Democrats as flip-floppers ... again
November 4 '05
By Jonah Goldberg
Published: Friday, November 4, 2005 10:53 AM EST
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'If he refuses or continues to evade his obligations through more tactics of delay and deception, he and he alone will be to blame for the consequences. ... Now, let's imagine the future. What if [Saddam] fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction ...? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal. And I think every one of you who's really worked on this for any length of time believes that, too."
"If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people. So this is a way to save lives and to save the stability and peace of a region of the world that is important to the peace and security of the entire world."
George Bush in 2002? Dick Cheney? Nope. Clinton and Gore in 1998.
The conviction that Saddam had WMDs was shared by France, Israel, China, Russia, Britain, the United Nations, the CIA and the entire national security team of the previous Democratic administration. Germans believed Saddam would have a nuclear weapon within 36 months. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee - now a full member of the "Bush lied" team - said, "I do believe that Iraq is an immediate threat."
Sens. Evan Bayh, Joseph Biden, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, and former Sen. John Edwards all voted for the war.
Most of these Democrats had access to the same intelligence as the president. But now, Democrats have decided that they cannot accept their own responsibility in what they clearly consider to be a mistake. They cannot even criticize the CIA for yet another horribly botched job. Instead, the same CIA liberals derided for years is now heroic and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has decided - now that the Fitzgerald investigation has fizzled - to dedicate his party to slandering the president.
Meanwhile, they cannot even admit they made a mistake supporting the war - except in that they believed Bush's "lies." But how could Bush have lied? How was he to know the intelligence was wrong? Without knowing that, he could not have lied. But the Democrats will not allow for the possibility the intelligence which caused Clinton to bomb Iraq was the same which caused Bush to topple Saddam. And they will not even concede that after Sept. 11, the argument over WMDs wasn't the best, never mind sole, argument for toppling Saddam, but the easiest one.
"Never again" was the new rule after Sept. 11 and - after ousting the Taliban - Saddam was the next obvious target. He applauded the attack, funded suicide bombers, defied the international community and, we now know, pretended he had WMDs. Remember: "Regime change" became the official policy of the U.S. in 1998, not 2002.
But the Democrats don't care. They don't care that their shabby accusations feed the very worst theories about America's role in the world. They don't care that Iraq is poised to either become one of America's greatest achievements or its worst debacles. They want timetables, apologies and scalps.
But does anyone doubt that if there was no insurgency and Iraq was as far along in the democratic process as it is now, the Democrats would be boasting about their bipartisan support for the war and cackling about how Democrats were right about "nation-building" all along?
But they don't care. In Pelosi, Reid and Dean's America, partisanship begins at the water's edge.
Examiner columnist Jonah Goldberg is editor at large at the National Review Online and a syndicated columnist.
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/11/04/opinion/op-ed/13oped4goldberg.txt
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