Swanson: Here is part 1-A of Bush's case for war, which I said you did not reply to:
"(1) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither (A) adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq,"
Here's your new reply:
"When you say I didn’t respond to part (A) in Bush statement (1) which says that we went to war to protect the national security of the United States, I guess that means you didn’t understand my remarks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Notice that you avoided the part about "the continuing threat posed by Iraq," and avoided my remarks about the extensive disinformation campaign conducted by the Bush administration around Weapons of Mass Destruction. Remember those?
You went on to say, instead:
"These wars are the only reason we haven’t been attacked since 9/11. Prior to the war, Saddam Hussein was hosting al-Qaeda conferences, al-Qaeda terrorist training camps, al-Qaeda leaders, and supporting the radical Islamic war against the Jews. He provided an asylum for the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. He was a big enthusiast of 9/11 and as the Mohammed Atta trail is beginning to show probably had a role in that attack, as well as others. Most importantly he was in full support of the Islamic jihad against us (and had even inscribed Allahu Akhbar in Iraq’s national flag in 1991); he was, an ally of bin Laden and a dictator in control of a country with the resources and the will to supply terrorists with chemical and biological and eventually nuclear weapons or to obtain them himself from Libya and North Korea."
I think you've done it. You've broken Colin Powell's record for lies per paragraph. The Busheviks did not claim that Saddam Hussein "had the will" to supply terrorists with weapons. They claimed that he actually had those weapons and that he posed an imminent threat to the United States, where we might see a mushroom cloud any day or unmanned aircraft dropping chemical weapons. Do you remember the months and months during which we were barraged with these horror stories?
Saddam Hussein was not an ally of bin Laden. I understand how you could be confused. They're both dark skinned ferriners who talk funny. Nonetheless, they considered each other enemies. Go figure. Hussein was not training al Qaeda. I really have no idea whether he was "an enthusiast" for the 9-11 attacks or whether he wrote "God is Greater" on a flag, but I'm not sure those really constitute good reasons to bomb a country and kill upwards of 100,000 innocent people. But, really, I give you an A for effort. Most war supporters have given up on trying to defend the original justifications and have shifted to new ones like "spreading democracy."
The second reason Bush gave for war, and which I said you failed to address was
"(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
You now replied that the word "including" gets Bush off the hook. So, after having just made the baseless claim that Saddam Hussein was training al Qaeda, you lost your nerve and declined to claim that he had anything to do with the attacks of 9-11. A curious distinction, to say the least. But more important than what you claim is, of course, what the Bush Administration claimed for months and months. Bush and his top officials endlessly drew connections between 9-11 and Iraq, sometimes directly asserting a connections, more often implying it. The media pushed this so hard that most Bush voters last year still believed it (see survey by PIPA). In fact, judging from the callers to radio shows I've been on recently, a fair number of war supporters still believe it. Including the word "including" was very slick, but if it was meant to suggest that Iraq was not behind 9-11, then why didn't Bush simply omit the phrase that followed that word?
I'm not sure how much of your delusional paranoid rant I should reply to. John Nichols wrote in the Nation today that, while he felt sorry for you, he didn't think it appropriate to dignify you with responses. I can see the point. Still, there are others who believe your lies. Many of them do so because they haven't heard anything else. So, I have something of a duty to say a little more here.
You still have not said whether you would like Cindy to be censored or imprisoned. I take it you would not, and I applaud you for your respect for free speech. I would like you free to speak as well, although you engage in so much slander that you would be hurtful if you weren't so humorous.
You say that Cindy and I are conducting a war against our country. Yet neither of us has picked up a gun or ordered anyone else to do so. Cindy Sheehan has not sent thousands of people to their graves. She's doing everything she can to prevent any more deaths, American or Iraqi.
She's not doing this, as you claim, at a time when our country is under attack. You say we're under attack from "an enemy." You don't name that enemy, but Bush usually calls it "terrorism." The key point here is that it isn't Iraq. Cindy is asking for an end to the aggressive, illegal, and fraudulent war on Iraq. If Osama bin Laden is suspected of commiting a horrible crime of mass murder, then let's focus all the resources that have been wasted on Iraq instead on finding him and trying him in a court of law. Cindy has said the same.
