From Hoyer press statement on the President's Iraq speech, November 30, 2005:

I believe that a precipitous withdrawal of American forces in Iraq could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation's security and credibility.

Bush Attempts Hard Sell on Iraq Progress By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer

Wed Nov 30, 1:57 PM ET

President Bush's depiction of Iraqi security forces as "helping to turn the tide" is difficult to square with persistent setbacks in handing control of the country back to its own people.

His suggestion that Americans are solidly behind the mission also understates opposition at home, and his hard sell on the rising quality of Iraqi forces overlooks complexities on the ground.

Bush on Wednesday declared the Iraqi army and police forces are "increasingly taking the lead in the fight against the terrorists," even as recruits patrol Iraq's most violent cities barely three months after learning how to use weapons and police forces struggle to get officers to come to work.

The president, in a major speech on Iraq war aims and in an accompanying strategy paper, acknowledged all has not gone as planned, speaking several times of a need for "adjustments" along the way.

Still, the White House paper cited a number of positive statistics on the recovery of the Iraq economy, asserting "our restore, reform, build strategy is achieving results."

The International Monetary Fund, in its latest World Economic Outlook, in September, issued a more sobering view.

"The new government faces daunting medium-term challenges, including advancing the reconstruction of the country's infrastructure, reducing macroeconomic instability and developing the institutions that can support a market-based economy," the survey stated.

The IMF staff cited a "volatile security situation" as one of the biggest challenges and said only "slow progress" had been made in restoring Iraq oil production to prewar levels.

Bush, making his remarks at the U.S. Naval Academy, spoke as if the debate about Iraq were limited to Washington and only politicians were questioning the mission.

"When you're risking your life to accomplish a mission, the last thing you want to hear is that mission being questioned in our nation's capital," he told cadets. "I want you to know that, while there may be a lot of heated rhetoric in Washington, D.C., one thing is not in dispute: The American people stand behind you."

Bush's public standing and support for the war have declined. In an AP-Ipsos poll taken in November, 62 percent said they disapproved of his Iraq policy,and his overall job approval rating dropped to 37 percent, the lowest level of his presidency.

The president spoke of "an increased focus on leadership training" to build a core of midlevel and higher ranking officers needed to guide and lead an Iraqi force that can operate on its own.

It takes years to develop a strong officer core, and the process has been a particular struggle in Iraq. The deficiency was highlighted recently when Iraqis put out a call for more former officers from Saddam Hussein's army to rejoin the armed forces. Bush did caution it would take "time and patience" to train enough Iraqi forces to carry the fight.

"As the Iraqi forces grow in number, they're helping to keep a better hold on the cities taken from the enemy," he said.

Indeed, large Shiite cities in the south now are largely controlled by Iraqi forces. But throughout central and northern Iraq, cities that are either Sunni Arab or ethnically or religiously mixed have proved more difficult to stabilize.

In Samarra, only 100 of the 700 police on the city payroll are showing up for work most days, even as U.S. soldiers prepare this week to turn over control of the inner city to Iraqi forces. The Americans tried twice before to do that in the city of 200,000 but failed when insurgents moved against police.

As he did before the invasion, Bush tied Iraq to terrorism, to make the case that a stable Iraq would make for a safer America.

He declared, "The terrorists have made it clear that Iraq is the central front in their war against humanity. And so we must recognize Iraq as the central front in the war on terror."

Iraq was not, however, the terrorists' chosen battlefield until Saddam was defeated and extremists poured across unsecured borders.

Associated Press writer Pauline Jelinek contributed to this story

"A U.S. withdrawal would likely lead to carnage on a scale that would dwarf what is now occurring in Iraq."

The House Minority Whip formed a group a few months back "to shape the Democratic strategy on national security issues and battle perceptions that the party is weak on defense," reported Roll Call in September.

The rollout of the defense blueprint by Hoyer and his team comes just as some of the Caucus’ left-leaning Democrats are becoming ever more vocal about their opposition to the war in Iraq and heightening their call to bring U.S. forces home. Some of those Members will participate in an ad hoc hearing today to discuss ways to end the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. A coalition of liberal groups, meanwhile, will hold a major rally advocating troop withdrawal just across town....

The No. 2 House Democrat, a moderate who supported U.S. involvement in Iraq, said he believes Democrats lost the “national election because of national security” and because of a “lack of confidence of the American public.” He added that many voters had doubts that Kerry and the Democrats were committed to defeating terrorism.

Do the other members of the Hoyer group agree with Pelosi?

Democratic Reps.
Adam Schiff (CA)
Jane Harman (CA)
Ike Skelton (MO)
John Spratt (SC)
Ellen Tauscher (CA)
Chet Edwards (TX)
Dennis Cardoza (CA)
Jim Cooper (TN)
Norm Dicks (WA)
Howard Berman (CA)
Solomon Ortiz (TX),
Silvestre Reyes (TX)
Robert Andrews (NJ)

From Roll Call moments ago:

Pelosi Backs Murtha Call for U.S. Withdrawal By Erin P. Billings Roll Call Staff Wednesday, Nov. 30

In a move likely to cause a stir among members of her divided Democratic Caucus, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) on Wednesday endorsed fellow Democratic Rep. John Murtha’s (Pa.) recent call to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq as soon as possible....

“This announcement is going to divide the Caucus,” the staffer said. “It would have been more helpful to focus on where all Democrats agree that the president has made major mistakes and changes need to be made. Instead the focus is now going to be this division to the detriment of our vulnerable Members and candidates.”

Pelosi also released the following press statement:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 30, 2005

Pelosi: ‘The President Has Dug Us into a Deep Hole in Iraq; It Is Time for Him to Stop Digging’

Washington, D.C. – House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi held a news conference today in response to President Bush’s speech on Iraq. Her remarks are below:

"What we heard today was a commitment to the status quo – a status quo that is not working.

"The ‘Plan for Victory’ backdrop against which the President appeared at the Naval Academy today was no more accurate than the ‘Mission Accomplished’ backdrop he used over two and a half years ago on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

"The President did not have a plan for victory when he went into his war of choice in Iraq, and he did not have a plan for victory today.

"The American people expected that the President would do more today than just put a new cover and 35 pages of rhetoric on old sound bites. What the American people wanted from the President today was some evidence that he has heard their concerns.

"Clearly, the President fails to understand that a new course is needed in Iraq. The President has dug us into a deep hole in Iraq; it is time for him to stop digging.

"He offered a status quo plan that would not accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces, would not motivate Iraqis to assume security responsibilities more quickly and bring American troops home.

"Instead, he suggested that we send more troops and spend more money in Iraq. That is not what the American people want.

"The President says that the security situation in Iraq is getting better. But just because the President says it, does not make it so.

"226 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in just the last three months. The Generals have told us that the presence of large numbers of U.S. forces in Iraq encourages the insurgents. The President provided no specifics on how, or when, the number of troops will be reduced.

"With more than 2,100 American soldiers killed, thousands more wounded grievously, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, the President owes the American people more than he provided today.

"We should follow the lead of Congressman John Murtha, who has put forth a plan to make America safer, to make our military stronger, and to make Iraq more stable. That is what the American people and our troops deserve."

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting piece on Chinese espionage methods inside the United States.

China has spent more than two decades creating a large and varied intelligence infrastructure in the United States, according to US counterintelligence documents. High-profile prosecutions in recent years related to alleged Chinese espionage may merely hint at the depth and breadth of China's collection efforts....

Recent cases involving the People's Republic of China (PRC) "are just the tip of the iceberg of an already-large and increasingly capable PRC intelligence effort," concludes a US government Intelligence Threat Handbook, an unclassified manual for security officers produced by an arm of the National Security Agency.

John Pike explains in today's Los Angeles Times.

It may be found here.

The Defeatniks at Moveon.org may want to look at this before cutting a commercial on this.

It's easy to forget that Senator Ted Kennedy & Company tried their best to defeat the resolution authorizing force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait. It's easy to forget that Iraq had passed frequent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections designed to ensure its compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or that its Manhattan Project-sized nuclear program went undetected by US intelligence. It's also easy to forget just how skilled Saddam became at deception post-Osirak.

Some history --

Iraq ratified the NPT in 1969. Twelve year later, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. According to the June 22, 1981 Newsweek,

[t]he Osirak reactor was theoretically only for research purposes—but Iraq twice refused a French offer to supply it with low-enriched uranium, insisting instead on weapons-grade, 93 per cent enriched fuel. Iraq was also operating an Italian-built “hot cell” lab for extracting plutonium, and had arranged to buy large quantities of uranium from Brazil, Portugal and Niger—all without any investment in a nuclear-energy program.

In his 2002 book, The Threatening Storm, Clinton NSC official Kenneth Pollack wrote that Osirak “was the key to Saddam’s nuclear weapons program and ... was due to go online within a matter of weeks.” The bombing set Iraq’s “nuclear bomb program back by several years,” but it also “taught the Iraqis an important lesson. Thereafter, Saddam ordered a redoubling of the Iraqi program...camouflaged against detection.” (Pollack would subsequently note this regarding Saddam's nuclear program.)

After the Osirak attack, Iraq would pursue a secret nuclear weapons program that had gone undetected by Western intelligence and the IAEA until after the 1991 Gulf War. As former U.N. inspector David Kay wrote in a 1995 Washington Quarterly piece, Iraq would pursue this program while maintaining “its status as a full member” of the NPT because it was “the desire of the military and security services not to attract any undue attention to Iraq’s developing nuclear program that would complicate procurement and development efforts.”

The fact that Hussein was able to conceal his nuclear program was even more remarkable given that: 1) as the Washington Post noted in October 1991, the “scope and sophistication” of its program “resembled the Manhattan Project, the American effort that produced the first atomic bomb”; and 2) Iraq had passed regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

On August 11, 1991, the Post reported that:

International inspectors...unearthed one of the most important—and disturbing—finds of the post-Cold War era: a huge assembly line for the covert manufacture of equipment to make an Iraqi bomb.

The location of the sophisticated, secret factory for manufacturing hundreds of uranium gas centrifuges was unknown to any foreign intelligence agency despite intense scrutiny and untouched by five weeks of severe aerial bombardment during the Gulf War that supposedly eviscerated the Iraqi nuclear project. As such, it is a monument to the world’s ignorance about what a determined bomb-builder such as Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein can do.

The factory was a key component in Iraq’s elaborate highly redundant and largely secret network of physics, chemistry and metallurgical laboratories, industrial mines, metalworking factories, electrical power generators, nuclear research reactors and radioactive waste processing sites—all aimed at swiftly putting a nuclear weapon in the hands of one of the world’s most ruthless leaders.

The Post also reported:

Despite repeated warnings and Saddam’s own public statements, Western experts consistently underestimated Iraq’s scientific and technical capabilities. Inspection officials now believe Iraq was only 12 to 18 months from producing its first bomb, not five to 10 years as previously thought.

Kay wrote that Iraq hid its program by keeping it “heavily compartmentalized” and employing a variety of deception techniques. For example, Iraq created a network of front companies to import nuclear-related materials “in quantities that were below the size that triggered controls.” Equipment was imported ostensibly for civilian purposes but was diverted to the nuclear program as well. (see here for UNMOVIC May 2003 report on Iraq's attempt to "conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks" for missiles, chems & bios)

The Iraqis, Kay continued, had an “accurate understanding of the limitations of U.S. technical collection systems...” and exploited these vulnerabilities through various methods, including:

construction of buildings within buildings... hiding power and water feeds to mislead as to facility use... diminishing value of a facility by apparent low security and lack of defenses... moving critical pieces of equipment at night....

