Hitting Softballs

A friend took issue with Prez Bush's words in Jerusalem yesterday, specifically this part where he spoke about democracy spreading throughout the Middle East.

From Cairo and Riyadh to Baghdad and Beirut, people will live in free and independent societies, where a desire for peace is reinforced by ties of diplomacy, tourism and trade. Iran and Syria will be peaceful nations, where today's oppression is a distant memory and people are free to speak their minds and develop their talents. And al-Qaida, Hezbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognize the emptiness of the terrorists' vision and the injustice of their cause.

He put his concerns into an e-mail last night, and I didn't get a chance to answer him today, so ...

You often tell me, "it isn't so, just because you say it's so..."

This sage advice [Suck up! (I love it.)] can be directly applied to today's comments, and in fact, his entire policy for the region.

"We'll be welcomed as liberators..."

As it happens, we were welcomed as liberators. But that was before Iraq turned John Kerry on us and didn't welcome us as liberators after they welcomed us as liberators. Let me count the countries where people pray that some day they will be welcoming us as liberators ...

"Mission accomplished."

Granted, not a perfect PR moment, but it's been exploited by the Lying Left. They know the mission that was referenced was the toppling of Saddam's brutal, repressive, murdering rein, a mission that had, in fact, had been accomplished.

"Saddam Hussein is proliferating WMDs..."

I'm amazed that as bright my friend is, he still repeats these easily rebuttable lies. He must know that our intelligence matched up against Germany's and England's and Russia's. He must know that his own beloved Bill Clinton thought Saddam had WMDs. He must know that Saddam was squirreling away money he stole from Oil-for-Food, intending to spend it on WMDs the first moment he could. And he must know that Saddam frustrated UN weapons inspectors at every turn, increasing the rationality of the "Saddam has WMDs" position.

And on, and on, and on...

Bottom line, it is not even close to so, yet he continues to say it is
so.

So because democracy hasn't spread throughout the Middle East in five short years, we're supposed to give up on the entire concept and leave that entire huge part of the world continue in its totalitarian, Islamo-theocratic dungeon? And leave the future of the world to the jihadists?

We have two alternatives: Hide behind our borders, something al-Qaeda taught us we cannot do, or continue to try to bring liberation and freedom to the oppressed people on our planet. I'll choose the latter.

Will MSM Cover Saddam-al-Qaida Links?

Libs love to laugh at W for claiming there were ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, relying on the old canard that Sunni and Shi'ia don't mix. I wonder if their laughter will wane upon reading this:

This ought to be big news. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.

The Weekly Standard news item is based on a report gleaned from 600,000 documents from the Saddam era, including letters, memos, computer files, audiotapes, and videotapes. From the report's abstract:

Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance
of and, in some way, a 'de facto' link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam's use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime.

Weekly Standard gives us this summary of some key report findings:

In 1993, as Osama bin Laden's fighters battled Americans in Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group to join the battle there.

For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq.

According to a 1993 internal Iraqi intelligence memo, the regime was supporting a secret Islamic Palestinian organization dedicated to "armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests."

In the 1990s, Iraq's military intelligence directorate trained and equipped "Sudanese fighters."

In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered "financial and moral support" to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi jihadist groups.

That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists.

So Saddam's interplay with terrorists not only included al-Qaeda, but went far beyond it, posing multiple threats to America on multiple fronts.

Will America read about this in their daily paper or see it on their nightly news? With the Weekly Standard just posting the story, it's too early to tell -- but somehow I feel that in the end, this will be passed of as just a story a neocon rag ran, discounting the report behind it in order to keep the mythology of the "war that started with a lie" intact.

500,000 Iraqis Did Not Die

A few months after the notorious and suspect Johns Hopkins/Lancet study of civilian deaths in Iraq was issued, a new study by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government has issued a new study estimating 500,000 fewer war-related civilian deaths.

The Hopkins study pegged the death count at 655,000, a number no one by anti-war fanatics (and some Dem prez wannabes) accepted as anything other than hysteria. The new study says 151,000 civilian Iraqis have died violent deaths since the start of the war, 95% from military operations, insurgent attacks or sectarian violence.

(Certainly, 151,000 violent deaths is an awful thing, but by comparison, between 24,000 and 40,000 civilians died in a single night in the bombing of Dresden, and in just two years the Nazis were able to shrink the Warsaw ghetto's population from 400,000 to 70,000.)

WaPo's report on the new study highlights why the counts are so different:

Both teams used the same method -- a random sample of houses throughout the country. For the new study, however, surveyors visited 23 times as many places and interviewed five times as many households. Surveyors also got more outside supervision in the recent study; that wasn't possible in the spring of 2006 when the Johns Hopkins survey was conducted. (emphasis added)

Given that the same method was used, the broader sampling ensures more accurate results. The methodology was apparently much better as well:

"Overall, this is a very good study," said Paul Spiegel, a medical epidemiologist at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Geneva. "What they have done that other studies have not is try to compensate for the inaccuracies and difficulties of these surveys, triangulating to get information from other sources."

Les Roberts, who was involved in the Hopkins/Lancet study also praised the new study as more accurate.

"My gut feeling is that most of the difference between the two studies is a reluctance to report to the government a death due to violence," he said. "If your son is fighting the government and died, that may not be something you'd want to admit to the government."

Strangely, today WaPo said the Hopkins/Lancet study pegged the count at 601,000. Did they not check their own archives for the 655,000 figure? Does time heal mortal wounds?

