Thursday, September 07, 2006

"We have entered a time of profound moral confusion"

Thats what Hugh Hewitt calls it, but I have a different opinion of it myself.. I do admit that some seem to be afflicted with confusion, but for the most part, anybody that hasnt been converted to the "self preservation" side by now, are no less than deranged.. Consumed by lunacy.. Blinded by hate..

I've seen many of the Left's most ardent supporters of the (D)'s programs and proposals turn to see that this is a fight for survival.. It hasnt been anythang like a mass conversion, but it is a steady awakenin on their part.. They have finally heard the steady drumbeat of the Enemies of America.. I have no idea what it was that brought them to face reality, but it is a welcomed transformation..

We on the Right, us Conservatives, are gonna be the victims of much harrassment and targets of attack from those that aint wrapped too tight and whose logic HAS LEFT THE BUILDING !! Be prepared to face the crazy sunzabitches whenever you post somewhere or if you have one of these type as a friend.. It aint gonna be easy !!

The Polls are not sayin what the unhinged are wantin em to say, and are gonna be frothin at the mouth mad and sometimes are gonna be violent to-boot.. Until after the next 60 days or so, and the election passes we are gonna be the object of their frustrations.. They will show no mercy.. No compassion.. So if you caint take the heat, stay outta the kitchen !! Dont be surprised if the Shit Hits The Fan around here too !! I travel wide and far in the Blogosphere, and sometimes some mangy dogs follow me home..

12 Comments:

Blogger Wild Bill said...

Hell, its already startin !! I posted this and then checked my e-mail and had a note from one of my F.L.A.M.I.N. liberal friends, that had a pic of G.W. and underneath it said "would somebody please, PLEASE, give this man a blowjob so we can impeach him" !! I aint figgered out my reply to her yet, but you can bet its gonna be a doozy !! BWAHAHAHAHAHA

4:28 PM, September 07, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Somehow I don't think the Prez is the BJ type, if ya get my drift.

More things to attend to than his nether regions.

Sides, he doesn't have to go out tom cattin around cause hes got a perfectly gorgeous wife who loves him. His ego is not poised at the end of his fulcrum. Capish?

Little Willy needed more than his ego stroked and went after it like a heat seeking missle. No dignity there. Ishta!!!

12:52 PM, September 08, 2006  
Blogger Wild Bill said...

G.W. seems to me to be a man of honor, and I dont thank he even cares about CEEGARS !! I figger his love life is restricted to Mrs. Laura, and so I dont consider that any of my business..
I thank my liberal friend was tryin to imply that G.W. was on a moral plane with Slick Willy, and thus defame the Prez.. Even tho the BJ wasnt what got Ol Slick in hot water, but the liein bout it.. Which brings to mind the current situation with the movie thats maybe gonna be aired on ABC this Sunday and Monday.. The (D)'s are busier than cats tryin to cover up elephant shit to get that movie nixed, aint they ?? Well, like they say "the truth hurts" !! I thank that with all the squeelin "like a pig under a gate" that they are doin, is only gonna cause more of the BAD history of the Clintoon Admin. to come back to life !! I figger that before its over the (D)'s are gonna be hoarse from all the screamin they are gonna be doin.. But HISTORY is not on their side, and that is gonna be the stake to the heart.. But we all know how the (D)'s are partial to tryin to RE-WRITE history !! So far it seems that the most controversial part of the movie has to deal with Sandy Burgler and Madeline Halfbright's part of the portrail..
Its really gonna be a sad day if the the (D)'s get to have their version of this movie written-in or the movie gets whitewashed to reflect their view of it..
Do you remember any of this kind of controversy in the Mickael Moore film F 9-11 ?? Seems like the (R)'s waited till after the movie was distributed and aired before they started shootin holes in it .. Anybody see a pattern in this ??

2:32 PM, September 08, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Was'nt your boy ,Bush Jr ,in office 7 months before 9/11? So if things were so bad why did'nt he do something? How can you go all the way back to Billy Boy? And how 'bout Bush Sr? Is'nt the son trying to finish the job that the dad screwed up? And, guess what, there are no WMD!
Billy Boy did'nt do anything any of the rest of them did'nt do!
I don't expect you to publish this because it's all true!
Your Liberal Friend

8:48 PM, September 08, 2006  
Blogger Wild Bill said...

