By Kent Eckhardt
Contributing Writer
“So where are these weapons?” I don’t know. But when these critics say “they never existed,” I expect answers on how all these claims ever existed.
So what about that massive four-foot high stack of CIA documents (submitted to Congress last June as validation) detailing all the CIA’s probing of Saddam’s weapons, those British dossiers, those U.N. records of weapons inspections, and other international intelligence? What about Iraq’s 1995 confession to making weapons out of thousands of liters of anthrax, botulinim toxin and aflatoxin? What about all the reports since 1992 of U.N. inspections being hindered by non-cooperation, and uncovering evidence such as missile shells designed to contain chemical and biological material? What about one of Hussein’s top weapons scientist and other insiders who defected over to the U.S. and spilt their first-hand information to our government with official Iraqi documents?…and where are their answers? Easy — they never existed.
So they can call me brainwashed by government propaganda, but when many elite sources of intelligence claim Hussein was producing some of the deadliest weapons conceivable, that seems more convincing to me than their huge conspiracy theory on a government full of checks and balances.
I would bet any one of them four years of Pepperdine tuition that those weapons exist against their assumption that it is impossible to conceal them in a country the size of the state of California…just as “impossible” as it should have been for Hussein to conceal the components and instructions to build a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium, which were only uncovered during the summer because an unsuspected Iraqi scientist (Mahdi Obeidi) declared it all buried under his backyard rose garden. They think inside this box, like: we see no weapon, there must be no weapon. Maybe they should ask the Kurds if they saw any weapons (Hussein killed nearly 100,000 in chemical attacks on Kurdish communities in 1988).
The same critics hated Bush for refusing to waive our sovereign right of self defense over to a self-interested U.N. Security Council, and for blowing off masses of delusional protesters demanding “peace in our time”…till our time runs out and attacks on Americans with these extremely deadly weapons make 9-11 look like spilled milk in comparison.
Remember them: “No blood for oil!”…till we all witnessed masses of Iraqis celebrating their liberation on our TV screens, images in magazines, newspapers, and Web sites; and then it looked more like blood for freedom. But “that’s propaganda”, no matter how factual, and yet this distorted notion that “Bush did it for the oil” still captivates these simple-minded cynics who are way too smart to believe anyone with access to any undisclosed CIA intelligence. It makes better sense for them to envision Dick Cheney secretly scheming to have Energy Task Force go pump all the oil up, ship it out, and stash it on Bush’s ranch in Crawford…nobody will find out.
Amazing: a death-toll of around a thousand U.S. soldiers in combat operations (compare that to tens and hundreds of thousands in other American wars) to secure millions of innocent lives, fulfill the demands of 45 nations in the “Coalition of the Willing”, and liberate 26 million Iraqis from a sadistic regime of murderers hoarding oil and wealth amidst extreme poverty and starvation, while employing their mental talents toward devising increasingly painful methods of torturing Iraqis…oh, hold on, they want to interrupt this “propaganda” so we can hear them describe an American imperial power over there determined to suck Iraq dry of all its oil so we can keep our SUVs guzzling at a more buyer-friendly price.
I guess Britain, Australia, and Poland came along for dibs on some oil too; why else? Now let’s wonder how an accumulation of surveys from some no-reason-to-be-biased sources show that 90 percent of Iraqis are extremely grateful and welcoming of coalition forces…I mean, “imperial” forces, compassionately giving food, water (which has been most life-saving), medical attention, helping to establish order, reconstruction, and a constitutional democracy that will represent the diversity of Iraq’s people.
While this situation looks so much similar to America’s commitment to rebuilding Japan after WWII, they say this is just a repeat of Vietnam in a desert. The only spotlight they behold is the one the media shines on is the next soldier or innocent victim that dies, not the hundreds of thousands that Hussein tortured and killed, and the millions who were in danger of his weapons (which includes them too). Joseph Stalin understood this mentality when he said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”
Cooperating with terrorist networks, insane Hussein could have passed devastating weapons material through our porous borders and coastlines to perhaps: blast cities into giant mushroom clouds (simply by detonating a little enriched uranium), release some deadly chemical gas, or release a biological weapon in a metropolis for a hysterical evacuation that could cause it to spread in killing path from sea to shiny sea. They never cared.
So who are these critics? You remember them. They’re just the same people we saw standing roadside, protesting our safety and Homeland Security with signs demanding that we “Give Hussein a chance”…or was it, “Give peace a chance”? I forget…but it doesn’t matter; they both mean the same thing. And they still display their stickers to tell us “war is not the answer” while they never give us one. But, you know, since they have no answers, maybe that means “they never existed.”
November 06, 2003