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero hosted a European-Mediterranean summit that ends "with a murmur." From the Los Angeles Times:

The desperation of the summit hosts to achieve agreement, any agreement, was revealed during a break in deliberations. A microphone had been left on near Zapatero, and a top aide complained to him that the Israelis were intractable and that the other members were "ready to throw in the towel."

Zapatero responded: "We must close this! Any way possible!"

Today's Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece, "Our Troops Must Stay," by Senator Lieberman who just returned from Iraq.

Progress is visible and practical. In the Kurdish North, there is continuing security and growing prosperity. The primarily Shiite South remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity. The Sunni triangle, geographically defined by Baghdad to the east, Tikrit to the north and Ramadi to the west, is where most of the terrorist enemy attacks occur. And yet here, too, there is progress....

Before going to Iraq last week, I visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has been the only genuine democracy in the region, but it is now getting some welcome company from the Iraqis and Palestinians who are in the midst of robust national legislative election campaigns, the Lebanese who have risen up in proud self-determination after the Hariri assassination to eject their Syrian occupiers (the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah militias should be next), and the Kuwaitis, Egyptians and Saudis who have taken steps to open up their governments more broadly to their people. In my meeting with the thoughtful prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, he declared with justifiable pride that his country now has the most open, democratic political system in the Arab world. He is right....

The question is whether the American people and enough of their representatives in Congress from both parties understand this. I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and by Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November's elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead....

Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America's bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory....

And, at least one person (make that two) at the Democratic Leadership Council agrees with the Connecticut senator. Who knows about the rest.

The Director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, John Walters, delivered a “Progress Report on Anti-Drug Efforts in Colombia” here and here. According to Walters,

heroin purity has declined 22 percent between 2003 and 2004, with an increase of 30 percent in price.

Yet another indication that Plan Colombia and our balanced efforts against the international drug problem are making the problem smaller.

Yet another Murray Waas bombshell piece -- if you believe the leftwing blogs and liberal pundits -- on Iraq has appeared in the National Journal as a "news feature." The fact that the anti-Bush crowd loves what Waas has to write should come as no surprise. Over the years, he has written for the American Prospect and The Nation. Going back to the Reagan administration, the common thread of Waas' investigative journalism has been to go after Republicans. Spend just fifteen seconds on his blog and you'll learn Waas isn't a big fan of the current Bush administration. Of course, there's nothing wrong with criticizing or investigating the White House. But Waas' Iraq pieces always seem to fit nicely with the story line spun by Democratic Senators Rockefeller and Levin that the president and vice president lied us into war. Waas' work appears regularly in Frank Rich's weekly conspiracy columns in the New York Times, and Chris Matthews hypes his pieces on Hardball but makes sure his viewers know where it was published.

"The new piece tonight that ran in Washington's National Journal, a very respected, even-handed journal," is how Matthews characterized another Waas piece on Iraq pre-war intelligence that was far from "even-handed" -- see here. And Waas current piece isn't much better. More later.

Economist and Weekly Standard contributing editor Irwin Stelzer notes that the New York Times managed "to bury the good news about weekend sales (up 22 percent over last year) by reporting instead, on page 1 of the business section, that mall-based specialty stores are losing out to big stores like Wal-Mart that are based outside of malls."

All the negative Bush news that's fit to print continues.

Blackfive.net shares the bravery and courage of Javier’s Marine squad in Iraq.

National Review's Victor Davis Hanson has an insightful piece on the "complicated" anger of the Democratic establishment.

Despite acrimony at home, the politics of two national elections and a third on the horizon, and the slander of war crimes and incompetence, those on the battlefield of Iraq have almost pulled off the unthinkable — the restructuring of the politics of the Middle East in less than three years.

On Sunday, November 20, Democratic Senator Joe Biden peddled the "imminent threat" myth. Here's the exchange he had with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace:

WALLACE: I don't think that the vice president ever said anything about an imminent threat. And actually, some Democrats did.

BIDEN: Oh, he did. No, no, he did. He did, and as did the administration. They talked about the threat being imminent. They talked about there's a -- remember mushroom clouds, remember the -- you know, look, the whole point about this was whether or not there was an imminent threat requiring us to go to war when we did. If there was no imminent threat, we had time to continue to try to isolate Saddam Hussein, continue to keep inspectors in there, try to make a deal with the international community to keep this pressure on.

In fact, the vice president never said Iraq was an "imminent threat," unlike Jay Rockefeller ("I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat...") and John Kerry's running mate ("I think Iraq is the most serious and imminent threat to our country... I think each of them have to be dealt with on their own merits. And they do, in my judgment, present different threats. And I think Iraq and Saddam Hussein present the most serious and most imminent threat.")

Here is what the president stated in his 2003 State of the Union address:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

Sen. Biden's other point about efforts "to try to isolate Saddam Hussein, continue to keep inspectors in there, try to make a deal with the international community to keep this pressure on" is worth some review. In "The Right War for the Right Reasons," William Kristol and Robert Kagan write:

By the time inspectors returned to Iraq in 2002, Saddam was ready to be a little more forthcoming, because he had rejiggered his program to withstand somewhat greater scrutiny. He had scaled back to a skeletal program, awaiting the moment when he could breathe life back into it. Nevertheless, even then he could not let the inspectors see everything. Undoubtedly he hoped that if he could get through that last round, he would be home free, eventually without sanctions or further inspections. We now know that in early 2003, Saddam assumed that the United States would once again launch a bombing campaign, but not a full scale invasion. So he figured he would survive, and, as Kay concluded, "They maintained programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their programs."

Was this a satisfactory outcome? If this much had been accomplished, if we had succeeded in getting Saddam to scale back his programs in the hope of eventually turning them on again, was that a reason not to go to war? Kay does not believe so. Nor do we. If the United States had pulled back last year, we would have placed ourselves in the trap that Berger had warned about five years earlier. We would have returned to the old pattern of "Iraqi defiance, followed by force mobilization on our part, followed by Iraqi capitulation," followed by a new round of Iraqi defiance--and the wearing down of both the international community and the United States.

There was an argument against going to war last year. But let's remember what that argument was. It had nothing to do with whether or not Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and WMD programs. Everyone from Howard Dean to the New York Times editorial board to Dominique de Villepin and Jacques Chirac assumed that he had both. Most of the arguments against the war concerned timing. The most frequent complaint was that Bush was rushing to war. Why not give Blix and his inspectors another three months or six months?

We now know, however, that giving Blix a few more months would not have made a difference. Last month Kay was asked what would have happened if Blix and his team had been allowed to continue their mission. Kay responded, "All I can say is that among an extensive body of Iraqi scientists who are talking to us, they have said: The U.N. interviewed us; we did not tell them the truth, we did not show them this equipment, we did not talk about these programs; we couldn't do it as long as Saddam was in power. I suspect regardless of how long they had stayed, that attitude would have been the same." Given the "terror regime of Saddam," Kay concluded, he and his team learned things after the war "that no U.N. inspector would have ever learned" while Saddam was still in power.

So it is very unlikely that, given another three months or six months, the Blix team would have come to any definitive conclusion one way or another. Nor, therefore, would there have been a much greater probability of winning a unanimous vote at the Security Council for war once those additional six months had passed. Whether the United States could have kept 200,000 troops on a permanent war footing in the Persian Gulf for another six months is even more doubtful.

To be continued.

The White House released this document on pre-war intelligence on November 15. Topics addressed include:

Foreign Governments That Opposed The Removal Of Saddam Hussein Judged That Iraq Had Weapons Of Mass Destruction (WMD).

The Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) Was Judged Not To Have Different Intelligence Than The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) Provided To Congress, Which Represented The Collective Opinion Of The Intelligence Community.

Former President Bill Clinton Warned After 9/11 That The United States Could Not Allow Saddam Hussein To Continue Defying Weapons Inspectors.

The Weapons Inspectors Concluded That Saddam Hussein Sought A Nuclear Capability.

The President Never Connected Iraq To The 9/11 Attacks While Other Politicians And Independent Commissions Judged That There Were Contacts Between Iraq, Al-Qaeda And Other Terrorist Groups.

Congressional And Independent Committees Have Repeatedly Found No Political Pressure To Change Intelligence.

1) "Document Date: Feb-02, Title: ...Training Manual from Al Qaida Chemical Plant regarding Chem Warfare, Description: Contains papers concerning Iraqi officials, prices of equipment, training plans, and actions...all concerning chemical warfare" -- Here

2) "Did Saddam Hussein Account for the VX known to have been Produced? No. How about the 600 Tons of VX Precursors UNSCOM believed Iraq had Imported? No. Did it Matter? Yes. Just Ask Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen" -- Here

3) "Did Saddam Hussein Comply With the Provision of UN Resolution 687 Regarding Terrorism? No" -- Here

4) "Did Saddam Hussein Comply With the Provision of UN Resolution 687 Regarding Terrorism? No, Part II" -- Here

5) "With the apparent death of "Halabja" al-Douri, Let's Review Some Material from the Duelfer and UNMOVIC Reports that Won't Appear in a New York Times Editorial Anytime Soon" -- Here

6) "Trust in Saddam: What Hans Blix Doesn't Tell Audiences Nowadays" -- Here

7) "The Media Somehow Missed the Other News Powell Aide Made Yesterday" -- Here

8) "Who were Zawahiri's reported contacts in Iraq? Have members of the Iraqi Delegation that reportedly Traveled to Afghanistan to Meet the Taliban and Bin Ladin been Identified? Have Any Republicans Bothered to Ask?" -- Here

9) "Why did President Clinton Worry About a Terrorist Attack on the United States with Weapons Supplied by Iraq?" -- Here

10) "Why were U.S. Government Officials 'Deeply Worried' That Saddam Hussein Might Give 'Radical Islamist Groups' Biological Weapons to Attack the U.S. during the Clinton presidency?" -- Here

11) "Guess What Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State Had to Say about Saddam's Nuke Program in 2002?" -- Here

12) "What did U.S. intelligence tell the Clinton administration on the nuclear reconstitution issue?" -- Here

13) "Does the National Journal's 'Exclusive' Piece on Pre-War Intelligence Distort the Public Record?" -- Here

14) "More Distortion on Iraq & Niger" -- Here

15) "Another Media Distortion: Joe Wilson Didn't Uncover Forgeries and Didn't 'Debunk' Much of Anything" -- Here

16) "Another Washington Post Distortion" Here

17) "The Washington Post Continues the 'Imminent Threat' Myth" -- Here

18) "Paris v. The Wall Street Journal" -- Here13)

President Clinton told an audience two days ago that he had never "personally" seen any intel linking Iraq and Al-Qaeda and "no one I knew believed that was the case," reported the Westchester Journal-News. Well, the following quotes seem to indicate that the Clinton administration was "deeply worried" about terrorists getting their hands on wmd with Saddam as the possible supplier. If not al Qaeda, which terrorist groups were they referring to? Have any reporters bothered to ask President Clinton?

A November 24, 1997 Time magazine piece, "America the Vulnerable," stated that:

officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call "strategic crime." By that they mean the merging of the output from a government’s arsenals, like Saddam’s biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups, who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them.

