Politics Blog

Slate has a PowerPoint presentation of John Kerry’s military record. I particularly like slides 5 thru 9.

— PoliPundit

From the Associated Press: L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, said in a speech six months before the September 11, 2001 attacks that the Bush administration was “paying no attention” to terrorism.

“What they will do is stagger along until there’s a major incident and then suddenly say, ‘Oh my God, shouldn’t we be organized to deal with this,”‘ said Bremer at McCormick Tribune Foundation conference on terrorism on February 26, 2001.

If Bremer really said this, it calls into question his judgment, given that the Bush administration had just assumed office for just over a month. Meanwhile, a National Review article by Barbara Lerner accuses Bremer of setting a policy that punishes America’s friends and rewards its enemies in Iraq.

In Lerner’s opinion, Bremer is essentially hoarding responsibility over Iraq without actually doing anything with that power. Here’s the relevant passage:

General Garner was replaced by L. Paul Bremer, a State Department man who kept most of the power in his own hands and diluted what little power Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani had by appointing not six but 22 other Iraqis to share power with them. This resulted in a rapidly rotating 25-man queen-for-a-day-type leadership that turned the Iraqi Governing Council into a faceless mass, leaving Bremer’s face as the only one most Iraqis saw.

By including fence-sitters and hostile elements as well as American friends in his big, unwieldy IGC and giving them all equal weight, Bremer hoped to display a kind of inclusive, above-it-all neutrality that would win over hostile segments of Iraqi society and convince them that a fully representative Iraqi democracy would emerge. But Iraqis didn’t see it that way. Many saw a foreign occupation of potentially endless length, led by the sort of Americans who can’t be trusted to back up their friends or punish their enemies. Iraqis saw, too, that Syria and Iran had no and were busily entrenching their agents and terrorist recruits into Iraqi society to organize, fund, and equip Sunni bitter-enders like those now terrorizing Fallujah and Shiite thugs like Moqtada al Sadr, the man who is holding hostage the holy city of Najaf.

– Zhang Fei

Rich Lowry sums up John Kerry’s character:

Whenever [Kerry] says, “I have personally always believed [fill in the blank],” it islikely: 1) he doesn’t believe it; 2) he either didn’t believe it at some time prior, or is about to stop believing in it.

— PoliPundit

“I would like to thank them.”

– General Vo Nguyen Giap, who led North Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam war, about American anti-war protesters like John Kerry.

— PoliPundit

Slate has a PowerPoint presentation of John Kerry’s military record. I particularly like slides 5 thru 9.

— PoliPundit

From the Associated Press: L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, said in a speech six months before the September 11, 2001 attacks that the Bush administration was “paying no attention” to terrorism.

“What they will do is stagger along until there’s a major incident and then suddenly say, ‘Oh my God, shouldn’t we be organized to deal with this,”‘ said Bremer at McCormick Tribune Foundation conference on terrorism on February 26, 2001.

If Bremer really said this, it calls into question his judgment, given that the Bush administration had just assumed office for just over a month. Meanwhile, a National Review article by Barbara Lerner accuses Bremer of setting a policy that punishes America’s friends and rewards its enemies in Iraq.

In Lerner’s opinion, Bremer is essentially hoarding responsibility over Iraq without actually doing anything with that power. Here’s the relevant passage:

General Garner was replaced by L. Paul Bremer, a State Department man who kept most of the power in his own hands and diluted what little power Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani had by appointing not six but 22 other Iraqis to share power with them. This resulted in a rapidly rotating 25-man queen-for-a-day-type leadership that turned the Iraqi Governing Council into a faceless mass, leaving Bremer’s face as the only one most Iraqis saw.

By including fence-sittersand hostile elements as well as American friends in his big, unwieldy IGC and giving them all equal weight, Bremer hoped to display a kind of inclusive, above-it-all neutrality that would win over hostile segments of Iraqi society and convince them that a fully representative Iraqi democracy would emerge. But Iraqis didn’t see it that way. Many saw a foreign occupation of potentially endless length, led by the sort of Americans who can’t be trusted to back up their friends or punish their enemies. Iraqis saw, too, that Syria and Iran had no and were busily entrenching their agents and terrorist recruits into Iraqi society to organize, fund, and equip Sunni bitter-enders like those now terrorizing Fallujah and Shiite thugs like Moqtada al Sadr, the man who is holding hostage the holy city of Najaf.