Well my liberal friend, if you will take a look back, you will see that it probably took 7 months to get the phones hooked back up after Willy's group yanked em outta the walls, and the dishes needed replacin after Willy's clan stole em, so they probably had to eat from Mickey D's, and then wasnt that about the time that the DOT COM BUST that the (D)'s orchestrated happened ?? The Economy was a drivin factor about that time, and OH YEAH, the WMD's..

I Need a Nerd With a Calculator
Five Hundred Tons of Yellowcake can Ruin Your Whole day

A commenter tells me that an article I referred to is incorrrect.

Earlier this week, I mentioned an article by one Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at Sussex University in England. He said the 500-plus tons of uranium ore possessed by Saddam Hussein were sufficient for over 140 atom bombs, at 25 kg. of U 235 each.

I described the ore as "yellowcake," as did Professor Dombey.

The reader referred me to this Washington Post article: CLICK. And he said the ore possessed by Hussein was not "yellowcake," and that "yellowcake" refers to a more enriched form of uranium.

Okay, I cranked up Google, and what I learned is this: yellowcake is uranium oxide, U3O8, refined until it's 70% to 90% pure. Nothing enriched about it. And the 500 tons of crap found at Tuwaitha was, indeed, yellowcake.

The Front Page Magazine article linked in the above paragraph draws a distinction between yellowcake and the two tons of more-enriched uranium taken out of Tuwaitha recently.

So, yes, Saddam had over 500 tons of yellowcake.

The commenter claimed Hussein didn't have enough uranium for a single bomb, which is a whole lot different from what Professor Dombey said. Naturally, I assumed the physicist was more likely to be right. This is the kind of calculation physicists do in their heads. It's not even science. It's arithmetic.

Being a former quasi-physicist, I decided to do my own version, on the fly. I invite my more nerdly readers to look it over. Five hundred tons times .4536 kg./pound is 453,600 kg. of uranium oxide. Assume 70% purity (the low end of the scale), and you get about 320,000 kg. Take Dombey's figure of .7% U 235 to U 238 (the ratio in unenriched ore), and you get about 2200 kg. of oxide containing only U 235 (the bad U). That's not exactly how it works, since you can have U 235 and U 238 mixed in the same molecule, but for statistical purposes, it's accurate.

Okay, take the atomic weights of uranium and oxygen, and you find that uranium oxide is about 85% uranium by weight. So you do the obvious multiplication, and you get something like 1800 kg. of U 235. Divide that by 25 kg. per bomb, and you get roughly 70 bombs.

I am using round numbers not because I am stupid, but because that's what scientists do when an exact result is unimportant, so don't think you're being clever by whipping out your abacus and coming out with a more precise result.

Anyway, I probably made a mistake in there somewhere, but I still get a whole lot more atom bombs than "less than one." And I'm not including the 2 tons of enriched uranium we had to confiscate.

I am lazy, so I am not going to root around in there for booboos. I don't know how high the recovery percentage is for U 235 in uranium oxide, or exactly how refined bomb-grade uranium is.

The real point here is that it sure looks like Saddam had a crapload of fissionable material--in raw form--on hand while we were all slinging poo at President Bush over the insignificant yellowcake remark, which turned out to be correct anyway.

I keep waiting for the left to come up with a bona fide Bush scandal, and the election is almost here, and it hasn't happened. Will it matter? I don't know. If no one thinks 500 tons of uranium oxide are important, I doubt anything could change their minds.

9:55 PM, September 08, 2006  
Blogger Wild Bill said...

Jeff Edwards: Weapons of Mass Destruction

August 19, 2005

[Have an opinion on this article? Go to the Discussion Forum to sound off.]


Did President Bush deliberately mislead the American public about the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? A lot of people think he did, but I don't happen to be one of them.

