A great column about The Good War
The Boston Herald’s Jules Crittenden, who was embedded in Iraq during the invasion, wrote a great article today titled, The Good War.
A ‘fisking’ in the blogosphere is described by Wikipedia, as “ruthlessly detailed point-by-point criticism that highlights errors, disputes the analysis of presented facts, or highlights other problems in a statement, article, or essay.” What is it called when you praise line after beautiful line, a McMahon, as in Ed McMahon?
The Good War by Jules Crittenden,
Some people just donâ??t get it…
The lack of U-boats attacking the shipping lanes has lulled some people into thinking this is not actually a war. Not a real war, certainly not a good war, not like World War II. They mock the very notion that it is a war, having fun with the name â??Global War on Terror.â?ť They put forward the notion that, like almost everything else in our American lives, this thing that has been called a war is a choice. A bad choice.
We saw this in spades last week. As expected, Maureen Dowd summed up the conventional wisdom of the left by cracking that the Miami 7 could not find a Sears let alone the Sears Tower.
George Bush, while announcing that we were at war five years ago, made a decision to encourage Americans to go about their business as usual. Rather than mobilizing the country for war, he decided he could fight this unconventional war by unconventional means, and with the forces already at hand. Normalcy had its uses as a weapon. It showed that our enemy could not hobble us.
It is pretty amazing to think about how normal our daily lives are. Remember after September 11 feeling like nothing would ever be the same again? Remember the trepidation at the first few big events, like the Madison Square concert for New York or the World Series? That is all ancient history now.
Ironically, Bush has been so effective with his approach, that there has not been an attack on the mainland United States since 9-11. That has allowed his opposition to maintain that all the unpleasant things Bush has had to do domestically and abroad are unnecessary, or the very least excessive. Theyâ??ve had the freedom to nitpick at the execution of the war, expressing indignation at every misstep, while ignoring major accomplishments, which they see after all as the accomplishments of an unnecessary war based on global intelligence failures that, in hindsight, they cast as lies.
Jules is much too kind to the domestic insurgents. The anti-war, anti-Bush left has been dishonest in their criticism and disgraceful in their conduct.
The New York Times editors are hiding behind the idea of freedom of the press. That has been slowly evolving in recent decades into a freedom without responsibility — the overarching new American value. It is the value that allows seemingly reasonable people to think we can wish away our problems. It is the value that allows seemingly reasonable people to see our elected president as the enemy.
Have truer words ever been written? For more on the
Times, check out Patterico
…the fabled Good War - belongs to another time. A simpler time. It is probably something that only exists in the rearview mirror anyway.
There are some people who will never get that. Their actions show that they are not worthy of the freedoms that American soldiers have died to give them. Those freedoms are theirs anyway, the birthright of even the most despicable self-centered coward who is born American. But there comes a point when you have to ask, which side are they on? There comes a point when even professional capriciousness and misguided idealism - to be charitable -have to be labelled for what they are: Giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Treason.
Bravo Jules Crittenden. Thank you for a great column.
Source: 
June 28th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
A very intriguing read from former NSA intelligence officer Wayne Madsen:
June 28, 2006 — WMR has reported on the explosive information from two Iraqi War Army counter-intelligence veterans that they uncovered materials and documents proving that some of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons were provided in 1988 by The Carlyle Group, through Spanish and French intermediaries. WMR has learned that pre-cursor and recombinant chemicals used in Iraqi WMDs were provided by a Texas petrochemical company and a chemical/biological toxin firm in which George H. W. Bush held and continues to hold a financial stake.
In April 2003, counter-intelligence personnel with the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion, California Army National Guard, discovered, with the help of an Iraqi Air Force Chief Warrant Officer, aerial bombs specially configured for delivering chemical and biological weapons. The discovery was made at Al Bakr Air Base, some 60 miles north of Baghdad. In all, 29 crates containing the bombs were discovered.
Dave DeBatto, one of the counter-intelligence agents who discovered the bombs, wrote,
“He [the Iraqi Warrant Officer] pointed to the midsection of the bomb and to what appeared to be a small, thin metal door or covering bolted shut with small metal pins and possibly covering a slot or chamber. Inside, ]the Warrant Officer], explained, was a small parachute. He told us that after the bomb was dropped from the aircraft, the metal covering was blown open and the parachute deployed at about two hundred feet, slowing the descent of the bomb. A chemical agent, which was located in another chamber located at the rear of the bomb, was then dispersed into the air in an aerosol spray and spread over as large an area as the prevailing winds allowed.
[The Warrant Officer] led us around to the rear of the bomb and pointed to the tail assembly. It had a circular piece of metal connected to spokes in a conventional sort of design, but the similarity stopped there. Where ordinarily the rear end of a conventional high explosive bomb would taper into a point, this bomb had apparently had the tail section cut off about six inches from the tip resulting in a flat, circular end. Into that flat end, a small handle was inserted like one on a drawer. [The Warrant Officer] motioned with his hand near the handle and said that this device was twisted in order to open the compartment and then the technician pulled the drawer out and inserted a chemical agent in the slot. When finished, the drawer was reinserted into the bomb and the handle was once again secured.”
The Iraqi Warrant Officer was proud that he managed to hide the bombs from UN weapons inspectors over the years since Operation Desert Storm. According to information provided to WMR, Saddam’s decision to hide these particular weapons from the UN actually protected the ultimate source of the chemical and biological weapons — companies directly linked to George H. W. Bush and James Baker.
DeBatto wrote, “I opened the folded off-white paper form and noticed several interesting things right away. The bombs had been purchased in the United States in 1988 from what appeared to be a government contractor called The Carlyle Group. I am almost embarrassed now to say that I had not heard of The Carlyle Group at that time so the name meant nothing to me. The only reason I remember it at all is that I was amazed that the bill was in English and I was stunned to see that a bomb that was used by Iraq in delivering chemical WMD â?? the only WMD found during the entire Iraq war â?? was in fact supplied to Saddam Hussein by the United States. Un-blanking believable.”
However, there is more to this story, much more.
The Bush/Baker-influenced Carlyle Group profiteered from the Iraq-Iran War in the late 1980s. In the late 1980s and early 90s, illegal U.S. weapons shipments to Iraq became the subject of an intensive investigation by the House Banking Committee Chairman, Rep. Henry Gonzalez of Texas. This is what Sen. Edward Kennedy said of Gonzalez at the award ceremony presenting him with the 1994 President John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, “The achievement of banking reform might have been enough courage for most elected officials â?? but not Henry Gonzalez. The following year, he launched the “Iraqgate” investigation that exposed the role of the Atlanta branch oÂŁ an Italian bank and the involvement of the U.S. Commodities Credit Corporation and Reagan and Bush Administration officials in the illegal sale of U.S. arms to Iraq leading up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War. The Bush Administration first asked â?? and then pressured - Chairman Gonzalez to drop the investigation, on the ground that national security would be compromised. But Chairman Gonzalez saw through that flimsy pretext, and the rest is history.”
From the reports of Gonzalez’s Banking Committee and two law suits by Desert Storm veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome against two Texas-based companies named as sources of chemical and biological weapons for Iraq in court filings, WMR can report that George H. W. Bush and James Baker were directly involved in providing WMDs to Saddam Hussein using then-private businessman Donald Rumsfeld as an intermediary.
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/