Kofi Anan
With the guilty plea of that highly-bribed lobbyist, Samir Vincent, another shoe has dropped in the Oil for Food Iraq Theft (OFFIT), a swindle that may just be the largest in the long history of human thievery. Because of its massive size and depravity, it will serve to further discredit the Hussein-bribed elites of the international left, and by association, the American left. The unraveling of OFFIT with new indictments likely to follow will ultimately deny the internationalist/progressive movement one more of its most cherished beliefs, that being that the Bush coalition’s invasion of Iraq was a fraud and had nothing to do with the war on terror. In her attack on Condi Rice, Senator Barbara Boxer spent two days reaffirming Democrats’ view that America’s most recent war was, in the monumentally ironic words of Kofi Anan, “illegal.”
When the OFFIT money trails are inevitably exposed, the facts will cement Bush’s case, proving that Barbara Boxer’s interrogation of Condi Rices was grandstanding and pandering to our enemies. Iraq was a key financier of terrorist groups seeking to attack America. But most importantly, it will expose the real reason why the American left finds itself essentially out of power, holding a minority of state legislatures and governorships, and in the minority all three branches of the federal government.
Since the election, many have made a study of left-leaning editorial spokespeople, as they have searched for face-saving answers, from Krugman, Friedman, Ivans, Sheer, “A-War-Ginned-Up-on-Lies” Dowd. In synthesizing their commentary, the election was lost because Bush’s religious zealotry had somehow caused bigoted Christian knuckleheads (presumably such as me) to multiply across the red-state land. Their balm was the certain knowledge that the Iraq war was supported by we simpletons who couldn’t see that the President had ulterior motives, bad intelligence or probably both. Further the election could be repudiated because it was really just a proxy for the culture war.
But real wars have a way of accelerating history and with that, public opinion. What Senator Boxer is clearly ill-equipped to comprehend, is that a majority of the electorate believes that Bush’s performance as commander-in-chief has been near heroic, given the level of opposition he faced down.
While Bush’s domestic policies made him our less than a perfect red-state candidate, Kerry on the other hand, was our perfect opponent in the sense that he would have been, in our world view, abysmally bad for the country in every category, a man with few ideas, most of which were wrong. Even worse, he was a slavish devotee of the utterly corrupt and anti-Semitic United Nations. He made fervent campaign pledges to, one, defer to the U.N. so that it could take the lead in solving the Arab Israeli conflict and, two, to defer to that august body as to when we should or shouldn’t respond to security to threats. Even Kerry’s work ethic was poor. Not even his supporters on the left could dispute the accusation that he rarely showed up in the Senate and was mostly absent for important votes. And when he was there, it was nearly always so he could vote against the very weapon systems necessary to defend America and the free world.
Granted, the election was still fairly close, owing in large measure, one must suppose, to the vast redistributive power of government to curry votes. And secondly, never in the modern era, has the mainstream media so shamelessly shilled for its favorite political party. (The Dan Rather debacle was only the coup de grace but somewhat surreal watching a major television network give up any pretense of professionalism and objectivity.) But the left still lost the election, partly because we have entered a new era when the majority of the electorate knows that no matter what politicians may say, government can no longer keep its promises. Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and, if left in place, will be vast immoral confiscations of capital from the young.
However, the real deciding factor in this last election was that the American left and especially their elected officials like Barbara Boxer, seemingly forgot that on 9/11 Islamic radicals killed 3,000 American civilians in a surprise attack on the U.S. mainland. They didn’t and still don’t see the voter backlash and resentment they engender when they keep trying to refute facts already in evidence and continue to mislead the public in an effort to undermine a just and necessary war in Iraq.
Now the American left is essentially out of power because this politicized anti-war behavior is not new. It has been a central feature of the activities since late sixties, from the end of the Viet Nam War, through the entire Cold War, and now continuing with this, the war against Islamic fascism. Particularly when a Republican has been president, the American left’s need to defeat its political enemies has made it and its allies in the International Left and in the United Nations General Assembly a coalition opposed to U.S. interests, sovereignty, and national security initiatives.
A short time after 9/11, former President Clinton made a speech where he stated that we needed to understand the context with which the attacks occurred, citing Islamic grievances such as our European ancestors’ Crusades. (I reference Clinton here because he is the elder statesman of the American left, is arguably its chief spokesman and seems to be angling to become the U.N. Secretary General after Kofi is fired.) Here with his equivocation after 9/11, Clinton is intimating that the current western powers should retain a collective guilt for the Crusades. With this canard, he echoes much of the Islamic press, radical clerics, and of course bin Laden himself. It’s an example of the pattern cited above. And it is pandering to our enemies.
Further, for those on the left who consider us ignorant, I would remind them that by the time of the Crusades, it had been nearly four centuries that Muslim armies had been attacking, killing, and conquering infidels. By the time of the first Crusade, Islam had already brutally captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. For the largely Christian West, it was a matter of defending itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.
Press reports that are still easily available over the internet, show that in its second term, it was common knowledge in the Clinton administration, that Iraq was not only involved in WMD production but that it was connected to bin Laden’s growing organization. Yet last summer, in Clinton’s syndicated radio interview conducted to promote his newly published memoirs, he glibly stated, “There was never a shred of evidence that linked Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda or bin Laden.”