Who were these officials?
Intelligence community officials?
Clinton White House officials?
What intelligence did these officials base their "deep worry" on?

And did President Clinton base his November 15, 1997 remarks in Sacramento on the same intelligence that prompted government "officials" to be "deeply worried" about a Saddam-supplied bioterror attack on U.S. soil?

think about it [Iraq's disarmament] in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.

Other examples:

November 19, 1997, White House

The inspectors must be able to do so without interference. That's our top line; that's our bottom line. I want to achieve it diplomatically. But we're taking every step to make sure we are prepared to pursue whatever options are necessary. I do not want these children we are trying to put in stable homes to grow up into a world where they are threatened by terrorists with biological and chemical weapons. It is not right.

February 17, 1998, Pentagon

Saddam Hussein's Iraq reminds us of what we learned in the 20th century and warns us of what we must know about the 21st. In this century, we learned through harsh experience that the only answer to aggression and illegal behavior is firmness, determination and, when necessary, action. In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now--a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed.

May 22, 1998, US Naval Academy

Rather than invading our beaches or launching bombers, these adversaries may attempt cyber-attacks against our critical military systems and our economic base, or they may deploy compact and relatively cheap weapons of mass destruction, not just nuclear but also chemical or biological, to use disease as a weapon of war. Sometimes the terrorists and criminals act alone, but increasingly they are interconnected, and sometimes supported by hostile countries.

There are also many examples of Defense Secretary William Cohen suggesting Saddam's wmd could end up in the hands of terror groups. He spoke about Saddam's VX program.

One drop [of VX nerve agent] on your finger will produce death in a matter of just a few moments. Now the UN believes that Saddam may have produced as much as 200 tons of VX, and this would, of course, be theoretically enough to kill every man, woman and child on the face of the earth.

Cohen then recalled Iraq's use of poison gas and the sarin attack in Tokyo. He warned that “we face a clear and present danger today,” and reminded people that the “terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in New York had in mind the destruction and deaths of some 250,000 people that they were determined to kill.” Cohen had another national television appearance in which he held a bag of sugar and warned that the same amount of anthrax "would destroy at least half the population" of Washington, D.C.

There is also the issue of the Clinton administration's bombing of the al-Shifa chemical plant in Sudan -- explained here.

Newsmax.com's Jason Barnes has set up a web site -- www.whosaiditiraq.blogspot.com -- to compile as many quotes from Democrats on Iraq as possible. If you have any, send them along to whosaiditiraq@gmail.com

On Saturday, the New York Times published an editorial, "A Cold War China Policy," criticizing the president's approach to Beijing. Dan Blumenthal, former senior director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia in the Secretary of Defense's Office of International Security Affairs and current AEI fellow, responds:

The New York Times gets the order of events in Asia exactly backwards: the Bush Administration is generally continuing the policy of the Clinton Administration in its response to China's destabilizing military build-up -- an expansion characterized by annual double-digit increases in defense spending for over a decade. China now has the military capability to coerce and intimidate Taiwan into submission and make any U.S. intervention on Taiwan's behalf costly in lives and treasure.

The Bush Administration is seeking to transform the US-Japan alliance to make it more effective in countering China's military power. The same holds with US-India relations. Despite what the Times' editors may believe, there is a US government consensus that China's military build-up is serious and changing the balance of power in the region. Both conclusions are reflected in recent Pentagon reports, as well as the latest report of the bi-partisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Commission.

Too call the Japanese government "nationalistic," as the Times does, is simplistic and facile. After years of North Korean provocations and, in the last year, frequent Chinese naval incursions into its territorial waters, Japan has now taken small steps to strentghen its defense. The fact that Tokyo is a liberal democracy with a post-War pacifist tradition means that the public debate about such a defense reorientation has been slow, deliberate and responsible.

If anything, the Bush Administration has been overly cautious about countering Chinese power. It is quick to emphasize areas of shared cooperation but downplays areas of disagreement, such as China's support of regimes in Sudan, Zimbabwe and Iran.

A brief review of China's activities in the last year alone would have helped the editors of the New York Times convey what's really going on in East Asia to its readers.

Vice President Cheney delivered this speech today at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Here are some highlights:

"All of us understood, as well, that for more than a decade, the U.N. Security Council had demanded that Saddam Hussein make a full accounting of his weapons programs. The burden of proof was entirely on the dictator of Iraq -- not on the U.N. or the United States or anyone else. And he repeatedly refused to comply throughout the course of the decade"

"In a post-9/11 world, the President and Congress of the United States declined to trust the word of a dictator who had a history of weapons of mass destruction programs, who actually used weapons of mass destruction against innocent civilians in his own country, who tried to assassinate a former President of the United States, who was routinely shooting at allied pilots trying to enforce no fly zones, who had excluded weapons inspectors, who had defied the demands of the international community, whose regime had been designated an official state sponsor of terror, and who had committed mass murder."

"American soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq go out every day into some of the most dangerous and unpredictable conditions. Meanwhile, back in the United States, a few politicians are suggesting these brave Americans were sent into battle for a deliberate falsehood. This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety. It has no place anywhere in American politics, much less in the United States Senate."

"What is not legitimate -- and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible -- is the suggestion by some U. S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence."

"The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight, but any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false. Senator John McCain put it best: 'It is a lie to say that the President lied to the American people.'"

"Some have suggested that by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, we simply stirred up a hornet's nest. They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001 -- and the terrorists hit us anyway. The reality is that terrorists were at war with our country long before the liberation of Iraq, and long before the attacks of 9/11. And for many years, they were the ones on the offensive. They grew bolder in the belief that if they killed Americans, they could change American policy. In Beirut in 1983, terrorists killed 241 of our service men. Thereafter, the United States withdrew from Beirut. In Mogadishu in 1993, terrorists killed 19 American soldiers. Thereafter, the U.S. withdrew its forces from Somalia. Over time, the terrorists concluded that they could strike America without paying a price, because they did, repeatedly: the bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993, the murders at the Saudi National Guard Training Center in Riyadh in 1995, the Khobar Towers in 1996, the simultaneous bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and, of course, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

"Believing they could strike us with impunity and that they could change U.S. policy, they attacked us on 9/11 here in the homeland, killing 3,000 people. Now they are making a stand in Iraq -- testing our resolve, trying to intimidate the United States into abandoning our friends and permitting the overthrow of this new Middle Eastern democracy. Recently we obtained a message from the number-two man in al Qaeda, Mr. Zawahiri, that he sent to his chief deputy in Iraq, the terrorist Zarqawi. The letter makes clear that Iraq is part of a larger plan of imposing Islamic radicalism across the broader Middle East -- making Iraq a terrorist haven and a staging ground for attacks against other nations. Zawahiri also expresses the view that America can be made to run again."

"In light of the commitments our country has made, and given the stated intentions of the enemy, those who advocate a sudden withdrawal from Iraq should answer a few simple questions: Would the United States and other free nations be better off, or worse off, with Zarqawi, bin Laden, and Zawahiri in control of Iraq? Would we be safer, or less safe, with Iraq ruled by men intent on the destruction of our country?

"It is a dangerous illusion to suppose that another retreat by the civilized world would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone. In fact such a retreat would convince the terrorists that free nations will change our policies, forsake our friends, abandon our interests whenever we are confronted with murder and blackmail. A precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would be a victory for the terrorists, an invitation to further violence against free nations, and a terrible blow to the future security of the United States of America."

"The terrorists lack any capacity to inspire the hearts of good men and women. And their only chance for victory is for us to walk away from the fight."

The New York Post's Ralph Peters on "How to Lose a War."

From Time Magazine, November 20, 2005:

In contrast to the Pentagon's stock answer that there are enough troops on the ground in Iraq, the commanders said that they not only needed more manpower but also had repeatedly asked for it. Indeed, military sources told TIME that as recently as August 2005, a senior military official requested more troops but got turned down flat.

There are about 160,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq, a number U.S. commanders in the region plan to maintain at least through the Iraqi national assembly elections on Dec. 15. But the battalion commanders, according to sources close to last week's meeting, said that because there are not enough troops, they have to "leapfrog" around Iraq to keep insurgents from returning to towns that have been cleared out. The officers also stressed that the lack of manpower--rather than of protective armor or signal jammers--posed one of the biggest obstacles in dealing with roadside bombs, which have caused the majority of U.S. casualties in Iraq. The commanders, according to the meeting sources, said there are simply "never enough" explosives experts on the ground. So far, no officer has been willing to go on record to complain about the need for more troops. But there is one positive sign: the Army recently decided to double the number of explosives experts to 2,500 over the next few years.

In the current Weekly Standard, Stephen F. Hayes has a piece on the enormous volume of documents captured in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

Hayes writes:

There are many such documents in a U.S. intelligence database known as HARMONY. One example: Document number ICSQ-2003-00025586 was captured by the U.S. military during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Here is the synopsis of that document that appears in the database:

Category: Al Qaida
Title: Letters, logbook, training manual from Al Qaida Chemical Plant regarding Chem Warfare
Short Description: Contains papers concerning Iraqi officials, prices of equipment, training plans, and actions by high level officers all concerning chemical warfare
Agency: DIA
Document Date: Feb-02
Document #: ICSQ-2003-00025586

What does it mean? I'm not sure. On the one hand, any document under the heading "Al Qaida" that mentions "chem warfare" and "Iraqi officials" is inherently interesting. On the other, we don't know what the document tells us. Just as it is possible that the document reveals Iraqi complicity in al Qaeda's efforts to secure WMD, it is conceivable that the "papers concerning Iraqi officials" include indications that Iraqis rejected al Qaeda overtures for assistance on chemical warfare. Although some HARMONY documents are flagged as being of suspect authenticity, this one is not flagged. Still, it is possible that it is a fabrication and was entered into the database without an assessment of its authenticity.

I can't answer these questions. Someone probably can.

Iraq admitted in 1995 that it had produced nearly four tons of VX, but UN inspectors believed Saddam had imported 600 tons of VX precursors -- enough to produce 200 tons of the nerve agent.

VX was clearly important to the regime. According to UNMOVIC’s March 6, 2003 report,

[i]n a top secret letter, written in 1987 by the Director-General of Al Muthanna [a large chemical weapons production and storage facility near Baghdad] to senior government officials, the importance of the agent to Iraq was recognized. In the letter, VX was compared to a nuclear weapon: “two tons carried by an aircraft compare with a medium nuclear bomb of 20 kilotons.” The letter continued that its possession “…ushers us into the [field] of armament of advanced countries.”

Post-Gulf War, Iraq failed to disclose its VX program to UN inspectors. Then, Iraqi officials denied they had successfully weaponized the nerve agent for military use. But UNSCOM's October 1998 report on Iraq’s VX program declared:

The existence of VX degradation products conflicts with Iraq's declarations that the unilaterally destroyed special warheads had never been filled with any chemical warfare agents. The findings by all three laboratories of chemicals known to be degradation products of decontamination compounds also do not support Iraq's declarations that those warhead containers had only been in contact with alcohols.

Chief UN inspector Hans Blix told to the Security Council in January 2003 that there were “indications that the [VX] agent was weaponised.” He stated:

Iraq has declared that it only produced VX on a pilot scale, just a few tonnes and that the quality was poor and the product unstable. Consequently, it was said that the agent was never weaponised. Iraq said that the small quantity of agent remaining after the Gulf War was unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991.