It was interesting to learn that I am "peripherally" in "actual formal contact with the radical Islamists." I'm going to have to let my family and friends know. Seriously, that's the most disgusting sort of attempt at guilt by association. You aim for the guilt without so much as presenting the association. And what's frightening is that you probably half-way believe yourself. You think that anyone who's against a war must be for the side of the war that you are against. This is apparently because you cannot comprehend being against a war in toto, and in favor or peace. Please try. Just stop for a second and think about it.
I know that you think that when I criticize the Bush Administration I am inviting your dreaded terrorists to attack Cleveland. Meanwhile, I think, that the Bush Administration is doing that when it bombs and occupies Muslim countries. Bin Laden stated publicly why he wanted to attack the United States. Remember? He said he objected to US troops in Saudi Arabia. He didn't say he was encouraged by US leftwingers criticizing Bush's education policies, or his military policies.
Your lies about Joe Wilson, and about the meaning of the word "fixed," and so on, are things no one else has the nerve to still be pushing. But somehow I do feel obliged to reply to your accusation that I've claimed that "the Jews are responsible for the War on Terror." Yet, how do I reply to a complete fabrication without making it seem serious? Suffice it to say I do not believe the Bush Administration's motivations are simply religious, that most members of that administration are not Jewish, that many leaders of our peace movement are Jewish, that I find your attacks offensive, and that we are not – as you claim – a threat to peace, because what we are doing is demanding an end to war and a beginning to peace.
Let me close just by pointing out that I cited a half dozen sources documenting that the "war on terror" has made us less safe. You replied to none of them.
Horowitz: It’s difficult to conduct a discussion with a man who refuses to read the words that are directed to him. You begin this round with the claim that I avoided addressing the phrase “the continuing threat posed by Iraq,” as a cause of the war. In fact I wrote quite a bit about this very issue. First that the war in Iraq has neutralized the threat of terrorism generally; second, Iraq was a base for terror; third, Saddam posed a threat to the peace through his defiance of the terms of the 1991 Gulf War truce (a truce that followed a war caused by his second invasion of a sovereign country); fourth Iraq posed a threat because it had become clear over a 10 year period that force was the only language Saddam understood; fifth because his defiance of the UN ultimatum of November 8 (deadline December 7, 2002) showed that short of removing him there was no way to stop Iraq from developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons when the United States withdrew its 200,000 man army from the borders of Iraq which it was bound sooner or later to do. (Can you just see the Democrats supporting a permanent standing army of 200,000 on the borders of Iraq and costing $1 billion a week?)
My experience with leftists like yourself is that you operate from a base of ignorance and prejudice and that you are unable to conduct a discussion of issues and facts (which are always subject to differing interpretations). Therefore, sooner or later, you resort to name-calling as a substitute for the argument you were unable to make. This is not an auspicious beginning for the third and final round of our exchange.
To refer to “the disinformation campaign conducted by the Bush administration around Weapons of Mass Destruction” is to reveal an impressive intellectual bankruptcy. For this unpretty phrase to have any meaning you would also have had to refer to “the disinformation campaign conducted by John Kerry and other Democratic Party leaders who had access to the same intelligence information as the Bush Administration, the British Government, and the intelligence agencies of the French, Russian, German and Jordanian governments, to mention just the most important members of the conspiracy to deceive people like you and Cindy Sheehan. All of these intelligence agencies (and not just the Bush Administration) concluded – as I observed in my previous post – that Saddam had stockpiles of WMDS. How is one to take seriously someone who argues like this?
Actually it was the threat posed by Saddam’s programs for building WMDs (and his plans to continue such programs when the inspectors weren’t looking or were actually gone). This threat was telegraphed in Saddam’s refusal to allow the UN inspectors the full access and freedom of movement required to prevent him from continuing the programs, and also required by the UN resolutions, that led to the confrontation with Saddam; and it was Saddam’s refusal to comply with UN resolution 1441 that led directly to the decision to go to war. It was the credibility of America’s word (something you wouldn’t understand) and the credibility of future ultimatums as the final guardians of the peace (something you also wouldn’t understand), that made acting on 1441 necessary.
The only official U.S. presentation about WMDs – which is the one you are referring to – was Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN. This presentation (in which Powell claimed Saddam had chemical weapons) was made on February 5, 2003, two full months after the UN deadline had passed and Saddam had not complied, and nearly a month after Britain and the United States had decided that Saddam’s breach of the deadline meant war was inevitable.
