview on CNBC:
GLORIA BORGER: In hindsight, Mr. Vice President, are you disappointed in the quality of the intelligence that you received before launching an attack against Iraq?
Vice Pres. CHENEY: I can't say that, Gloria. I think the decision we made was exactly the right one. Everything I know today, everything the president knows today, we would have done exactly the same thing. Saddam Hussein was an evil man. He'd launched two wars. He'd produced and used weapons of mass destruction in the past. He had provided safe harbor and sanctuary for terrorists. He was paying $25,000 a pop to the families of suicide bombers who'd kill Israelis. He hosted Abu Nidal in Baghdad, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, had established a relationship with Al Qaeda. This was an evil man who had tried previously to expand his influence in the area and we did exactly the right thing.
Now could we have better intelligence? You always want better intelligence. If you had complete knowledge on these kinds of decisions and issues, you wouldn't need a president to make the decision; some robot could. The President has to make judgments. You go to the president of the United States and you lay down a very strong case that this guy is all the things I've said plus had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction program, tell him it's a slam dunk case and you've got the ongoing evidence of a relationship with Al Qaeda and we had 9/11. 9/11 changed a lot. Remember what happened after 9/11. We said henceforth we will no longer make a distinction between the terrorists and states that sponsor or have safe harbor sanctuary for terrorists. If you're going to host a terrorist, you're going to be held responsible for their actions just as much as the terrorists are, which is what we did in Afghanistan. And it's very important for us to remember that when 9/11 occurred, it forced us to look at the world a new way, that part of the world in particular, where in fact Saddam Hussein operated.
Amen, Cheney. What people keep missing in this whole Iraq/Al Qaeda issue is context. People see a misleading headline such as "9-11 Commission Finds no Ties Between Iraq and Al Qaeda" and don't bother to read the article. There are two separate questions -- whether Iraq and Al Qaeda collaborated on 9-11, and whether Iraq and Al Qaeda had a relationship at all. The first is separate from the second, and the lack of distinction in recent political discourse is contributing to why the public is confused. Many on the political left are more interested in deceiving the public (to discredit Bush) than discovering the truth. If this wasn't an election year, you can bet some of the methods of reporting would be different.
Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda independent of 9-11 have been well-documented. Obviously, we don't always know what was said. Although there's evidence of numerous connections and meetings, there's some debate as to whether it was in the context of collaboration, planning, conversation, etc. We know bin Laden met with Iraqi intelligence in 1995 and 1996 for assistance with making weapons; we know about Zarqawi's relationship and think we know about Atta's. But in many cases, we just knew the two forces were talking to each other; so in essence, the debate is whether the Bush administration theory that they were conspirators is supported by the facts. What's getting lost is the fact that not finding a lot of evidence to support one theory isn't the same as finding evidence to support an opposing theory.
Regardless, the action in Iraq had more to do with the timetables set up under Bush I, Clinton, and U.N. resolutions -- specifically, noncompliance of resolutions 660 and 678 (in 1990), 687 (in 1991), 1284 (in 1999), and 1441 (in 2002) made his ouster justified (hell, even mandated/required) by international law. The fact that a few European countries were derelect in their duty to fulfill these obligations (often because they had economic interests in Saddam's Iraq) does not make the decided action less justified. The only people who are upset that Iraq wasn't involved in 9-11 are those who mistakenly believe that was why we went in -- they were only related in the sense that, as Bush put it, it's clear that the stakes are higher now, that the problems of other nations could be problems in our backyard as well. Whether Iraq would have ever attacked us personally is somewhat of a non-issue, since it was never claimed that Iraq was an imminent threat -- only that we should pre-emptively act, as Bush repeatedly stated, before the threat was imminent. If we also knew Iraq was having conversations with Al Qaeda, the PLO, and Abu Nidal, it's not unreasonable to assume they may have had some similar interests or goals. But again, whether or not Saddam and Al Qaeda had relations or not is somewhat of a non-issue, since the resolutions Iraq was in breach of spanned 12 years and probably would/should have been acted on whether 9-11 happened or not.
Update: The Drudge Report reminds us today of Clinton's Justice Department's detailing of the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq in 1998, during the original Grand Jury Indictment of bin Laden (read the full text here.) Documents like this (and there are many) help illustrate how the Bush-haters' attempts at partisan revisionist history just won't work on the literate.