UNMOVIC, however, has information that conflicts with this account. There are indications that Iraq had worked on the problem of purity and stabilization and that more had been achieved than has been declared….There are also indications that the agent was weaponised.

And the September 2004 Duelfer report concluded:

Iraq had not adequately addressed VX production and weaponization activities—a point on which Iraq’s denials were contradicted by UNSCOM findings. ISG investigations into Iraq’s work with VX reveals that Iraq did weaponize VX in 1988, and dropped 3 aerial bombs filled with VX on Iran. The bombs, originally declared to be part of a storage stability trial, were in fact dropped on an undisclosed Iranian location in 1988.

In February 2003, Iraq made a proposal that it claimed would prove it had unilaterally destroyed its VX in 1991. But UNMOVIC's May 30, 2003 report stated that Iraq's proposal “would not address all of the unresolved issues” regarding VX.

UNMOVIC pointed out to Iraq that the primary concern with regard to VX was not simply the quantity unilaterally destroyed in 1991 but rather the retention of precursors, know-how and the extent of the development of the program in 1990. Therefore, Iraq’s sampling and quantification effort, even if successful, would not address all of the unresolved issues identified by UNMOVIC.

But why would the unaccounted for VX precursors matter? What's the big deal?

UNMOVIC's March 6, 2003 report judged that:

Iraq’s VX programme included extensive efforts in a number of areas such as synthetic routes, stabilizers, and binary munitions. Given Iraq’s history of concealment with respect to its VX programme it cannot be excluded that it has retained some capability with regard to VX....

The major remaining issue relating to Iraq’s production capability is the fact that there are significant discrepancies in the accounting for all the key precursors... required to produce VX. A few other chemicals are required to produce VX... these are however readily available [to Iraq].

According to the September 2002 International Institute for Strategic Studies report,

Iraq could have retained stable precursors for a few hundred tonnes of sarin and cyclosarin and a similar amount of VX. Weaponisation of any retained material would not pose a significant obstacle.

Assessing the production of new CW agent and precursors depends on determining the degree to which Iraq will have chosen to mobilise its civilian chemical industry to produce these capabilities. Without inspectors present, Iraq would not find it difficult to build on pre 1991 stocks and produce and weaponise fresh agent....

Our net assessment of the current situation is that:

Iraq has probably retained a few hundred tonnes of mustard and precursors for a few hundred tonnes of sarin/cyclosarin and perhaps similar amounts of VX from pre-1991 stocks.

It is capable of resuming CW production on short notice (months) from existing civilian facilities. It could have produced hundreds of tonnes of agent (mustard and nerve agents) since 1998. In these circumstances, it is not possible accurately to estimate present stocks.

Evidently, Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen was very worried about Saddam's VX program.

One drop [of VX nerve agent] on your finger will produce death in a matter of just a few moments. Now the UN believes that Saddam may have produced as much as 200 tons of VX, and this would, of course, be theoretically enough to kill every man, woman and child on the face of the earth.

Cohen then recalled Iraq's use of poison gas and the sarin attack in Tokyo. He warned that “we face a clear and present danger today,” and reminded people that the “terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in New York had in mind the destruction and deaths of some 250,000 people that they were determined to kill.” A week before these comments Cohen said on ABC's This Week that Saddam may have enough VX to kill "millions, millions, if it were properly dispersed and through aerosol mechanisms."

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman released the following statement today:

Intelligence Chairs Calls for Declassification of Documents Seized in Global War on Terrorism

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Nov. 18, 2005

Intelligence Chairs Call for Declassification of Documents Seized in Global War on Terrorism

WASHINGTON, D.C. - House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., today called on the administration to declassify millions of pages of documents captured during the global war on terrorism to enable their analysis by the public.

"The reality is there is no way the U.S. government can possibly translate and assess all the documents it has obtained in the global war on terrorism," Hoekstra said. "I would like to get these documents into the public domain in hopes that academics, journalists, bloggers and other interested people can help clear this backlog. In the end, I think the government, and the public, will benefit from having all these documents translated."

In a letter to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence signed by Hoekstra and Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., they request a process be developed to release the documents publicly. They ask that the process ensure document integrity and protection of sources and methods as well as involve our allies, who are in control of some of the documents.

Hoekstra said he would like to see the documents posted online, where people would be able to access copies and offer translations and interpretations of the material. He envisions it working like Wikipedia or open-source code on the Internet, where people are able to take original information and review and analyze it. In much the same way, he said the government could then draw from the public review to determine which documents contained important information and which were trivial.

Hoekstra said he became concerned about this issue when he learned that tens-of-thousands of documents dating back to operation Desert Storm still had not been translated.

"From the collective effort of people across the world, we can learn what is in these documents and gain insight into the thinking of Saddam and his government," Hoekstra said. "I believe this is a far better plan than the continued slow translation of documents, which may leave many of these documents unread for decades."

Texas Sen. John Cornyn released the following press statement today:

WHO’S PLAYING POLITICS ON IRAQ?
While the Minority Leader Complains on the Senate Floor, Democrats Attack

The Senate Minority Leader took to the Senate floor this afternoon to accuse the White House of playing politics.

[T]he President and Vice President shamelessly decided to play politics…The American people and our brave soldiers deserve better. It seems the President and Vice President have decided to treat the war like it’s a political campaign.

- U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senate floor, November 17, 2005, 12:43 p.m.

But mere hours before the Minority Leader took to the floor, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (an organization dedicated raising funds for Democrat Senate candidates) sent an email to supporters under the signature of Sen. Reid’s colleague, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), on the same issue.

Our leaders must be held accountable to ALL Americans. Please forward this message to your friends and family and ask them to stand with us Senate Democrats and demand the truth about how we were lead to war in Iraq.

- U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), DSCC email, November 17, 2005

The Minority Leader also complained about “smear” tactics…

The White House continues to dodge and to duck the questions of America and to smear their opponents. That’s not leadership and our troops and the American people deserve better.

- U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Senate floor, November 17, 2005, 12:43 p.m.

...Mere hours after the DSCC attacked the administration with a discredited smear.

[T]he Bush Administration exaggerated and distorted intelligence before the war in Iraq…

- U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), DSCC email, November 17, 2005

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made the following statement regarding the politicization of the war in Iraq:

I regret that this war in which we are engaged, the global war on terror, with its central front being in Iraq today, has become such a political football. Unfortunately, we see it is just too tempting a target to partisans, some partisans, to try to engage in revisionist history in order to score political points. This should not be about whether Republicans have scored points or whether Democrats have scored points. Rather, this should be about our military strategy on the ground in Iraq that is being implemented as we speak to restore Iraq to a self-governing democracy.

The media is all over the comments made by House Democrat John Murtha of Pennsylvania today. But will the same media cover Sen. McCain's remarks made here?

We have told insurgents that their violence does grind us down, that their horrific acts might be successful. But these are precisely the wrong messages. Our exit strategy in Iraq is not the withdrawal of our troops, it is victory.

Americans may not have been of one mind when it came to the decision to topple Saddam Hussein. But, though some disagreed, I believe that nearly all now wish us to prevail.

Because the stakes there are so high — higher even than those in Vietnam — our friends and our enemies need to hear one message: America is committed to success, and we will win this war.

Don't hold your breath.

Weekly Standard contributor and German Marshall Fund fellow Daniel Twining on the incompatibility of restricting free speech in a globalized information age:

Freedom of the press is under attack in much of Asia -- in countries that should know better, like Thailand and Singapore, and perhaps most importantly in China. China's leaders apparently believe their country can continue to flourish in a globalized world economy increasingly dependent on free flows of information, even as they restrict free speech at home. But as Victor Mallet points out in this Financial Times piece (sub. req'd), "Asian authoritarians are repeating their mistake of a decade ago, seeing the free flow of information as a preventable evil promoted by misguided western liberals. In fact, it is an inevitable adjunct of global modernisation."

Democratic South Korea and Taiwan, once dictatorships themselves, demonstrate that economies dependent on information and services -- rather than manufacturing, which sometimes rewards organization and hierarchy -- require freedom of speech. That's a lesson other Asian leaders should heed, if not for the sake of their people's rights than for the continued growth of their economies, in an age when businesses everywhere profit from free flows of information and lack of government interference. Mallet is right: "Repression and censorship will put awkward people in jail and keep awkward news off the state television channels, but they will not stop the sharing of information.... Authoritarians typically accept the need for free speech on economic matters, but not in their own sphere of politics. Yet business and politics are intertwined. Freedom of information is indivisible." The Asian economic miracle may increasingly depend on a new level of openness in controlled societies.

In typical Clinton fashion (and with Bush's poll numbers down), he now says going into Iraq was a "big mistake," but he's glad Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. His remarks remind me of his clever answer to a question on how Gov. Clinton would have voted on the first Gulf War resolution had he been in Congress at the time. "I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote. But I agree with the argument the minority made," Clinton said in 1991. But does the former president have an opinion on his "big mistake"?

Here's an interview PBS' Frontline conducted with Richard Clarke in March 2002.

Some also say that due to the Lewinsky scandal, more action perhaps was never undertaken. In your eyes?

The interagency group on which I sat and John O'Neill sat -- we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused. We were never refused. Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved....

But didn't you push for military action after the Cole?

Yes, that's one of the exceptions.

How important is that exception?

I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed. So many, many trained and indoctrinated Al Qaeda terrorists, which now we have to hunt down country by country, many of them would not be trained and would not be indoctrinated, because there wouldn't have been a safe place to do it if we had destroyed the camps earlier.

Reuel Marc Gerecht also wrote on the lesson of the USS Cole bombing for the Weekly Standard in October of 2000.

Some may be found here in the Washington Times and here in the New York Sun. And, here's what Bob Dole had to say yesterday on CNN:

I think it's time that President Bush came out slugging. I mean, these guys [the Democrats] have been beating him up for the last six months. And he's hunkered down and took it. I think he's going to recover some ground with the American people if he fights for what he believes in. If it's not worth fighting for, it's not worth doing.

Think there's any chance Sen. Dole can come back to the Senate for a while??????

Let's not kid ourselves. The GOP walked right into a Democratic trap yesterday, and the newspaper headlines today are the early result. First, Republicans let months pass before countering the Democratic drumbeat that the President "lied us into war," despite the mountain of material available to refute the charge. Then last week the White House decided to fight back. The president went on offense during a Veterans Day speech followed by other senior officials pointing out the hypocrisy and distortions of Democratic leaders. In his speech, the president rightly stated:

Last month, the world learned of a letter written by al Qaeda's number two leader, a guy named Zawahiri. And he wrote this letter to his chief deputy in Iraq -- the terrorist Zarqawi. In it, Zawahiri points to the Vietnam War as a model for al Qaeda. This is what he said: "The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam -- and how they ran and left their agents -- is noteworthy." The terrorists witnessed a similar response after the attacks on American troops in Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993. They believe that America can be made to run again -- only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

But then yesterday hit. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin sponsored a resolution calling for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq based on specific timetables. Republicans sponsored a weaker alternative, sponsored by Sen. John Warner, stripped of the specific timetable language. Levin's lost. Warner's won. Victory for Republicans? No. One only has to skim a few papers this morning to get a sense of the signal the US Senate sent the American people yesterday. The Washington Post's headline, "Senate Presses for Concrete Steps Toward Drawdown of Troops from Iraq," sums up what is on the front page of many papers across the nation. It isn't, "Republicans Call for Victory; Democrats for Withdrawal."