I get five or six emails a week on this subject, as well as a fair number of postings in my Military.com discussion forum. I try to answer each of those emails and postings as honestly and thoroughly as I can. My goal is not so much to change the other person's point of view, as to help him or her understand how I arrived at my own position regarding WMDs in Iraq. To that end, I generally include links to the resources and documents that have been instrumental in shaping my opinion.

Having revealed the basis for my own opinions, I often ask them to share the rationale for their beliefs. I also ask them to site the documents, evidence, or testimonies that helped them formulate their position.

The responses vary wildly. Some people break off the dialogue immediately, as though examining the thought-process behind an opinion is entirely out of bounds. A few shift instantly from conversation mode to name calling. (One of these accused me of being so tightly wrapped in the flag that I can't see anything.) And some -- a small minority -- actually provide links to the resources they consider important.

I am continually astounded by the fact that very few of the President's critics seem to have actually examined the evidence regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Thousands of pages of unclassified (or declassified) documents on the subject have been released by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the CIA, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a score of other organizations. The findings of the UN weapons inspectors, including UNSCOM and UNMOVIC reports, are available online. The deliberations and findings of the UN Security Council are just a mouse-click away, but a lot of people are too busy hating the President to review the data.

I've read as many of the reports as I can get my hands on, with particular attention to the evidence provided before the onset of military action in Iraq. In my opinion, given the information available at the time, there was every reason to believe that Saddam Hussein had an ongoing chemical/biological warfare program even as the weapons inspection teams were carrying out their UN mandate.

In the eyes of many Bush-detractors, anything that supports the position of the current administration qualifies as propaganda, and can be automatically disregarded. But many of the reports come from sources outside of the American government, and a lot of the documents predate the Bush administration. A significant number originate from sources that are overtly critical of the United States and/or the President, making it fairly difficult to dismiss their contents as Bush administration propaganda.

I'm going to quote from several of those reports. I apologize in advance, because some of what you're about to read is a little on the dry side. (Apparently, politicians are even more in love with their own words than most writers are.) So parts of this will be a bit long winded. But it's worth reading. There's a lot of important information to be gleaned -- information that might just answer the question as to whether or not the President lied about the threat of WMDs in Iraq.

Let's start with a fact that many people have apparently forgotten: Saddam Hussein's possession and use of WMDs is an established fact. We know with utter certainty that he had them, and that he used them.




The UN website contains eyewitness testimonies from people who were present when WMDs were used by Iraqi forces. This is directly from a United Nations Commission on Human Rights report on the subject:

A young man, who was a mere boy at the time, survived the Halabcha bombings in March 1988. He described to the Special Rapporteur the horror that followed the bombing of his native town with chemical weapons such as mustard gas, and the continuing effects on his health and that of hundreds of others who also survived the onslaught. Thousands of people died, including 25 members of his family, and thousands more are still suffering today from heart disease, breathing problems and eye allergies.

That same report goes on to say:

During his consultations with a Kurdish delegation in Amman in December 2003, the Special Rapporteur heard evidence on issues such as the Anfal campaign, executions and mass graves. There now exists documentary evidence inculpating the mastermind and chief executioner of these crimes, Ali Hassan Al-Majeed, alias ‘Chemical Ali,' and proves the existence, at the highest governmental level, of the criminal intent to mercilessly exterminate the Kurds and implant people of mainly Arab origin in their homes and villages, in a process that amounted to genocide.

A BBC News article from March of 2002 references both the massacre and the use of WMDs:

Iraqi aircraft shelled Halabja with chemical weapons on 16 March 1988, in an attack which left 5,000 dead and 7,000 injured or with long-term illnesses.
Saddam Hussein's infamous Anfal campaign is incredibly well documented, and there are literally thousands of eyewitnesses. Even Aljazeera (not exactly a pro-Bush organization) concedes that Hussein's regime conducted massive chemical weapons attacks on the Kurdish town of Halabja, resulting in thousands of deaths.

Of course, the Anfal campaign is classified as old news. Nearly fifteen years had elapsed between those massacres and the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As far as I know, there's not statute of limitations on mass murder, but Saddam Hussein's record as a homicidal despot is not the current point of contention.