Unfortunately, the new Iraq/WHO study, which you can read in its entirety here, does not include a break-down of violent deaths among the three war-related causes -- military ops, insurgent attacks or sectarian violence. If the breakdown were available, I'm sure it would show Islamists to be responsible than Americans for the deaths of Iraqis. I'm looking forward to that study.

Even so, the new study has deflated a Great Canard of the anti-war movement.

"Great Canard?" some may ask. Well, click here to see how the foaming-mouthers have falsely extrapolated the false Hopkins/Lancet study to create a 1.1 million civilian death count.

Now comes the test: See how tenaciously the Left holds on to the 655,000 figure, or the 1.1 million or the 17 kazillion figure, rather than acknowledge that they are playing with numbers even their creators now reject.

No matter what numbers they use, they will continue to fault the U.S. invasion for all of Iraq's woes, conveniently forgetting what was going on there before the invasion. Under Saddam Hussien:

• Between 100,000 and 200,000 Kurds were killed, more than all the violent deaths since the invasion
• The crazy war Saddam started against Iran resulted in more than 1 million deaths.
• 85,000 died as a result of crazy war against Kuwait
• An unknown number if Shi'a were killed after the Kuwait war when Hussein brutally suppressed their quest for freedom.
• By the Left's accounting, 100,000 children died during the post-war period from disease and malnutrition, they say were caused by sanctions but were indeed caused by Saddam's refusal to comply with the sanctions, and his ability to siphon aid money off into humanitarian palace-building efforts.

(All except the last bullet sourced to Wikipedia)

Will any of this matter to the anti-war Left? No; they don't let facts bother them. But to the more rational among us, the new study is confirmation that our liberation of Iraq has resulted, as we all knew, in a huge net gain for humanity, even at the tragic cost of 151,000 civilians, Iraqi police and Army losses, and our own military losses.

The deaths of Islamists insurgents is in itself a net gain for humanity, so their body count goes in the "gain" column, not the "loss" column -- another benefit of the war.

Have You Heard Them, General Tom?

With apologies to David Bowie for the headline, and a quick answer "Yes" to the question, let's get on with Gen. Tom McInerney's statement today on Fox News regarding Saddam Hussein's secret tapes.

I'd forgotten about them frankly, and in case you have too, here's some background. They constitute at least twenty hours of Saddam acting like Nixon, recording his most secret conversations. Siezed after the fall of Baghdad, they have been mostly kept under wraps by the US command since then.

It's evident from the limited translated transcripts that were released that Saddam was mad for WMDs and dedicated to trouncing UN efforts to get info on his programs, yet they stay buried in secrecy.

The Left is convinced they're buried because they contain definitive proof that Saddam wasn't pursuing WMDs -- but they're stuck in the denial quagmire. McInerney's explanation is much more compelling: That Russia, China and other "allies" were so complicit in arming Saddam that we have decided to keep the tapes secret.

Well, fie on that! Let the truth be told, and let the cards lie where they fall.

Graham Ambushed By Ex-Abu Ghraib CO

Elanor Clift, fresh from calling global warming deniers akin to holocaust deniers, jumped at the opportunity to attend the opening of the Kennedy-Krafted (Rory, RFK's daughter, born six months after his assassination) film "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib." I amost didn't read the article ... but I was in the mood for a little righteous indignation at leftyscribes. I had a couple pleasant surprises.

After the usual Clift-clatter ...

The administration’s war policies are like a Band-Aid slowly being pulled off. The lies, the faulty intelligence, the recriminations, and now—thanks to a new documentary by filmmaker Rory Kennedy, “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib”—the spotlight is back on the infamous prison where revelations of abuse and sexual humiliation destroyed what was left of America’s moral high ground.

... came this very interesting passage:

[Ted] Kennedy called the investigations into what happened at Abu Ghraib “a basic whitewash” because no high-ranking officials were held accountable. [Lindsey] Graham said the abuses were not systemic, that this was “sadism on the night shift,” and it was up to the commander on the ground to keep the young soldiers in line.

To Graham’s evident surprise, the commander was in the audience. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski rose to her feet to challenge Graham’s assertion that she should have been court-martialed. With her gray hair pulled tight into a bun and wearing a soft-gray knit suit, she lit into Graham, saying, “I asked for a court-martial. They didn’t want me in a courtroom because they didn’t want to hear the truth.”

Karpinski was demoted in rank but did not serve jail time. In the film, she talks about “begging” for resources to handle what had become “a huge mass of humanity thrown into a mud pit.” Abu Ghraib, by September 2003, housed 6,000 prisoners and had only 300 military police guarding them.

Graham sputtered a bit at being sandbagged, but was unmoved.

What a moment that must have been! I don't have a lot of sympathy for Karpinski, but putting a self-aggrandizing old coot like Graham on the spot ... well, bully for her.

Clift also actually put some decent perspective in this piece, noting:

Thirty thousand people were executed at Abu Ghraib during Saddam Hussein’s regime, most of them hung from huge meat hooks. The hooks are still there in the film; pictures of Saddam still adorn the walls. Wild dogs roam the grounds trying to dig up the dead.

Thirty-thousand dead -- mostly the victims of political murders or ethnic cleansing -- in just one popular Saddam venue, and the Left howls about the unrighteousness of our cause, including writers like Clift.

hat-tip: Real Clear Politics