– Zhang Fei

Rich Lowry sums up John Kerry’s character:

Whenever [Kerry] says, “I have personally always believed [fill in the blank],” it islikely: 1) he doesn’t believe it; 2) he either didn’t believe it at some time prior, or is about to stop believing in it.

— PoliPundit

“I would like to thank them.”

– General Vo Nguyen Giap, who led North Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam war, about American anti-war protesters like John Kerry.

— PoliPundit

If it were determined that shortly prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, chemical WMD was transported from Iraq to Syria and later ended up in the hands of al Qaeda, who then attempted to bring it into Jordan for a 9/11 scale terrorist attack, most thinking people would determine that Saddam Hussein had, in fact, posed a threat to the rest of the world. They might even consider it was an imminent threat. Those dots have not yet been connected, but there is a lot of evidence that points to just such a possible scenario.

Today, a Wall Street Journal editorial asks why a story that I provided links to (here and here) in a post last week, has yet to be seriously investigated or even prominently reported by most major news outlets.

Jordanian authorities say that the death toll from a bomb and poison-gas attack they foiled this month could have reached 80,000. We guess the fact that most major media are barely covering this story means WMD isn’t news anymore until there’s a body count.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi–the man cited by the Bush Administration as its strongest evidence of prewar links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and the current ringleader of anti-coalition terrorism in Iraq–may be behind the plot, which would be al Qaeda’s first ever attempt to use chemical weapons. The targets included the U.S. Embassy in Amman. Yet as of yesterday, most news organizations hadn’t probed the story, if at all, beyond the initial wire-service copy.

Perhaps the problem here is that covering this story might mean acknowledging that Tony Blair and George W. Bush have been exactly right to warn of the confluence of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction…

The provenance of the operation is also of note. The bomb trucks and funds are said to have entered Jordan via Syria. Last fall General James R. Clapper Jr., director of satellite intelligence for the Pentagon, said there had been an unusual amount of traffic–including possibly WMDs–between Iraq and Syria in the lead-up to war.

This post provides links to another story about Iraq WMD you won’t see getting widespread media attention this week.

Do these stories not deserve at least as much attention as the final episode of Friends?

– Lorie Byrd

Doug Bandow, a former Reagan administration official, on the consequences of American foreign policy: Terrorism cannot be treated in isolation from American foreign policy. It’s not that Americans deserved to die, that the blame falls on U.S. policymakers instead of the killers who hijacked and crashed four planes. Rather, terrorism must be understood as an inevitable consequence of global intervention.

Doug Bandow’s position is that other nations ought to set American foreign policy. He describes terrorism as a tool of weak nations, and believes that the US is provoking attacks against itself by taking positions that are contrary to the interests of terror-sponsoring countries. The problem with this approach is that it is an invitation for our enemies to attack us by sponsoring terror groups in order to separate us from our allies.

Doug Bandow’s approach is pretty radical - the American way has always been to respect those who respect us and punish those who attack us. He is proposing that the US abandon its allies to appease its enemies. It is the Cato Institute’s (Bandow’s think tank) penny-wise, pound-foolish approach that has led to China’s ever-expanding push into the South China Sea (through the American abandonment of the Filipino bases in the early 1990’s) and the extinction of the only Christian government in the Arab world in Lebanon. The Cato Institute is misnamed - it wants to bury its head in the sand about the danger from abroad, whereas Cato the Elder pushed for the destruction of Rome’s enemies, the most famous example of which was the leveling of Carthage.

It is time that the US made clear to foreign countries that either directly or indirectly kill Americans that there is a price to be paid for their hostile foreign policy vis-a-vis the US and its allies. This is the point we have attempted to drive home to our enemies via the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is time for them to appease us, and not the other way around.

– Zhang Fei