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The only thing more tedious and tiresome to me than a celebrity sex scandal is a political sex scandal.
If there's one thing Hollywood can do right, it's grotesque, perverted sex. Compared to the Left Coast, Washington looks ... well, like it does: a pageant of withered, sagging old white men.
So, now that Eliot Spitzer has ended his political career with a grace he lacked during his tenure, we can finally see the back of this arrogant schmuck and his brazen and never-ending self-promotion (yes, we see you...now go away!), and we can get to the real story of the past week.
A Monday report by McClatchy revealed that a Pentagon study concludes what the rest of us found blinkingly obvious almost right away:
"An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network."
So, rationale number two for the Iraq War crumbles on close inspection - number one being the nonexistent WMD program. As I said before, this really isn't much of a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention. After all, this argument - if it can be properly called such - has been steadily losing impetus since the invasion and certainly hasn't cropped up since we bought off the "awakened" al Anbar Sunnis.
This really should be old news, but like the WMD case, some people refuse to surrender in their obstinate War on Reality. Take Ray Robison, whose "Both In One Trench" is the most unreadable exercise in somnambulant redundancy I've recently read on the Iraq subject.
Robison explores Saddam Hussein's "connections" with Islamic extremist organizations, then leaps to a non-sequitur connection to al Qaida ... most of this research having been scrupulously conducted in his massive rectal database.
The architects of the Iraq War also continue to peddle the idea that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden cooperated in their jihadist enterprise. Take Douglas Feith, former defense undersecretary and chief peddler of the Saddam/Osama business-partnership lie.
The Pentagon's inspector general issued a report concluding that Feith's Office of Special Plans - an office in the Pentagon run by Douglas Feith that was the source of most of the misleading intelligence on al Qaida and Iraq - had "developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers."
Feith recently said, "CIA and DIA analysts tended to deny or downplay information about Iraq-al Qaida connections. They favored a theory that the secular Baathists of the Saddam Hussein regime would not want links of any kind with the religious extremists of al Qaida. They would not acknowledge such links if they could possibly find a way to dismiss the underlying information."
By "underlying information," he apparently means some gut-level commitment to an idea. Apparently the reality-based community lets pesky facts interfere with truthiness.
The Pentagon study does concede that there was some level of assistance to terrorist organizations in the region, but that the principal focus of the Iraqi security apparatus at the time was Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others considered enemies of the regime.
But the evidence against a connection has mounted to what, I think, constitutes a tipping point that cannot be rebutted. Some argue that the presence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq before the war shows that Saddam Hussein had links to al Qaida, but this is nonsense.
If anything, it proves the Hussein regime's willingness to exploit religion and religious fanatics to their advantage, in this case by allowing Zarqawi to attack Kurdish separatists in a region of Iraq he didn't control.
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Gabe, Whoever selects the titles for the editorials really out to be offered employment elsewhere. This one is especially misleading. While I think that reasonable people can debate the WMD thing – a lot of people in the intelligence community legitimately believed Saddam had them but a lot of contrary reporting was, indeed, ignored – I think the Al-Qa'ida / Saddam connection, always tenuous at best, has been effectively refuted. Incidentally, I read in the Post that Douglas Feith is publishing a book shortly. Apparently he throws everyone under the bus in it. Might be an interesting read but one must certainly take it with a massive grain of salt. Again, another enjoyable and well-researched column.
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Chip, I wanted to call this one "Lies, Damn Lies and Conspiracy Theories" but apparently CT doesn't like blue language in their publications...go figure.
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Another thing, yeah, I heard about Doug Feith's upcoming book on "Countdown" and he apparently really blasts Colin Powell, which isn't going to win him any friends on the Right. He also heaps endless praise on Don Rumsfeld, which will piss off...well, nearly everyone. Fairly or not (I think at least somewhat fairly) Rummy is the scapegoat for this war, both in conception [the Left] and execution [both Left and Right]).
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About the only good thing I can say about Rumsfeld is that he's gone.
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Don't get me wrong here, Rummy deserves his share of the the blame for this mess, but i think that it's unfair to give it all to him. Let's try not to forget that it was one Dick Cheyney who was against going into Baghdad last time around, for many of the same reasons that are part of reality there today. So yes they all deserve some blame, but some more then others. I wonder what life is like in the alternate universe where we didn't drop the ball on Al Queda?
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Rumsfeld doesn't deserve all of the blame for Iraq but he does for a lot of it. First, had he bothered to listen to the counsel of professional soldiers at the outset things might not have gotten so far out of control so quickly. General Franks' wanted a lot more troops for the initial invasion, and General Shinseki testified before Congress that it would require troop numbers more on the magnitude of 200 – 300,000 to pacify the Iraqi populace and keep the peace. He based this on having first-hand experience at stability operations in the Balkans. It also seems Rummy had no use for any kind of post-invasion planning, not that anyone else did, either. In fairness, Paul Bremer's dismantling the Iraqi military and de-Ba'athifying the government have to go down in the Top Ten Boneheaded Moves in History on the Arabian Peninsula. Then there's Rummy's "you go to war with the army you have" comment. If we were attacked and had to counterattack or something, sure. But when you are pursuing a war of choice? Sorry, that line falls on deaf ears and his cavalier way of delivering it (sorry your buddies are dying, specialist – sucks to be you) did not go over well in the Army. Even when he had a legitimate point, such as the fact that the European Union is larger now, he blundered spectacularly by saying things exactly the wrong way (aah – that's Old Europe…).
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Hey Gabriel, Did you even read the new Pentagon report? I did and it confirms, not denies, links to al Qaeda. Stop swallowing whole the media's analysis of the report and read it yourself.
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No, I haven't. It hasn't been released to the general public and won't be available to anyone except via mail now because it's become "to politically charged" in the DDs words. I see your website still adheres to the connection line...what color is the sky in your world - and did we find the WMDs there? I'll get my copy of the report soon, and if I'm guessing right, this'll be another Feith-job...that is certain facts - totally absent context - can be construed to support a link, but not the whole analysis. We'll see.
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