In addition, some Republicans are asking today why the Senate leadership didn't offer a simple alternative to Levin that stated that the Democratic withdrawal resolution is a plan for defeat in Iraq, would send a bad signal to our enemies (as President Bush warned in his Veterans Day speech) and that we must do what it takes to win, period. Instead, many Republicans didn't see the text of the GOP alternative until minutes before the vote and, on an issue of great significance to U.S. national security policy, a whopping four minutes of debate was allotted to each resolution.

What a way to run the world's greatest deliberative body.

The White House released this document in response to this editorial in today's New York Times.

William Kristol writes:

One hopes that a year from now this vote is simply remembered as a minor hiccup on the way to success and victory in Iraq. But one doesn't win a war by showing weakness. And one doesn't win a political fight by half capitulating to one's opponents, and, in effect, accepting the premises of their critique.

And John Kerry (writing in a fundraising letter today) couldn't be happier:

You can feel the ice breaking. For far too long, Republican leaders have refused to challenge the aimless Bush "stay as long as it takes" approach to Iraq. But now, their unwillingness to act has started to crumble.

On April 8, 1991, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 687, the first post-Gulf War disarmament resolution, which declared, among other things, that Iraq

not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate within its territory and to condemn unequivocally and renounce all acts, methods and practices of terrorism.

In November of 2002, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441, which declared that the

Government of Iraq has failed to comply with its commitments pursuant to resolution 687 (1991) with regard to terrorism….

From page 316 of the July, 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report:

From 1996 to 2003, the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] focused its terrorist activities on western interest, particularly against the U.S. and Israel. The CIA summarized nearly 50 intelligence reports as examples, using language directly from the intelligence reports. Ten intelligence reports [redacted] from multiple sources indicate IIS "casing" operations against Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague began in 1998 and continued into early 2003. The CIA assessed, based on the Prague casings and a variety of other reporting that throughout 2002, the IIS was becoming increasingly aggressive in planning terrorist attacks against U.S. interests.

Part I is here

On April 8, 1991, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 687, the first post-Gulf War disarmament resolution, which declared, among other things, that Iraq

not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed towards commission of such acts to operate within its territory and to condemn unequivocally and renounce all acts, methods and practices of terrorism.

Eleven years later, on November 8, 2002, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441, which declared that the

Government of Iraq has failed to comply with its commitments pursuant to resolution 687 (1991) with regard to terrorism….

What about the Democrats? What did they have to say about Saddam's terror connections? Well, Senator John Cornyn of Texas has pulled together some quotes to refresh everyone's memory.

Clinton Administration (Patterns of Global Terrorism: 1999, U.S. Department of State)

Iraq continued to plan and sponsor international terrorism…it continued to provide safehaven and support to various terrorist groups

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (Senate floor speech, October 10, 2002)

Saddam's government has contact with many international terrorist organizations that likely have cells here in the United States.

Sen. Hillary Clinton (Senate floor speech, October 10, 2002)

[Saddam Hussein] has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members..."

Sen. Harry Reid (Senate Office website, October 2, 2002; last checked Nov. 14, 2005)

Under Saddam's rule, Iraq has engaged in far-reaching human rights abuses, been a state sponsor of terrorism, and has long sought to obtain and develop weapons of mass destruction.

Sen. Carl Levin (Late Edition, CNN, December 16, 2001)

The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as [Saddam Hussein] is in power.

The invaluable Tom Maguire has an interesting post deconstructing Jay Rockefeller’s October 9, 2002, speech explaining why he voted to authorize the Iraq War. Rockefeller is now – and was then – the Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Here’s another take on Rockefeller’s speech.

Rockefeller has lately taken to claiming that Iraq “had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, it had nothing to do with al-Qaida.” We won’t dwell here on the fact that evidence points rather conclusively in the opposite direction.

Two points:

Rockefeller in his 2002 speech warned that:

Saddam's government has contact with many international terrorist organizations that likely have cells here in the United States.

And:

He could make those weapons [WMD] available to many terrorist groups which have contact with his government, and those groups could bring those weapons into the U.S. and unleash a devastating attack against our citizens. I fear that greatly.

I called Rockefeller’s office this summer and asked which terrorist groups the West Virginia Democrat was talking about. Wendy Morigi, Rockefeller’s communications director, responded.

He was talking about the Palestinian groups that had established relationships with Saddam," she said. "Abu Nidal was living in Baghdad before the war.

Perhaps. But one week before his floor speech, Rockefeller suggested something quite different in an interview with the Charleston Gazette. He said: "If you go pre-emptive, do you cause Hussein to strike where he might not have? He is not a martyr, not a Wahabbi, not a Muslim radical. He does not seek martyrdom. But he is getting older," Rockefeller told the paper. "Maybe he is seeking a legacy by attacking Israel or using al-Qaeda cells around the world." [Emphasis added.]

One month before the war began, Senator Rockefeller spoke of a "substantial connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.” In some interviews Rockefeller did say that he hadn't seen evidence of close ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. But asked about an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship by CNN's Wolf Blitzer on February 5, 2003, Rockefeller agreed with Republican Senator Pat Roberts that Abu Musab al Zarqawi's presence in Iraq before the war and his links to a poison camp in northern Iraq were troubling. Rockefeller continued:

The fact that Zarqawi certainly is related to the death of the U.S. aid officer and that he is very close to bin Laden puts at rest, in fairly dramatic terms, that there is at least a substantial connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

One final note. The resolution that Rockefeller supported specifically mentioned the presence of al Qaeda fighters in Iraq:

Members of al Qaeda, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks that occurred on September 11, are known to be in Iraq.

Remind me, who isn’t being straight with the American public about the Iraq War?

American Enterprise Institute resident scholar and frequent Weekly Standard contributor Gary Schmitt writes:

Sunday’s Washington Post ran a story, “Bush Carries to China a Delicate Diplomacy,” by Peter Baker and Glenn Kessler in advance of President Bush’s upcoming trip to Asia. The Post article began with the fact that the president had met with the Dalai Lama last week but that the visit was not put on his official advance schedule nor were pictures of the visit posted on the White House website. As Baker and Kessler report, the visit by the Dalai Lama was designed “to signal” Bush’s “commitment to human rights in the world’s most populous country.” Pretty weak signal.

Of course, what the White House was trying to do was avoid looking like the cold-hearted realists of the Ford White House, who ignored Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn on his visit to Washington, but, at the same time, not upset the one-party dictatorship that is present day China. According to one White House official, “Bush raises human rights issues in a ‘constructive spirit’ and is optimistic that China will see that freedom is necessary to build a successful society.” Well, one can hope, but certainly, as demonstrated by the Chinese government’s own recent, Orwellian white paper on Chinese-style "democracy," it hasn’t seen the light as of late. To the contrary, virtually every major indicator of civil and human rights has shown no improvement or has declined in China in recent years.

The fact is the administration has a host of issues and problems it wants to address with China in the weeks and months ahead. And, as Deputy Secretary of State Zoellick’s recent speech on US-China relations suggested, all is not well here. Now, it may be that the administration is simply not prepared right now – perhaps even reasonably so – to admit openly that a new great power competition is underway with China. Yet anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear can see that is precisely what is going on.

For a more accurate depiction of the current state of play in U.S.-China relations and what policy initiatives might be needed to begin to create a coherent and realistic strategy vis-a-vis China, folks should check out the most recent report by the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Last week, I noted that Virginia Governor Mark Warner is now considered a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. He is traveling to New Hampshire this week on a wave of punditry that declared him one of the "biggest winners" of Tuesday's election. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and many others point to his credentials as a popular, centrist Southern governor from a so-called Red state. I also wondered if the governor would let us in on how he would have voted on the war resolution had he been in Congress or would he would he wait several months to see how things are going in Iraq before taking a firm position?

Well, Governor Warner gave his answer today.

Ms. BUMILLER: Let's say you had been in the Senate. How would you have voted for the Iraq War resolution had you voted for it...

Gov. WARNER: Well, first of all...

Ms. BUMILLER: ...had been there?

Gov. WARNER: ...I think what we continue to see is the fact that not all the senators had all the information. I heard Senator McCain earlier, and I, you know, have tremendous respect for Senator McCain. But I think the Democratic Party ought to get over refighting how we got into the war and, again, continue to press the president on what he hopes to do in terms of how we will finish the job. I think there are three or four things we need to focus on. One, how do we keep the Sunnis involved in the government? How do we make sure that they don't feel excluded? Two, how do we make sure that as we go through the reconstruction of Iraq, that we don't continue to spend 30 cents on every dollar for security for folks like Halliburton and how do we get more Iraqis involved in the reconstruction? Three, how do we end up making sure that we truly keep that coalition involved? Because this is an international issue, not just an American issue. And four, I think we--one of the issues that will come out of Iraq--and I don't believe we have to set a arbitrary time line because--not only in terms of Iraq but Afghanistan and Iran, but we've got to make sure we look at this whole question of forced structure. Our military is so good at kicking out the command and control of the bad guys, but as we see in Iraq or in Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, what do we do afterwards in terms of restoring civil authority?

Ms. BUMILLER: But would you have voted for the war?

Gov. WARNER: Listen, I'm not go--I don't have all the information of what would have happened at that point. I think we ought to focus again how we finish the job, not go back and refight how we got there in the first place.

Gov. Warner should be applauded for telling Dean, Kennedy & Company to "get over…how we got into the war" but shouldn't a "Southern centrist" who aspires to be commander-in-chief tell us how he would have voted on the Iraq war authorization if he had been in Congress at the time? Does Gov. Warner believe the president made the right decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power in March 2003? Does he support Sen. Kerry's call for a staged troop withdrawal from Iraq or does he side with Sen. McCain who wants more troops to wage the counterinsurgency? He offered no straight answers to these questions that are at the heart of the current debate in Washington and across the nation.

Where do you stand, Governor?

"'If you have forgotten Halabja, we are ready to repeat the operation,' Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri to the Kurds, reminding them of chemical attacks they suffered," writes the BBC in its report on his death. In light of Saddam's wmd history, the Oil-for-Food scandal, and Iraqi attempts to conceal "its importing networks," some readers may find these underreported items from the September 30, 2004 Duelfer report and the May 30, 2003 UNMOVIC report of interest.

In the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) report, head inspector Charles Duelfer stated that, "there is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD production after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise. In addition to preserved capability, we have clear evidence of his intent to resume WMD production as soon as sanctions were lifted."

He continued:

Based on an investigation of facilities, materials, and production outputs, ISG also judges that Iraq had a break-out capability to produce large quantities of sulfur mustard CW agent, but not nerve agents....

Iraq retained the necessary basic chemicals to produce sulfur mustard on a large-scale, but probably did not have key precursors for nerve agent production. With the importation of key phosphorus based precursors, Iraq could have produced limited quantities of nerve agent as well. Mustard production could have started within days if the necessary precursor chemicals were co-located in a suitable production facility; otherwise production could have started within weeks. Nerve agent production would have taken much longer.

Duelfer further noted that ISG “identified several suspect clandestine laboratories that reportedly supported biologically related research” but “has not been able to determine whether these laboratories were part of a clandestine BW effort.” However,

the tactic of using IIS and covert laboratories has historical precedence dating back to the programs origins in the 1970s. Reverting to this practice would minimize the evidence available to inspectors. It would also leave the known and acknowledged BW workers free to deal with the UN inspection regime. However, it would require another cadre of scientists other than ones known to the UN to conduct this kind of research. The discovery of multiple clandestine laboratories after OIF lends some credence to this assessment.