The issue is the likelihood of WMDs in Iraq in the weeks prior to U.S. military action in that country. From that perspective, fifteen years is a very very long time. More than enough time for Hussein's regime to destroy its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. I raise the issue, not as proof of a continuing WMD threat in Iraq, but to point out that Saddam Hussein has demonstrated both the willingness and capability to kill large numbers of people using Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Let's look at a more recent document. Here are a few lines from UNSCOM letter S/1999/94. Please note that the emphasis is mine, not that of the weapons inspectors.

“Iraq's disclosure statements have never been complete; contrary to the requirement that destruction be conducted under international supervision, Iraq undertook extensive, unilateral and secret destruction of large quantities of proscribed weapons and items; it also pursued a practice of concealment of proscribed items, including weapons, and a cover up of its activities in contravention of Council resolutions.”
That's from an official report by the weapons inspectors. Here's another piece from the same report:

“The Commission has been very substantially misled by Iraq both in terms of its understanding of Iraq's proscribed weapons programmes and the continuation of prohibited activities, even under the Commission's monitoring."
And another quote, also from the same report:

“In response to the Commission's requests for relevant documents, Iraq has repeatedly claimed that they no longer exist or cannot be located, a claim which often has been shown to be false, either because inspection activities have in fact located precisely such documents or because Iraq has reversed its stated position and then produced relevant documents. In one aspect related to the destruction of BW warheads, the Commission, after consulting a group of international experts, assessed that Iraq's declaration that 15 warheads had been destroyed simultaneously conflicted with physical evidence collected at the declared location of their unilateral destruction. This finding indicated that not all BW warheads had been destroyed at the same time as claimed by Iraq and that Iraq had retained some BW warheads...”
In October of 2002, just five months before the start of the Iraq war, the CIA's official 2002 summary of Iraq's WMD program had this to say:

“More than 10 years after the Gulf war, gaps in Iraqi accounting and current production capabilities strongly suggest that Iraq maintains a stockpile of chemical agents, probably VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard. Iraq has not accounted for 15,000 artillery rockets that in the past were its preferred means for delivering nerve agents, nor has it accounted for about 550 artillery shells filled with mustard agent.”
The CIA report also referenced Iraqi Air Force documents which indicate that Saddam Hussein's military deliberately overstated the number of chemical bombs expended during the Iran-Iraq war by at least 6,000. In other words, 6,000 chemical warfare bombs that had been reported to the UN as destroyed were -- in fact -- totally unaccounted for. Those 6,000 bombs remain unaccounted for to this day.

Experts from UN weapons inspection teams assessed that Baghdad's declarations vastly understated the production of biological agents. According to the estimates of the inspectors, Iraq actually produced two-to-four times the amount of agent that it acknowledged producing, including Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) and botulinum toxin.

Just six weeks prior to the Iraq war, Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix made his report to the UN Security Council on the progress of the inspection effort in Iraq. Mr. Blix spoke hopefully, and highlighted several recent advances in the inspection process. He also stated that many proscribed weapons were not accounted for. He specifically mentioned 1,000 tons of chemical agent that the Iraqi government could not (or would not) account for. He was careful to avoid jumping to the conclusion that the agents were missing. He left room for the possibility of some harmless error that might account for the loss of 1,000 tons of chemical weapons.

Mr. Blix's report also addressed the fact that Iraq was continuing to manufacture components of the al-Samud II missile system, in violation of UN Resolution 687 and the monitoring plan adopted by Resolution 715. He referenced the discovery of 380 missile engines, designed for use in the prohibited weapons system, and pointed out that Iraq had imported the engines in violation of the UN ban.

I could easily fill up sixty more pages with similar citations, but I've already subjected you to enough dry bureaucratic writing. Instead, I'll settle for a quick recap of what we've already seen. At the onset of U.S. military action in Iraq, 6,000 chemical warfare bombs were unaccounted for, along with over 500 chemical artillery shells, more that 15,000 artillery rockets designed for use with chemical weapons, 1,000 tons of an unidentified chemical warfare agent, and at least 15 biological warfare warheads. These are from only a handful of the available reports. There are many many more like them.



Do these documents constitute the proverbial smoking gun? Perhaps not. Are they incontrovertible proof of an ongoing WMD program in Iraq? No. But they are (and were) extremely powerful indications of Iraq's capabilities and intentions.