The Powell speech, which is the only government speech that could lead to the erroneous conclusion that Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction constituted the rationale for going to war, was made for one reason and one reason only: because your leftist friends in England had put such pressure on Tony Blair that his government was in danger. In January there was a leftist demonstration in London that would have been the equivalent of 4 million Republicans marching against the war in Washington. This threatened the viability of the Blair government. Blair therefore asked Bush to get a second UN resolution and to make a case against Saddam that his leftist public might understand. To help his ally, Bush made the mistake of acceding to Blair’s request that he get a second Security Council resolution. Powell’s speech was purely to marshal political support for the war. It had nothing to do with the actual reasons for going to war which had been laid out in the Authorization for the use of Force endorsed by both political parties and Bush’s State of the Union address of January 20, 2003 and his statement on the eve of the conflict itself. On March 6, France – Saddam’s key ally – made a second Security Council resolution impossible by threatening to use their veto against war “in any circumstances.”
This – the French support for Saddam – is the real reason for the war. Saddam knew the French would veto an explicit war resolution, which is why he didn’t comply with the November 8th ultimatum. (The ultimatum said comply “or face serious consequences” but did not specify what the consequences were.) In January – before the Colin Powell presentation to the UN – Britain and American decided that the consequences should be war.
Bush should never have sought this second redundant resolution, which the French, Russians and Chinese were sure to veto. But he had been fooled by the Machiavellian tactics of Saddam’s allies, and did not consider that Saddam was conferring with all three all the time. If you were able to understand this sequence of events and the players involved (which I realize you are not) you would never make the mistake of claiming that the arguments put forward by Colin Powell about WMDS on February 5, 2003, just five weeks before the fighting began, had anything to do with the decision of the Bush Administration to go to war.
At this early point in your response, you give up the pretense of making an argument at all. Here begins the kind of vicious name-calling and mudslinging that is the only real discourse political savages like yourself are able to muster. In sequence you call me a liar, imply that I am idiot and infer that I am a racist. This is an unappealing confession of intellectual impotence, but I will ignore it in order to carry this exercise to its revealing end.
In dismissing Saddam’s connections to terror in general and Islamic terror in particular (remember the $75 million in Oil-for-Food funds that he funneled to Hamas?). Obviously you are ignorant of the massive evidence that Stephen Hayes has assembled in his book The Connection and in many supportive articles since. Readers interested in these and other articles demonstrating the Iraq-Terrorism connection can go to DiscoverTheNetworks.org by clicking here and then scroll down until they come to the heading: “Iraq-Terrorism Connection.”
I’m not going to waste time dignifying your ex-cathedra pronouncements on bin Laden and Saddam since they are based on no evidence whatsoever and come from a man who did not bother to check the facts referred to earlier in this discussion, and doesn’t know what “Allahu Akhbar” means but pontificates on it anyway and who can’t be concerned to find out what Saddam inscribed on the Iraqi flag but is prepared to argue as though he knows what was on Saddam’s mind anyway.
Continuing with your increasingly incoherent assertions, I did not alert you to the participle “including” in order to “get Bush off the hook.” I did so to make you see how utterly you failed to understand the plain meaning of his words. We went to war with Iraq because Iraq was a base and a supporter of international terrorism not because Iraq was directly involved in 9/11, although the likelihood is that it was. The unanchored pronouncements you make in this paragraph are further indication that you live inside the conspiratorial (and self-fulfilling) myths of a political movement that is unable to examine its assumptions and beliefs even when they have been refuted by the evidence over and over again. (One would have thought the collapse of every progressive dream with the fall of the Berlin Wall would have induced some humility among progressives like yourself; but apparently it hasn’t). Could it be that the reason for this imperviousness to these realities is that you regard such facts as obstacles in the path of your self-righteous (and self-intoxicating) crusade.
Now you turn to direct insult (“delusional paranoid rant” etc). I’m not going to dignify this with a reply except to say that John Nichols doesn’t “feel sorry” for me. That is just a pose that serves as his form of insult because he couldn’t and can’t meet the argument I made on the Reagan-Crowley show: the same people, Nichols included, who pressured America to withdraw from Indo-China because they wanted the Communists to win (or America to lose) are now recommending the same blood-drenched remedy for Iraq because they want the terrorists to win (or America to lose).