In addition, he reported:

ISG also has evidence that, possibly as recently as 1994, an IIS chemist who immigrated to Iraq from Egypt, Dr. Muhammad ‘Abd-al-Mun’im Al Azmirli (now deceased), experimented on prisoners with ricin resulting in their deaths.

In the chemical field, ISG learned that, in the 1970s, the former IIS Directorate of Science and Technology, M9 (which later transformed into M16) used this approach for research into lethal agents. The IIS used a succession of four clandestine laboratories in At Taji and Baghdad between 1996 and 2003 to research and develop chemicals. It also included testing of chemicals on small animals like mice, rabbits and rats.

Also, this section from UNMOVIC's May 30, 2003 report (pp. 27-28) on Iraq's attempt "to conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks" is worth reviewing.

Iraq was required to declare the import of dual-use items and supply UNMOVIC with details as to their origin. However, Iraq’s recent semi-annual monitoring declarations, starting with the “backlog” of declarations since 1998 supplied to UNMOVIC in October 2002, showed a trend of withholding pertinent information....The biological imports were of a slightly more significant kind, and included the import of a dozen autoclaves, half a dozen centrifuges and a number of laminar flow cabinets.

Missile imports, however, were more substantial and could have contributed significantly to any missile development programme. One example was the importation of 380 Volga engines that Iraq planned to use in the production of the Al Samoud 2 missile, a missile system UNMOVIC later determined to be prohibited since its range exceeded 150 km. In its declaration of 7 December 2002, Iraq declared that it had imported 131 such engines but failed to supply any information about their origin (suppliers, exporting countries) until inspectors observed 231 such engines at an Al Samoud production facility.

A trend that was especially pronounced in the missile area (but to a lesser extent also present in the biological and chemical fields) was the use of the term “local market” to classify the import of some very sophisticated pieces of equipment....UNMOVIC came to understand that Iraq used the term “local market” when an Iraqi import company imported a commodity and then sold or transferred it to a government facility, which suggested that Iraq was trying to conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks.”

Guess Sen. McCain had a point when he said last year that, "our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not our critics abroad. Not our political opponents…."

The Nation's current editorial throws down the gauntlet against Democrats who refuse to support the speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. The editors write:

We will not support any candidate for national office who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq a major issue of his or her campaign. We urge all voters to join us in adopting this position….But this fight, and our stand, must begin now. In the coming weeks and months The Nation will help identify--and encourage support for--those candidates prepared to bring a speedy end to the war….

Senator Clinton also faces mounting criticism from liberal activists.

Mrs. Clinton will now have to "pay a price for all of this, all these lost lives and wasted money," a spokesman for United for Peace and Justice, William Dobbs, told The New York Sun. UPJ is the largest coalition of antiwar organizations in the country, representing around 1,200 activist groups.

"It's always amazing to me that there are people who think Clinton is somehow a liberal," Mr. Dobbs added. "Her position on this war has been horrendous."

Two weeks ago, her New York colleague, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, said on the Meet the Press that he didn't regret his vote for the Iraq war resolution (as Kerry has done) because "my vote was seen and I still see it as a need to say we must fight a strong and active war on terror."

For now, Sen. Clinton stands with Schumer, who, unlike Kerry, has yet to buckle to the withdrawal crowd on the left.

Sen. John Kerry has released a press statement in response to Sen. McCain's speech on Iraq delivered today at the American Enterprise Institute. Kerry voted for the war but now says he regrets his vote. But his latest position on Iraq seems firm. Military historian Fredrick Kagan explains why Kerry has it exactly wrong here.

Virginia's Governor Mark Warner would apparently like to replace the current president in the Oval Office. Next week he is traveling to New Hampshire on a wave of punditry that declared him one of the "biggest winners" of Tuesday's election. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and many others point to his credentials as a popular, centrist Southern governor from a so-called Red state. Translation: Warner doesn't have the liberal baggage of a John Kerry or Hillary Clinton and would have been re-elected to his office unlike John Edwards who exited the Senate with sagging popularity at home.

But shouldn't a "Southern centrist" who aspires to be commander-in-chief tell us how he would have voted on the Iraq war authorization if he had been in Congress at the time? Would he regret that vote today if he had supported the authorization back then? Does Gov. Warner believe the president made the right decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power in March 2003? Does he support Sen. Kerry's call for a staged troop withdrawal from Iraq or does he side with Sen. McCain who wants more troops to wage the counterinsurgency?

E.J. Dionne has opinion on these big issues, as do Kerry, Edwards, Clinton and millions of others. How about you, Governor?

Senator John McCain delivered this speech, "Winning the War in Iraq," today at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Some highlights:

McCain on …

The Courage of the Iraqi People

…[A]s we look on events there, let us not forget that the Iraqi people are in the midst of something unprecedented in their history.

The world has witnessed Iraqis of all stripes exercising those very democratic habits that critics predicted could never take root in a country with little democratic tradition. They voted in January for an interim government. They put Saddam on trial and dictators throughout the world on notice. They produced a landmark constitution that, while not perfect, nevertheless enshrines critical rights that go far beyond the standards elsewhere in the region. On October 15, they braved explicit death threats from Zarqawi and his ilk in order to determine their future democratically. Try as they might, the terrorists and the insurgents in Iraq got no veto. Instead, an Arab country adopted a democratic constitution by a free vote for the first time in history….

John Kerry's Iraq Withdrawal Plan

We must get Iraq right because America’s stake in that conflict is enormous. All Americans, whether or not they supported American action to topple Saddam Hussein, must understand the profound implications of our presence there. Success or failure in Iraq is the transcendent issue for our foreign policy and our national security, for now and years to come. I would submit that the stakes are higher than in the Vietnam War.

There is an understandable desire, two and a half years after our invasion, to seek a quick and easy end to our intervention in Iraq. We see this in the protests of Cindy Sheehan; we saw it recently in Senator Kerry’s call to withdraw troops whether or not the country is secured. But should America follow these calls, we would face consequences of the most serious nature. Because Iraqi forces are not yet capable of carrying out most security operations on their own, great bloodshed would occur if the main enforcer of government authority – coalition troops – draw down prematurely….

If we leave Iraq prematurely, the jihadists will interpret the withdrawal as their great victory against our great power. Osama bin Laden and his followers believe that America is weak, unwilling to suffer casualties in battle. They drew that lesson from Lebanon in the 1980s and Somalia in the 1990s, and today they have their sights set squarely on Iraq. The recently released letter from Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s lieutenant, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, draws out the implications. The Zawahiri letter is predicated on the assumption that the United States will leave Iraq, and that al Qaeda’s real game begins as soon as we abandon the country. In his missive, Zawahiri lays out a four stage plan – establish a caliphate in Iraq, extend the “jihad wave” to the secular countries neighboring Iraq, clash with Israel – none of which shall commence until the completion of stage one: expel the Americans from Iraq. Zawahiri observes that the collapse of American power in Vietnam, “and how they ran and left their agents,” suggests that “we must be ready starting now.”

… Some argue that it our very presence in Iraq that has created the insurgency, and that if we end the occupation, we end the insurgency. But in fact by ending military operations, we are likely to empower the insurgency….

Senator Kerry’s call for the withdrawal of 20,000 American troops by year’s end represents, I believe, a major step on the road to disaster. Drawdowns must be based on conditions in-country, not arbitrary deadlines rooted in our domestic politics.

A Counterinsurgency Strategy of "Clear and Stay" Not "Sweeping and Leaving"

The battles of Tal Afar, like those in other areas of Iraq, have become seasonal offensives, where success is measured most often by the number of insurgents captured and killed. But that’s not success, and “sweeping and leaving” is not working. Instead, we need to clear and stay….

To enhance our chances of success with this strategy, and enable our forces to hold as much territory as possible, we need more troops. For this reason, I believe that current ideas to effect a partial drawdown during 2006 are exactly wrong. While the U.S. and its partners are training Iraqi security forces at a furious pace, these Iraqis should supplement, not substitute for, the coalition forces on the ground. Instead of drawing down, we should be ramping up, with more civil-military soldiers, translators, and counterinsurgency operations teams. Our decisions about troop levels should be tied to the success or failure of our mission in Iraq, not to the number of Iraqi troops trained and equipped. And while we seek higher troop levels for Iraq, we should at last face facts and increase the standing size of the U.S. Army. It takes time to build a larger army, but had we done so even after our invasion of Iraq, our military would have more soldiers available for deployment now.

The Media & the Democratic Party

A renewed effort at home starts with explaining precisely what is at stake in this war – not to alarm Americans, but so that they see the nature of this struggle for what it is. The President cannot do this alone. The media, so efficient in portraying the difficulties in Iraq, need to convey the consequences of success or failure there. Critics in the Democratic Party should outline precisely what they believe to be the stakes in this battle, if they are willing to suffer the consequences of withdrawal.

"Seeing this Mission Through to Victory"

America, Iraq and the world are better off with Saddam Hussein in prison rather than in power. Does anyone believe the stirrings of freedom in the region would exist if Saddam still ruled with an iron fist? Does anyone believe the region would be better off if Saddam were in power, using oil revenue to purchase political support? Does anyone believe meaningful sanctions would remain or that there would been any serious checks on Saddam’s ambitions? The costs of this war have been high, especially for the over 2000 Americans, and their families, who have paid the ultimate price. But liberating Iraq was in our strategic and moral interests, and we must honor their sacrifice by seeing this mission through to victory.

Most Americans haven't heard of the International Republican Institute but for over 20 years IRI has helped advance democracy in the world. IRI has monitored elections in over 160 nations with little or no history in democracy -- and supports democracy efforts in many others. IRI recently sent a delegation to observe Liberia's election and issued its preliminary report here.

Ellen Bork, a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard, emails:

Donald Tsang, Beijing’s man in Hong Kong, recently completed a pleasant visit to Washington where he faced little criticism over his (read: Beijing’s) plan to tweak the process by which Beijing controls the executive and the legislature and call it progress toward democracy.

The reception to these so-called reforms has been much frostier in Hong Kong where religious leaders have taken a particularly vocal stand. Bishop Joseph Zen condemned the "reform" package proposed by Tsang. Reaching full democracy "is just like climbing up a mountain--our goal is to reach the peak," Bishop Zen said. "This proposal is just guiding us round and round making pleasure jaunts rather than moving towards the peak. It is a waste of time."

Currently, Beijing’s choice of chief executive is approved by a rubber-stamp committee of 800. The new Tsang proposal would double that number. ”So what if the election committee (to choose the city's leader) is expanded to 1,600 people? What is the next step? There is no direction," Zen said, according to the local Ming Pao Daily. Zen’s call was joined by other religious leaders, including the president of the Methodist church.

Under Communist Party rule, Beijing will not provide direction or lead the way. Hong Kong’s diverse democracy movement, which includes free labor unions, as well as organizations of teachers, social workers, lawyers and other professionals, will have to prepare their own program for democracy.