Bear in mind that I've presented only a fraction of the material available, and that a great deal of the remainder points in the same direction. Also remember that we are speaking of a regime known to have possessed and employed chemical weapons, as well as a frequently-demonstrated intent to deceive UN inspection teams.

All of this raises a simple question: Where are the Weapons of Mass Destruction? I can't answer that. At the moment, no one who can answer that question has come forward. Maybe the assessments were wrong. Maybe Saddam really had destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. If so, I have to wonder why he was continuing to play games with the inspection teams. I also have to wonder why he was actively importing banned weapons systems less than two months prior to the start of the war.

I don't think we can be certain yet that the WMDs are gone. Iraq is a large country, and we've only searched a portion of it. We know a lot of things are still hidden under the ground, because we're still stumbling across mass graves.

But I must admit that it's possible that our intelligence estimates were wrong. That doesn't make the President a liar. It means that our intelligence people read the signs wrong. I've read the documents, and I came to pretty much the same conclusions as the intelligence community. If it turns out that their assessment was wrong, then mine was wrong as well. That may turn out to be the case. But there's an ocean of difference between a faulty assessment, made in good conscience, and a deliberate deception.

As I've said, I don't kid myself into thinking that I can sway the minds of people who believe that the President lied about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Instead, I invite you to review the evidence yourself. Not the sound bytes and cable news abstracts of the evidence, but the actual documents available prior to March 19, 2003. They're available to the public at no charge. Read them. Think about them. Try to mentally place them in the context of what we knew before the first U.S. tank rolled across the border into Iraq. And then make up your own mind about whether or not the President lied.

10:05 PM, September 08, 2006  
Blogger Wild Bill said...

The Missing Middle Ground
Phil Brennan
Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2005
Among the sour-grapes comments from the sore losers who can't accept the victory of President Bush is that he failed to keep his promise to bring us together.

That's garbage – sophistry at its worst. Simply put, you can't unite people whose political and moral opinions are diametrically opposed. Anyone who thinks that's possible is either prevaricating or dreaming. Apples are not oranges and no amount of coaxing will make them so.


When George Bush made that promise, he was utterly sincere in the hope that he could persuade the American people to put aside petty differences and unite for the good of the nation. But what he failed to recognize was that the differences that divided us were far from petty. In assuming the presidency he was walking headlong into a battleground where the issue is between what is right and what is wrong.
Someone once said – I think it was Abraham Lincoln; it sure sounds like him – that we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by those who would have us believe that there is some middle ground between right and wrong.

Yet the only way to unite those who uphold what they believe in their hearts is right, and those who they are convinced espouse that which is wrong, is to arrive at that elusive middle ground between the two, and it just plain does not exist.

One of the burning issues of our times is abortion. Roughly half of the American people believe that the killing of the unborn is not only wrong but also wantonly atrocious, while the other half think it's a perfectly acceptable way for a woman to solve the problem of an unwanted pregnancy.

Where's the middle ground here? How can you bring together people who regard abortion as murder and those who either deny that it is murder, or worse, insist that it doesn't matter if it is? A woman's right to choose to kill her unborn child simply trumps the right to life of an unborn human being. Period.

How can you bring together the two sides of this issue, which is, no matter how you put it, a matter of life and death? Did George Bush fail here? Well, if he couldn't do what is clearly an impossibility, you could say he failed. But you'd have to be Michael Moore or some other disingenuous fool to buy that nonsense.

There are genuine issues that divide this nation, and in almost all cases they involve matters of Judeo-Christian morality vs. the secular doctrine of anything goes. Most Americans, for example, adhere to the ancient doctrine that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. But the media and a large number of moral misfits insist that marriage should also be recognized as a union between a man and a man or a woman and a woman – an absurdity on its face.

This has been called a culture war, but it is far from that – it is a war where what is at stake is the nation's soul. We are either a Godly people adhering to a moral code as spelled out in the Ten Commandments, or a godless people wedded to the idiot notions that if it feels good, do it, and if it works, try it.

