Tuesday, November 15, 2005

The Hitch

In line with what I wrote below about the "Bush lied to us meme" Christoper Hitchens asks Are you sure you want to keep saying we were fooled by Ahmad Chalabi and the INC?:
"And this, of course, it actually has done. We did not know and could not know, until after the invasion, of Saddam's plan to buy long-range missiles off the shelf from Pyongyang, or of the centrifuge components buried on the property of his chief scientist, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi. The Duelfer report disclosed large latent facilities that were only waiting for the collapse of sanctions to resume activity. Ah, but that's not what you said you were looking for. … Could pedantry be pushed any further?

We can now certify Iraq as disarmed, even if the materials once declared by the Saddam regime and never accounted for have still not been found. Why does this certified disarmament upset people so much? Would they rather have given Saddam the benefit of the doubt? Much more infuriating about the current anti-Chalabi hysteria is this: He turns up in Washington with a large delegation of Iraqi democrats, including a female Shiite ex-Communist, several Sunni dignitaries from the 'hot' provinces, and the legendary Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, who led a genuine insurgency among the Marsh Arabs for 18 years. And the American left mounts a gargoyle picket line outside and asks silly and insulting questions inside, about a question that has already been decided. What a travesty this is. Not only do the liberal Democrats apparently want their own congressional votes from 1998 and 2002 back. It sometimes seems that they are actually nostalgic for the same period, when Saddam Hussein was running Iraq, and there were no coalition soldiers to challenge his rule, and when therefore by definition there was peace, and thus things were more or less OK. Their current claim to have been fooled or deceived makes them out, on their own account, to be highly dumb and gullible. But as dumb and gullible as that?"
Of course not, they just want their votes back so they can smear Bush despite the fact that he's not running for office again. The tendancy of liberals to act according to the polling data instead of standing by their own convictions is coming back to haunt them. After all in 2002 Bush already had authority to go to war. But the Dems in congress called for another resolution so that they could seem to be hawkish before the elections. Wishy washy doesn't even begin to describe these people.