The Bush administration is going on the offense, finally. But to add real punch to their effort they could use an effective advocate who is articulate on television, a first-rate debater, capable of absorbing large amounts of factual data, and not in government. Over a year ago, I attended a speech by the one-time Tennessee senator on the topic of Iraq and the broader War on Terror. He took the offensive against Bush's critics in his speech and was very effective in answering the many hostile questions thrown his way in the Q & A session. In the Senate, I witnessed Thompson defend amendments he had sponsored without notes yet well briefed with many facts that frequently put opponents on the defensive.

Fred Thompson may be busy with Law & Order and other stuff, but he could do the president a hell of a lot of good by agreeing to take on the Democrat's campaign of distortion even on a part-time basis.

Since the 2003 invasion, the failure of the military to secure the airport road has been one of the most reported stories of the war -- and rightly so. As Reuel Gerecht wrote a year ago in the Weekly Standard:

The Bush administration ought to admit to itself two obvious facts. First, we are losing the "war of the roads" in Iraq. If the Sunni insurgency controls the principal arteries in and out of Baghdad and can kill with ease on major thoroughfares elsewhere, there is no way the United States and its Iraqi allies can win a counterinsurgency campaign in the country's heartland….

Clearing the roads adequately, which means suppressing the occasional bombings, brigandage, and assassinations, really has nothing to do with "standing up" Iraqi security forces. If there is one kind of military operation that does not require much local knowledge, it's undertaking roadblocks, observation posts, and ground and air patrols. The military personnel required to perform this function 24/7 isn't small, but it is certainly within the capabilities of forces already present in Iraq if the Pentagon so chose to allocate these resources. It beggars the mind to believe that the U.S. military cannot deploy sufficient forces to secure the highway between Baghdad and the capital's international airport. Insurgents and brigands--it's very difficult often to tell the difference--now own this short stretch of highway, which regularly sees ordinary Iraqis robbed and shot, often in carefree, outrageous ways. What is worse, official Americans, authorized contractors, and the few lucky Iraqis who have the right friends can chopper overhead, traveling the same route in relative security.

But the Washington Post reports that today there is "easy sailing along [the] once-perilous road to Baghdad Airport." How was this achieved? Army officials said, "the turnaround was owed to simple, boots-on-the-ground military tactics."

Of course, why this wasn't done two years ago is anyone's guess.

Let's see. First, the cry of many anti-Bush liberals was that Bush officials "pressured" intelligence analysts to reach the judgments made in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. When that line of attack was torpedoed by two bi-partisan reports--

Silberman/Robb Commission: The Commission has found no evidence of "politicization" of the Intelligence Community's assessments concerning Iraq's reported WMD programs. No analytical judgments were changed in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion.

Senate Intelligence Committee: The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

-- they descended into cuckoo-clock land with another conspiracy in which a secret cabal forged those Niger uranium documents to push the U.S. into war. That fizzled the other day when the FBI weighed-in. The latest is that Bush officials presented the intelligence to the American people in a dishonest campaign to rush us into war.

Republicans should welcome a debate on all aspects of the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power. For example, John Kerry now says he'd have left Saddam in power. Let's debate the implications of his new position in light of the UN inspection reports and the findings of David Kay and Charles Duelfer. Let's debate the Clinton administration's use of intelligence in the lead-up to the December, 1998 Desert Fox bombing campaign -- an attack that some worried would compel Saddam to launch wmd-filled Scuds against his neighbors. Let's debate why Clinton officials were so worried about a "strategic crime" where Islamic radicals would hit US targets using Iraq-supplied wmd. To kick things off, Congress should appropriate funds to send every American household a copy of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate--a document that was not "politicized" and represents the collective judgment of six U.S. intelligence agencies. Let the debate begin.

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected President. He ran as a national security hawk and accused the Eisenhower-Nixon administration of conducting a reactive foreign policy in the face of Soviet adventurism. John F. Kennedy pledged to "assure the survival and the success of liberty" while John F. Kerry speaks of withdrawal timetables "that must be real and strict." Kennedy believed America was "fulfilling a noble and historic role as the defender of freedom" in the world while today's Democratic party embraces Michael Moore -- a movie maker who mocks the United States all over the world.

In the early 1970s, Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington was a founder of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a group of hawkish Democrats who opposed the take over of the party by the McGovern folks. While today's "Scoop" Jackson Democrats could fit on the deck of J.F.K's PT-109, there are a few like Sen. Joe Lieberman who haven't succumbed to the siren song of the Moveon.org/Daily Kos crowd -- and that's a bit of good news for the few Truman-Kennedy Democrats left in the party.

Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas took to the Senate floor today to respond to critics of the Bush administration's use of Iraq pre-war intelligence. The speech may be found here.

Some highlights:

I wish to ask my colleagues, did President Clinton lie when he discussed the intelligence that led him to support the forced ouster of Saddam Hussein? Did he manipulate intelligence to justify his bombing in Iraq? Or did he rely upon the same intelligence that this administration and this Congress and our allies did when they came to the same conclusion that Saddam was a threat to the region and to the world? Are there Senators who today would renounce their vote to remove Saddam by force in October of 2002? Out of the bipartisan 77 who voted to authorize the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, I have only learned of two who have said they regret that vote and would renounce it….

Before the war, a leading Democrat -- in fact, the Democratic leader -- clearly stated his position in Iraq. As of this morning, his quotation was still on his Senate Web site. It says:

'What is my position on Iraq? Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator who presents a serious threat to international peace and security. Under Saddam's rule, Iraq has engaged in far-reaching human rights abuses, been a state sponsor of terrorism, and has long sought to obtain and develop weapons of mass destruction.'

I agree with this statement on the Web site of Senator Reid of today, November 7, 2005. But today we are told by the same Democratic leader that somehow this administration was responsible for manipulating intelligence to authorize the war in Iraq when, in fact, he took the same position at the time that force was used. At least his Web site takes that same position today.

Do we resolve doubts in favor of a tyrant who has used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, who demonstrated an interest in acquiring nuclear weapons, who refused to cooperate with weapons inspectors after 17 Security Council resolutions ordered him to do so, and who at last count murdered at least 400,000 of his own people who are lying in mass graves?

Giving Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt would have been a crazy and irresponsible thing to do. Of course, the 78 Senators who voted for the use of force against Saddam in October 2002 weren't buying that Saddam was some harmless individual then.

A day doesn't seem to go by without Senator Levin spoon-feeding a story to the New York Times or the Washington Post that targets the Bush administration. The latest was Douglas Jehl's piece, "Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence," in Sunday's New York Times (Steve Hayes challenges the substance of the Jehl piece here). Apparently, Levin and Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller reviewed a classified Defense Intelligence Agency document from February 2002 and liked what they read in two particular paragraphs. They asked the DIA to declassify the two paragraphs and eight days later -- which must be close to record time -- the Agency did just that. A few questions come to mind reading the Jehl piece:

1. Have any Republicans read this document?

2. What's the reason Levin and Rockefeller requested only those two paragraphs for declassification? Are there any other paragraphs that may be of interest to Americans?

3. Have any Republicans read other documents or reports that may contain paragraphs of interest to Americans?

4. If so, have requests been made to the appropriate agency for declassification and how long has it taken to get an answer?

5. How many requests for declassification have been rejected?

6. What about page 66 of the 9-11 report?

Finally, as William Kristol has wondered, do Republicans actually enjoy being "punching bags" for liberal Democrats?

Yesterday's parliamentary election in Azerbaijan "deteriorated progressively during the counting and, in particular, the tabulation of the votes," reported the OSCE, which monitored the election. Ballot counting was "bad or very bad in 43 per cent of counts observed" and election violations included "tampering with result protocols, intimidation of observers, and unauthorized persons directing the process." In addtion, the results of an exit poll conducted by USAID varied widely from the official count in many races.

The fraudulent vote comes on the heels of Secretary Rice's visit to Central Asia where she delivered the message to each capital that "one of the elements of a strong and deep relationship with the United States these days is moving forward with democracy." Two years ago, the U.S. and many other nations rejected the results of a rigged parliamentary election in neighboring Georgia. Azerbaijan should be no different if the U.S. is serious about promoting real democracy in the region.

These and many other questions contained in the 9-11 Commission report remain unanswered. For example, page 66 of the report states:

In March 1998, after Bin Ladin's public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported that one, or perhaps both, of these meetings was apparently arranged through Bin Ladin's Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties on his own to the Iraqis. In 1998, Iraq was under intensifying U.S. pressure, which culminated in a series of large air attacks in December.

Similar meetings between Iraqi officials and Bin Ladin or his aides may have occurred in 1999 during a period of some reported strains with the Taliban.

Has any element of the intelligence community made progress in getting answers to the following questions:

Who were the "al Qaeda members"?
Who were the "Iraqi intelligence" officials?
Who were members of the "Iraqi delegation"?
Zawahiri "had ties of his own to the Iraqis." Who were they?
Who were the "Iraqi officials"?
Who were the Bin Ladin "aides"?

In an upcoming Weekly Standard piece, Steve Hayes writes:

For two years Senator Carl Levin of Michigan has led the Democratic assault on the credibility of Bush Administration’s claim of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. It is worth moment to examine his credibility on these same issues.

In the months after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Levin repeatedly accused the Bush Administration of pressuring intelligence officials to reach conclusions that supported the case for war. He provided an example in an appearance on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on June 16, 2003. “We were told by the intelligence community that there was a very strong link between Iraq and al Qaeda.”

But Levin’s allegations were undermined as the Senate Intelligence Committee interviewed analysts to determine whether they were pressured to change their analyses. None of the analysts supported his claim, a finding that was later confirmed in the Phase I report.

So Levin adjusted his allegation. “The intel didn't say that there is a direct connection between al Qaeda and Iraq,” he said in an appearance on Fox News on February 2, 2004. “That was not the intel. That's what this administration exaggerated to produce.”

So which is it? Did the intelligence claim a “very strong link” or no direct connection?

At his press conference last week, Levin went even further. “The intelligence was not far off as it related to the nonexistent relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.”

Carl Levin may believe that there was no relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. But his claims are at odds with the views of the CIA.

As noted above, the CIA assessed in Iraqi Support for Terrorism that “the most disturbing aspect of the relationship is the dozen or so reports of varying reliability mentioning the involvement of Iraq or Iraqi nationals in al Qaeda’s efforts to obtain CBW training.” [emphasis added].

Fortunately, we are no longer reliant on Carl Levin’s claims or even CIA analyses for our understanding of the Iraq-al Qaeda connection. Documents uncovered in postwar Iraq allow us to test Levin’s views and CIA prewar assessments against the words and deeds of the former Iraqi regime.

On June 25, 2004, The New York Times reported on an internal Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) document that discussed relations between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. The document, authenticated by the U.S. intelligence community, reports on meetings between bin Laden emissaries and Uday Hussein in 1994. The document further reports that the Iraqi regime agreed to a request from bin Laden to broadcast sermons from an anti-Saudi cleric. The IIS document advises that “cooperation between the two organizations should be allowed to develop freely through discussion and agreement.” And when bin Laden was ousted from Sudan in 1996, the document reports that Iraqis were “seeking other channels through which to handle the relationship.”

All of which makes one thing clear: Carl Levin may still believe there was no relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.

But the Iraqis, who might have had unique insight into such matters, certainly did.

To be continued.

"The FBI has determined that financial gain, not an effort to influence U.S. policy, was behind the forged documents," reports the Associated Press. Of course, the FBI's finding doesn't fit into the conspiracy theory that's been creating a frenzy on some blog sites. But wait, the FBI must be in on the conspiracy.

