VICTOR SHARPE: The Howling Hyenas of the Left, and the Silent Lambs of the Right
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/141020
It is always a delicious moment when progressives (the current politically correct name for left-wingers, socialists, and Marxists) have to admit their falsehoods.
Such is the case with the same progressives who relentlessly repeated the lie during the administration of President George W. Bush that no WMDs were found in Iraq and that, therefore, the reason for the U.S. going to war against Saddam Hussein was a lie. Remember the left-wing slogan: “Bush lied: People died.”
But a bizarre decision by Republican consultants and presidential advisers NOT to provide the evidence that there were indeed WMDs allowed the Left to falsely demonize the Bush administration and deeply harm the Republican party. However, more of that later.
The “progressive” slogan “Bush lied: People died” has finally been proven to be a monumental lie itself. The New York Times – hardly a bastion of unbiased and objective reporting – recently posted an article by C.J. Chivers confirming that indeed Hussein’s stockpiled weapons of mass destruction were found during the Iraq War and that buried under the desert sands may be yet more undiscovered WMDs.
Not a happy thought when much of those sands now lie within the territory occupied by the Islamo-Nazi head choppers of ISIS.
In fact, thousands of shells and bombs containing chemical and nerve agent weapons were found, along with some 500 metric tons of yellow cake uranium, which was subsequently shipped out by U.S. forces to Canada for disposal.
According to C.J. Chivers, “From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.
“In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”
The Times article continued with the words of Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company. He sarcastically joked of “wounds that never happened from stuff that didn’t exist.”
The public, he said, was misled for a decade. “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq.’ There were plenty.”
However, true to form, the New York Times obfuscated by claiming that these were not the actual weapons President Bush said would be found. This is one more lie on top of another in which the NYT makes the spurious claim that the only reason for the Iraq War was the existence of an “active” weapons program.
But President Bush claimed that we went to war to discover Hussein’s “old” WMDs and to prevent him from restarting his perilous weapons program. Remember he had used chemical weapons against his own people and against the Kurds and Iranians.
Remember, too, that Saddam Hussein was near to producing nuclear weapons but it was left to Israel to destroy that threat by bombing Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility, thus saving the world and U.S. troops from catastrophe.
In his September 12, 2002, speech, Bush had pleaded with the ever morally compromised UN to enforce sanctions and weapons inspections. In that speech, the president did not claim that an Iraqi “active weapons program” existed as now the New York Times is falsely alleging.
So to sum up. What was the cassus belli for the Iraq war?
It was Hussein’s refusal to disarm; his desire to restart the Iraqi aggressive weapons program; and the threat of arming, aiding, and abetting terrorists who posed a clear and present danger to the West and the Free World. The NYT on the other hand tried to spin the reason for going to war was based upon the presence of “active” WMDs.
But we now come to what may be a monumental mistake by Team Bush, who chose to remain silent for years and refrain from telling the world and the American public that President Bush did not lie about WMDs. The weapons really existed – and in enormous amounts.
The consultants and political advisers who gave this stupid advice to the Bush administration bring to mind those famous words of Albert Einstein:
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”
This stupid silence allowed the liberal media and the “progressives” to adversely affect President Bush’s own legacy and allow the Left to lie by also falsely accusing Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of “justifying a U.S. invasion in order to seize Iraq’s oil fields.”
Deroy Murdock, writing in National Review Online, asks why the Bush administration would have stayed silent so long even while being relentlessly attacked by the Left for lying.
“It is outrageous that the Pentagon and, apparently, Bush’s political team concealed proof that America’s chief casus belli actually existed. Instead, the howling hyenas of the Left were allowed to gnaw away at Bush’s political corpse.
“Why did anyone involved in this disaster think that this would be good for America domestically or globally? How thick were the skulls of Bush’s political advisers not to see the importance of presenting this information amid deafening shouts that the president and those of us who supported Operation Iraqi Freedom were a pack of filthy liars?”
This act of stupidity in part led to the electoral defeats of 2008 and 2012, with the baleful result of America enduring the last six years of the Barack Hussein Obama regime along with the support of its mainstream media “amen corner” and the increasingly far left Democrat party.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several published books including the trilogy, Politicide.
© Victor Sharpe
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