There is no middle ground here. There is right and there is wrong, and never the twain shall meet.

Writing in the current Weekly Standard, P.J. O'Rourke played ghostwriter for President Bush's inaugural address and he hit the issue head on.

"My Fellow Americans," he had the president saying, "I had intended to reach out to all of you and bring a divided nation together. But I changed my mind. America isn't divided by political ethos or ethnic origin. America isn't divided by region or religion. America is divided by jerks. Who wants to bring a bunch of jerks together with the rest of us? Let them stew in Berkeley, Boston, and Ann Arbor.

"The media say that I won the election on the strength of moral values. If the other fellow had become president, would the media have said that he won the election on the strength of immoral values? For once the media would have been right.

"We are all sinners. But jerks revel in their sins. You can tell by their reaction to the Ten Commandments. Post those Ten Commandments in a courthouse or a statehouse, in a public school or a public park, and the jerks go crazy. Why is that? Christians believe in the Ten Commandments. So do Muslims. Jews, too, obviously. Show the Ten Commandments to Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, or to people with just good will and common sense and nobody says, 'Whoa! That's all wrong!'"

O'Rourke has it right. On one side are the great mass of the American people whose heads are screwed on right. On the other are the jerks, the self-appointed elitists who think the majority of their fellow Americans are an illiterate bunch of yahoos who live in flyover country, probably in trailer parks or shacks with hound dogs living under the front porch, and whose opinions are not worth listening to.

The jerks are the intellectually superior class who think they can bring a president down by using forged documents on a TV news show and get away with it. The jerks are the politicians who lie to senior citizens that the president's attempts to solve the looming Social Security problem are really meant to cut benefits of those retirees now getting them.

The jerks are the people who would like to see the greeting "Merry Christmas" outlawed and that sacred holy day driven into obscurity. The jerks are the people who want to convince us that the universe and those within it created themselves.

Does anybody really want to be united with the jerkery?


* * * * * *

10:14 PM, September 08, 2006  
Blogger Wild Bill said...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3872201.stm


US reveals Iraq nuclear operation

The US has revealed that it removed more than 1.7 metric tons of radioactive material from Iraq in a secret operation last month.
"This operation was a major achievement," said US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in a statement.

He said it would keep "potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists".

Along with 1.77 tons of enriched uranium, about 1,000 "highly radioactive sources" were also removed.

The material was taken from a former nuclear research facility on 23 June, after being packaged by 20 experts from the US Energy Department's secret laboratories.

It was flown out of the country aboard a military plane in a joint operation with the Department of Defense, and is being stored temporarily at a Department of Energy facility.

The United Nations nuclear watchdog - the International Atomic Energy Agency - and Iraqi officials were informed ahead of the operation, which happened ahead of the 28 June handover of sovereignty.

10:15 PM, September 08, 2006  
Blogger Wild Bill said...

from here: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,80736_1,00.html


How to Lose a War
Oliver North | November 17, 2005
Pearl Harbor, HI -- Since October of 2001, our FOX News “War Stories” unit has been documenting the remarkable young Americans fighting the Global War on Terror. We have covered thousands of them on the decks of ships in the Persian Gulf, on combat patrols in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, in gunfights along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates and gone to hospitals in Iraq, Germany and the U.S. with the wounded. Throughout, there has been a common bond among these “warriors of 9-11” -- a steadfast resolve that they could win the war. Now, for the first time since I accompanied the initial U.S. combat units heading into Kandahar, Afghanistan, I'm hearing something different – a loss of confidence in the final outcome.

Over the course of the last ten days, I've met with scores of those I'd previously covered overseas. These soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen and Marines are now in “stateside” assignments at Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at Miramar Air Station in California, at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and here in Hawaii. Many of them expect to be back in the fight -- some of them soon. But recent reversals – not on the battlefield -- but in Washington, have caused nearly all of those I talked to on this trip to question whether we are suddenly in danger of losing the war they have been fighting.