More on the Iraq-Niger-uranium issue here.

A November 24, 1997 Time magazine piece, "America the Vulnerable," stated that:

officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call "strategic crime." By that they mean the merging of the output from a government’s arsenals, like Saddam’s biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups, who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them.

Who were these officials?
Intelligence community officials?
Clinton White House officials?
What intelligence did these officials base their "deep worry" on?

And did President Clinton base his November 15, 1997 remarks in Sacramento on the same intelligence that prompted government "officials" to be "deeply worried" about a Saddam-supplied bioterror attack on U.S. soil?

think about it [Iraq's disarmament] in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.

Other examples:

November 19, 1997, White House

The inspectors must be able to do so without interference. That's our top line; that's our bottom line. I want to achieve it diplomatically. But we're taking every step to make sure we are prepared to pursue whatever options are necessary. I do not want these children we are trying to put in stable homes to grow up into a world where they are threatened by terrorists with biological and chemical weapons. It is not right.

February 17, 1998, Pentagon

Saddam Hussein's Iraq reminds us of what we learned in the 20th century and warns us of what we must know about the 21st. In this century, we learned through harsh experience that the only answer to aggression and illegal behavior is firmness, determination and, when necessary, action. In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now--a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed.

May 22, 1998, US Naval Academy

Rather than invading our beaches or launching bombers, these adversaries may attempt cyber-attacks against our critical military systems and our economic base, or they may deploy compact and relatively cheap weapons of mass destruction, not just nuclear but also chemical or biological, to use disease as a weapon of war. Sometimes the terrorists and criminals act alone, but increasingly they are interconnected, and sometimes supported by hostile countries.

Venezuela's Chavez came to Argentina for the Summit of the Americas with big plans but no one seems to be listening except for the collection of leftists and anarchists chanting in the streets of Mar Del Plata.

Chavez, who regularly claims Washington is trying to overthrow him, has said free trade is being forced on Latin American countries and the deal would only help the rich. Instead, he has pushed for an anti-FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas] deal based on socialist ideals [and] pushed for regional solidarity….

But Bush seemed to be winning over supporters. A high-ranking Brazilian official, who said he was not authorized to give his name, told reporters 28 of the 34 countries participating in the summit had agreed to relaunch [FTAA] trade talks as early as April.

Update here.

The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb writes:

It used to be that I got to listen to BBC World Service as I rode into work every morning. No more. BBC has been displaced on WETA-FM by On Point, a show hosted by Tom Ashbrook with a pronounced tilt to the left even by NPR standards. The other morning, listeners had the pleasure of listening to Phyllis Bennis, a long-time anti-Israel activist and author of Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power.

Bennis:

I think the motive [for the administration’s lies] is that the lead people within the Bush administration were convinced from before they ever came into office, from the early 1990’s, when they began to work together when they were outside of power, when they were not in office in the Clinton years and they formed the group that later became known as the Project for the New American Century, when they were working for Bibi Netanyahu in the Israeli election. That same group of neocons had the view that the overthrow of the regime in Iraq was a crucial component of expanding U.S. power in the world…it had to do with oil, it had to do with the expansion of creating new permanent bases throughout the region, it had to with protection of Israel, it had to with a whole range of both regional and international goals.

You see, it was the Jews, the neocons in the Bush administration. But Bennis has always believed in an American conspiracy to subjugate Muslims and prop up Israel. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported in June 1997 that, on the thirtieth anniversary of the June War, aka the Six Day War, Bennis “charged that the U.S. is establishing a Middle Eastern empire with Israel at its center.”

David Corn, Washington Editor of the Nation, of course immediately agreed that we had gone to war based on these lies. Leaving our host to ask the question, why then was George W. Bush reelected by the American people:

Tom Ashbrook: "But when you say it’s “kindergarten clear” David Corn, is that disdainful of the American people? Is that saying that they knew and they voted stupidly?"

Corn: "Well some people, I think, did not care. I think some people didn’t, you know, listen Tom, not everybody listens to your show and reads the Nation or Op-Ed pages."

The blog dealt with "sensitive subjects" like freedom and democracy. Beijing is also having a problem with too much democracy in its "village elections" nowadays.

A November 24, 1997 Time magazine piece, "America the Vulnerable," stated that:

officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call "strategic crime." By that they mean the merging of the output from a government’s arsenals, like Saddam’s biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups, who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them.

Who were these officials?
Intelligence community officials?
Clinton White House officials?
What intelligence did these officials base their "deep worry" on?

And did President Clinton base these remarks made on November 15, 1997 in Sacramento on the same intelligence that prompted government "officials" to be "deeply worried" about a Saddam-supplied bioterror attack on U.S. soil?

think about it [Iraq's disarmament] in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you.

Was this threat cited in Time and in the president's speech addressed in a Presidential Daily Brief or some other official government assessment?

President Carter's take.

Here and here explain.

From today's Los Angeles Times:

"Business is better than previous years," said Saleh Abed, 34, a Baghdad clothing wholesaler. "Although there is terrorism and the country is going through a very rough time, there is some kind of stability. We have an army. We have police. We have a constitution…."

Even in violence-scarred stretches of the country, many merchants and consumers reported increased spending. The northern city of Samarra, for example, has been subjected to two large U.S.-led counterinsurgency operations over the last 15 months and recently was surrounded by a huge berm built to keep out militants….

"This is because of the relative security and stability this month in Samarra," he said. "This increases the desire of people to go shopping."

…Douri said his profit margin had jumped to 25% from 10% because of lower taxes that enabled him to charge customers less for better products.

Salaries for state employees, the bulk of Iraq's workforce, also have increased sharply. Mohammed Qais Nouri, a 38-year-old Samarra traffic cop, said his pay had increased from $20 a month before the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003 to between $500 and $600 a month now.

"Before, I used to worry about buying clothes for Eid," he said. "Now it's easy to get my four children whatever they want."

The Bull Moose writes:

the Democrats should be careful that they are positioning themselves as a party that is gullible, feckless and indecisive on national security. It may provide immense partisan satisfaction to flummox the Republicans on a procedural maneuver, but beware of the long-term impact on the party which already suffers from a perception of being weak on national security.

Within four or five years, [Iraq] could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing high-enriched uranium produced indigenously. Within that same period, it could threaten U.S. territory with nuclear weapons delivered by non-conventional means. If Iraq managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much earlier.

Robert Einhorn testimony before the Senate Gov't Affairs Committee, March 1, 2002

Well, Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration, commented in the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly on what U.S. intelligence believed regarding Iraq's nuclear program:

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s belief toward the end of the Clinton Administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons....

And, he also wrote:

In the late spring of 2002 I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: Did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

From Worldwide Standard, October 30, 2005:

Surprise, Surprise: The NYT's Frank Rich Ignores Facts that Undermine His Conspiracy Theory

For example, Rich writes:

Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with ''crucial documents,'' including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. ''evidence'' to the U.N. on the eve of war.

Rich, like other liberals, are desperately trying to get the nation to believe that the pre-war intelligence on Iraq was manufactured by a small band of zealots in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, including Cheney himself. Last week, Iraq opponents like Rich were abuzz over the remarks of Lawrence Wilkerson who called the relationship between Rumsfeld and Cheney "a cabal" during a speech in Washington. This week it's the Waas piece. But Wilkerson's other remarks in the same speech combined with the Waas piece actually undermine the "zealots made the wmd up" line.

For instance, Waas, a contributor to the American Prospect, writes:

…whether dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research [INR], the Department of Energy, and other agencies that often disagreed with the CIA on the question of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction…

His phrase "programs to develop weapons of mass destruction" leaves the clear impression that INR dissented not only on the nuclear issue (for the record, DOE believed Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program) but also on chemical and biological weapons . But that is not true, according to Wilkerson. Here's what Secretary Powell's chief of staff Wilkerson said the same "cabal" speech:

…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios….

According to Wilkerson, most, if not all, of the content in Secretary Powell's address -- a speech, Waas writes, that deputy CIA director John McLaughlin told Congress was reviewed to take "out material…that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable" -- to the UN was believed to be "the truth" by British, German and French intelligence. And INR, Wilkerson states, was "right there with the chems and the bios."

So Powell's speech didn't include the "Libby-written" passages, yet British, French and German intelligence believed it to be "the truth," and INR was "right there" with Powell on "the chems and bios."

Boy, that's quite a conspiracy the vice president engineered.

More on the Murray Waas piece may be found here and Wilkerson's "cabal" speech here.

From the Worldwide Standard, October 28, 2005:

Does the National Journal's "Exclusive" Piece on Pre-War Intelligence Distort the Public Record ?

Yesterday, the National Journal publicized an "online exclusive" on the Bush administration's pre-war intelligence claims. Last night, Chris Matthews cited the Murray Waas piece and today its contents are pinging around the blogosphere. But the piece has one passage, in particular, that doesn't quite square with the public record.

For instance, Waas, a frequent contributor to the American Prospect, writes:

…whether dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research [INR], the Department of Energy, and other agencies that often disagreed with the CIA on the question of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction…

His phrase "programs to develop weapons of mass destruction" leaves the clear impression that INR dissented not only on the nuclear issue but also on chemical and biological weapons. But here's what Secretary Powell's chief of staff said just the other day:

…I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios….

So, according to Lawrence Wilkerson, most, if not all, of the content in Secretary Powell's address -- a speech that deputy CIA director John McLaughlin told Congress was reviewed to take "out material…that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable" -- to the UN was believed to be "the truth" by British, German and French intelligence. And INR, Wilkerson states, was "right there with the chems and the bios."

Wilkerson's comment on INR reflect what was released publicly in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).

In that document, for example, INR concluded that “Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes is central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, but INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors.” INR cited the Department of Energy's judgment that the tubes were “poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment” and other factors to conclude that “the tubes are not intended for use in Iraq's nuclear weapon program.”

But the Department of Energy, which presumably only had a role in the nuclear assessment, apparently did not dissent from the Estimate's broader judgment on Iraq’s nuclear program. The “Key Judgments” section of the NIE stated that

DOE agrees that reconstitution of the nuclear program is underway but assesses that the tubes probably are not part of the program.

INR also stated in its “Alternative View” that “the activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons.” But INR still concluded “that Saddam continues to want nuclear weapons and that available evidence indicates that Baghdad is pursuing at least a limited effort to maintain and acquire nuclear weapons-related capabilities.”

But what did U.S. intelligence tell the Clinton administration on the reconstitution issue?

Well, Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration, commented in the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly on what U.S. intelligence believed regarding Iraq's nuclear program:

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s belief toward the end of the Clinton Administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons....

And, he also wrote:

In the late spring of 2002 I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: Did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

"How the CIA got the ball rolling on the Plame investigation."

Today's Washington Post has an article on a campaign to restrict military recruiting in Maryland public schools. The anti-military group Leave My Child Alone, based in San Francisco, is aiding the effort, particularly those in liberal Montgomery County, and the national PTA is getting into the act. A brief visit to the website, leavemychildalone.org, will quickly reveal the group's politics and national agenda.

Of course, it's a good bet that many Montgomery County residents agitating against the recruiters supported President Clinton's actions in Kosovo, for example, or wished he had done something to stop the genocide in Rwanda where 800,000 were slaughtered. Who do they believe stopped Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or could have intervened to save lives in Rwanda -- the Montgomery County School Board or the local PTA?