You and your friends are indeed waging a war against this country, guns or no. Why would you need to carry guns when America’s terrorist enemies are already using them? All you need to do is lean your weight on the other end of the scale. E.g., by following the pattern you already established in Vietnam of sapping America’s will to win.
What is it that you don’t understand about this? Probably everything, because you follow this with the self-aggrandizing and self-deceiving comment: “[Cindy] is doing everything she can to prevent any more deaths, American or Iraqi.” This more than anything else in this discussion shows that you do not understand the war in Iraq or the world you actually live in. Cindy Sheehan has called for America to get out at once. Unconditionally. That will leave the Iraqi army, which we already know can’t defend the country (otherwise we wouldn’t be there) to face the Zarqawi-Saddam-bin-Laden terrorists. Zarqawi has already declared that democracy is evil and that every Iraqi who voted on January 30 is an infidel and that all infidels will be put to death by the sword. What don’t you understand about this sequence?
Not even you are stupid enough to believe that an unconditional withdrawal by American forces will to anything but a bloodbath in Iraq. Or should I put it this way: Only someone who believes that their own country is the Great Satan without whom there would be no killing in this war could believe that America is the only reason people are dying or will die in Iraq. To believe that your own country is the source of evil and terror in the world (which is what Cindy Sheehan has said in so many words) is the very definition of a treasonous state of mind is it not? Why not recognize this and go from there?
In fact, neither you nor Cindy Sheehan cares for a moment whether there is a connection between Iraq and terror. This war is not the reason for your hatred of America. It is rather the convenient justification for your hatred of America. America’s sin begins with America’s beginning, does it not? Cindy has said so in so many words, as have numerous progressives from Ward Churchill to Noam Chomsky. Just like the Vietnam radicals, your hatred of your country precedes any deed it can commit. And there is no deed it can commit short of suicide that would qualify as good.
If this were not the case, you and your comrades would have noticed that we overthrew a monster in Iraq – an oppressor and murderer of women and minorities on a scale that is rivaled by few. No one is going to convince me or anyone with his head screwed on straight that “progressives” would not notice (and therefore applaud) the liberation of 25 million women in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the removal of a tyrant who had used poison gas on an ethnic minority unless their hatred for the liberator was so great that it was actually a form of religious fanaticism, a cosmic hatred of America which no particular fact or evidence could possibly deflect.
I am weary of this discussion which is not really a discussion anymore – not since the issue between us was really joined. From your next paragraph one could conclude that you think Osama is a persecuted innocent or that jury is out on whether he is an enemy even. What I do conclude is that you didn’t pay any attention to my comment that Osama was as good as dead already and that Bush had effectively neutralized him. But since you’re not dealing in real world events, what does it matter?
You accuse me of making unfounded accusations that through your participation in the “anti-war” movement you are “peripherally” allied with Islamic radicals who support terrorism. In fact, I not only said that the “anti-war” coalition was involved in formal alliances with Islamic supporters of terrorism, I linked an article documenting it. You respond to this in your typical way by hurling a name in my direction. And then you say “You aim for the guilt without so much as presenting the association.” Well actually I did. In spades. Here it is again. Who do you expect to impress with responses like this?
Now that your composure is shot and you can only sputter, you unburden yourself of a series of baseless charges as though they were self-evident. Here’s one: “You think that anyone who’s against a war must be for the side of the war that you are against.” No I don’t. In fact, I have refuted this (by actual references to war critics I have praised) so many times that I have lost count. Here’s one.
By now in this discussion you have disappeared into the fogbank of your political delusions. I cited a bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee report that concluded the President was telling the truth and Joe Wilson was not. Your rejoinder is that I am a liar. Are you trying to discredit yourself? Anyone can look this fact up. So what do you think you have accomplished? As for your disclaimer that you or Cindy ever accused the Jews of being behind our global problem, let me remind you that your heroine, Cindy, is on record saying her son died “for Israel” and the war in Iraq was the product of a “neo-conservative” cabal. I haven’t seen anyone on your side denounce this ugly, anti-Semitic canard. We’ll let readers judge who is culpable here.
Now that we are at the end of our discussion, here is my conclusion: This entire dispiriting exercise has demonstrated only that the crowd of zealots gathering in Crawford and across the country, whose goal is to sabotage their country’s defense of freedom in Iraq is, intellectually and morally speaking, running on empty. You have no argument and no case – not one that will stand up to scrutiny.