This sudden loss of assurance in our fighting forces has nothing to do with casualty figures, troop levels, the leaders prosecuting the war in the field or new acts of terror by a ruthless enemy. Rather, the anxieties I'm now hearing from those I have covered in combat come in questions like: “Do you think that they are going to pull us out before we've finished the mission?” and “Will we abandon Iraq like we abandoned Vietnam?” Interestingly, not one of the thousands of young Americans I have covered in Iraq or Afghanistan has ever asked about or commented upon, pre-war intelligence.

For more than two years the so-called mainstream media, the far left and some in Congress have been making trite comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. Having spent a significant amount of time in both conflicts, about the only parallels I have seen in the two wars have been that bullets still wound and kill, and spilled blood is still red. But another common thread now ties the two hostilities together -- political cowardice in Washington, D.C.

On Tuesday this week, with the Commander in Chief traveling in Asia, the Democrat leadership in the U.S. Senate introduced a proposal that would have set a fixed date for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. The measure was defeated 58 to 40, but an amended version, setting 2006 as a “period of significant transition creating conditions for the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq,” passed by an overwhelming 79-19 margin.

Though the White House and some Republican lawmakers sounded the trumpets of victory for defeating the Democrats hard-and-fast timetable, the message to the troops is clear: no matter where we stand in the war on terror -- if the Senate has its way, we're “pulling out” in 2006. Abu Musab al Zarqawi's "al Qaeda in Iraq" terrorist organization immediately claimed victory and exhorted his followers to “hold on.” Officials in Iraq's interim government, intent on providing a secure election on December 15 th , were publicly muted in response to the votes, expressing hopes in an official statement that “Iraqi security forces are becoming increasingly effective.” Americans in uniform -- both in-theatre and at home -- were stunned.

Major General William Webster, commanding the U.S. Army's 3 rd Infantry Division in Iraq said that “setting a date would mean that the 221 soldiers I've lost this year, that their lives will have been lost in vain.” A U.S. Marine colonel, recently returned from Iraq called it “a formula for disaster.” And universally those I have met with here in Hawaii, from the U.S. Army's 25 th Infantry Division to the 1 st Marine Brigade, to the sailors of the fleet, to the wounded at Tripler Army Hospital – all expressed anger and frustration with statements like: “We've fought well.” “We're helping to create a democracy.” “Don't they want us to win?”

That's a valid question. Even Senate Republicans don't seem to know what they want. As the “World's Greatest Deliberative Body” was exploring how to set a “date certain” for withdrawing troops without setting a certain date, Senator John Cornyn, (R-TX) said, “Americans do not cut and run, Americans do not abandon their commitments, and Americans do not abandon their friends.” But he voted for the measure anyway.

About the only ones in Washington who seem to know what they want are the leaders of the Democrat party. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who voted for war in 2002, waited until President Bush was overseas meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan to proclaim that, “Democrats and Republicans acknowledged that staying the course is not the way to go.” He then summed it all up by adding, “This is a vote of no confidence on the Bush administration policy in Iraq.”


William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, knows what this is all about. Though the Clinton administration had advocated the overthrow of Saddam in 1998, he told a university audience in Dubai this week that the Iraq war was "a big mistake." Like former President Jimmy Carter, Mr. Clinton apparently no longer feels bound by the affront to our troops or the traditional protocols that once governed political discourse while overseas.

In the House, Pennsylvania's John Murtha, an influential Democrat who voted in favor of Iraq war in 2002, called for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops saying, "it is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf region."

The GOP leadership, senior administration officials and the President need to dramatically alter the debate. They need to go to Iraq -- talk to the troops and reassure them that we will stay there long enough to get the Job done and not one second longer. Notwithstanding the “peace in our time” appeasement sentiment sweeping through our capital, it's not too late. Republicans need to realize that wining the war in Iraq is the only issue that really matters right now. It is more important than Medicare, the next Supreme Court justice, foreign trade deals or tax reform. If we lose the war -- and we could -- none of these things will matter.

10:20 PM, September 08, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanx WB, I learn alot from yer site. You are a man among men, and, I appreciate it.

5:03 PM, September 09, 2006  
Blogger Wild Bill said...

It aint a "manly" thang, Mamabear!! Its an American Thang !!

5:00 PM, September 10, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As E would say "Same thing only different!"

5:40 AM, September 11, 2006  

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