No Replacement For Displacement

Start the War! Mary McGrory is Persuaded!

Mary McGrory has now let us all know that it is OK to start the war, because now she is persuaded. As the Church Lady would say, isn't that special? Well, it's been a long time since I've used the fiskomatic, but I've gotten out the gun oil, cleaned the thing all up, and it is time to start firing away.

I don't know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell's "J'accuse" speech against Saddam Hussein. I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.

Only because a Republican was making the case. If it was a Democrat making the case for war, you'd be giving the full Lewinsky to the argument.

The people who were pushing hardest are not people whose banner I could follow. I find our commander in chief a flighty thinker. The drumbeaters didn't inspire my confidence. All of them, despite their clamorous anticommunism, declined to wear the uniform for Vietnam, and some of them had the nerve, when the fighting was finally over, to write pieces for their neocon journals about how sorry they were to have missed the camaraderie of the foxhole and the firing line.

Again, showing how you couldn't care less for the logic of the argument, only for the personalities of those making it. The hawks were pushing for this confrontation 5 years ago. The State of the Union speech about Iraq was over a year ago. Information from dozens of sources about Iraq have been available publicly for at least a year. Last summer I heard congressional testimony about Iraq's WMD programs. Were you frigging blind, and deaf all that time? After all that information, the only thing that convinced you were a couple of satellite pictures and some tape recordings presented by your paragon of sweetness and light, Colin Powell, but produced by all those evil folks at the CIA and Defense?

Richard Perle, a lead tenor in the war chorus, was the right hand of the late Henry Jackson, a hawk of hawks on defense issues. Gene McCarthy once remarked of Jackson, as a presidential candidate, "If he's elected, you will never see the sun -- the sky will be black with planes."

Richard Perle signed this letter back in 1998. It says:

Iraq's position is unacceptable. While Iraq is not unique in possessing these weapons, it is the only country which has used them -- not just against its enemies, but its own people as well. We must assume that Saddam is prepared to use them again. This poses a danger to our friends, our allies, and to our nation.

It is clear that this danger cannot be eliminated as long as our objective is simply "containment," and the means of achieving it are limited to sanctions and exhortations. As the crisis of recent weeks has demonstrated, these static policies are bound to erode, opening the way to Saddam's eventual return to a position of power and influence in the region. Only a determined program to change the regime in Baghdad will bring the Iraqi crisis to a satisfactory conclusion.

Five years ago he came to the conclusion you came to yesterday. For anyone who didn't pay attention to foreign policy pre-Atrocity, they came to that conclusion at the first death due to anthrax. For the terminally close-minded like yourself, you needed it spoon-fed by someone you could deem politically acceptable. Otherwise, you didn't want to listen at all. Horror of horrors if a hawk might actually be correct.

Among people I know, nobody was for the war.

Mainly because your buddies are a bunch of Communists.

When the protest crowds came to Washington, full of scorn for the commander in chief and his Cabinet cohorts, they made an exception of Colin Powell.

Sure. The "peace movement" loves him so much, don't they?

Powellites had a bad moment when he lost his cool with the French ambassador to the United Nations. The French invited him to a seminar on terrorism, but when he got there he received an antiwar blast from Dominique de Villepin. State Department and White House spinners put it out that the secretary was "livid" and "humiliated," and soon the buzz was that Powell, in his rage, had gone pro-war. I was told to remember that Powell was above all "a good soldier" and, once a decision was made, would salute.

Was it appalling that a man of Powell's stature would be small enough to think that because he had lost face, thousands might lose their lives? I knew it was bigger than that. But on Iraq, the president has been generous in sharing his personal feelings.

What is appalling is that someone who is paid serious money for their opinions, who has been on television and invited to give speeches, is such a closed minded idiot that the only argument she will entertain is those whose politics have been vetted to her liking beforehand. While the specific content of Powell's speech was new, the general content was not. We've known he's been hiding WMD for years. We've known he's sponsored terrorists for years. We've known he is willing to murder millions for years. Yet, golly gee, you just couldn't figure it out until Colin Powell said those sweet nothings in your ear. It has been mind-numbingly obvious to the layman for a solid year what Saddam as about. It has been obvious to those who paid attention that Saddam has been doing this sort of thing for 10 years, and that a strategy to remove him has been put forth for 5 years. Yet you couldn't figure this out until Colin Powell said it. Was it those steely brown eyes? That "Democrats Love Me" smile?

He talked of the mobile factories concealed in trains and trucks that move along roads and rails while manufacturing biological agents. I was struck by their ingenuity and the insistence on manufacturing agents that cause diseases such as gangrene, plague, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever.

Gee, the rest of us knew he was producing WMD, what? 12 years ago?

Would Saddam Hussein use them? He already has, against his own people and Iranians. He has produced four tons of deadly VX: "A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes." The cumulative effect was stunning. I was reminded of the day long ago when John Dean, a White House toady, unloaded on Richard Nixon and you could see the dismay written on Republican faces that knew impeachment was inevitable.

It was stunning, only if you refused to see the truth. The rest of us, even if we didn't know every tidbit, knew he was producing WMD. We knew he was violating his treaty obligations. We knew the only way to fix that problem would be to overthrow him. Yet, because you not only didn't know, but refused to know about these things, you thought you learned something new. For the rest of us, the only thing new was the specific data.

Argh. There's a few more paragraphs, but what is the point? McGrory somehow thinks that being a convert at this late stage makes her some sort of wondrous piece of liberal morality. I can only agree in one aspect. It does make her a piece of something.

Posted by John Bono at February 7, 2003 06:30 PM | TrackBack