Although disbarred in Arkansas, Clinton is an attorney. He knows the meaning of words like “never a shred of evidence.” He had to know he was lying about an issue of paramount importance to every American. But for the modern Democrat party, politics clearly trumps honesty, even when national security is at stake. Clinton’s recklessly false and transparent statement needed to be made because it was the official position of the DNC, the Kerry campaign and the editorial boards of the New York Times. It also had the aspect of addressing a personal agenda, that being the preemption of the obvious charge that his administration was guilty of malfeasance in handling the terror threat.
Unfortunately for the Clinton legacy and the American Left, there is no doubt that our new allies running the Iraq government will continue to uncover the OFFIT paper trail, adding to what is already known about the connections among Hussein, terrorist networks, bin Laden, and 9/11. And that trail will surely lead back to the creation of the Oil For Food Program during the middle of the Clinton administration. As is so often the case, it will be a matter of following the money. The left’s vast investment in their position that the War was a fraud will be further discredited by the five Congressional committees and two Justice department probes that are now conducting U.N. audits. Although the left may continue to try to protect its massive anti-Iraq war investment, there are now simply too many alternative media sources and OFFIT it is too far-reaching for those findings to be suppressed.
The record is clear. By the time Clinton was bombing Iraq in December of ’98, his administration, the CIA and the other military intelligence agencies had thousands of “shreds of evidence” on Iraq’s connections to terror and WMD production.
The 9/11 commission stated that they could find no evidence of a formal relationship. What we know now is that there were two good reasons for this ambiguous language on the part of the 9/11 committee. One is that rogue countries don’t usually enter into or announce formal relationships when they hire terrorist hit men to attack the U.S. And two, the final report was corrupted by the Democrat participants in a campaign year. Anyone with a computer and an open mind, can go back and get the press reports to check the veracity the Clinton/Democrat/partisan media’s “no-shred” position.
Nineteen ninety-eight was an important year for press coverage of the Iraq/al Qaeda cooperative activity. Here is just a small sampling of the stories from 1998 (during Clinton’s second term) An intelligence report submitted by Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense, to the Senate Intelligence Committee and subsequently leaked to the press in November of 2003, reveals that the CIA knew that, on February 3, 1998, the Hussein/bin Laden informal alliance was struck. On that day, Ayman al Zawahiri, who is still today bin Laden’s number-two man, traveled to Baghdad and met the Iraqi Vice President, Taha Yasin Ramadan.
According to the Feith memo, intelligence gathered in the first few months of ’98, stated that the goal of that meeting was to arrange the coordination between Hussein and bin Laden and for several camps to be set up inside Iraq and one inside Kurdistan. The Kurd camp later was called Ansar al Islam where satellite photos showed that many Taliban/al Qaeda fighters went after the fall of Afghanistan. With later intelligence gathered after the fall of Baghdad, American officials have now learned that shortly after his 1998 meeting in Baghdad, Iraqi intelligence cut a check to Zawahiri for $300,000. (quite possibly from the same OFFIT account that is paying Paul Volcker to stonewall the requests for documents in his U.N. financed investigation)
Upon receiving his money, the Arab press openly reported that Zawahiri quickly folded his Cairo-based terror organization into al Qaeda. US News and World Report who originally broke the story and the compromised 9/11 Commission’s Report confirmed that “Zawahiri most likely used it (the $300k) to fund merger costs and to regularize training of new jihad recruits.”
Stephen Hayes, in his book The Connection, reminds us that during that same month, on February 17, 1998, Clinton chose the Pentagon as his backdrop in telling the nation that war with Iraq was coming. He sounded a whole lot more like George Bush than Howard Dean when he warned of the danger posed by “predators of the twenty-first century…reckless acts of outlaw nations and an unholy axis of terrorist, drug traffickers and organized international criminals.”
“There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” he said.
- One month later, bin Laden issued his famous fatwa calling on all Muslims everywhere to kill Americans. In their abandoned headquarters, Iraqi intelligence documents uncovered since the fall of Baghdad prove that throughout 1998 Iraqi intelligence officials were traveling to meet with al Qaeda officials in Afghanistan, while Hussein was increasingly denying UNSCOM teams access to his palaces. He even publicly threatened “dire consequences” if the U.N. didn’t pull its inspectors out of Iraq.
- On August 7, 1998 bin Laden struck, bombing our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and killing 257 people. The U.S. was quick to react. On August 20th, sixty-six cruise missiles struck an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and in an act of unilateral aggression upon a sovereign state, thirteen hit the al Shifa aspirin factory in Sudan. Hayes writes that Clinton explained in oval office address that U.S. forces “…attacked a factory in Sudan associated with the bin Laden network. The factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons,” he said.
- Due to the controversy that swirled around Clinton’s decision to strike the Sudanese plant, on August 24th the administration made available to the press a senior intelligence official who Hayes reports cited “strong ties between the plant and Iraq.”
- On August 25th, John McWethy for ABC’s World News Tonight, told Peter Jennings and the nation, “Sources say the U.S. had intercepted phone calls from the plant to a man in Iraq who runs that country’s chemical weapons program.”
- On August 30th, Bill Richardson, then United Nations ambassador, told Wolf Blitzer of CNN, that the strike on Sudan was justified because of their “…support for terrorism, their connections with Iraq on VX, and you combine that, also, with the chemical precursor issue, and Sudan’s leadership support for bin Laden, and you’ve got a pretty clear case.”
There you have it, those of you who still believe in Michael Moore’s propaganda. The above quotes connect Iraq, al Qaeda, and WMD production all rolled up in the words of both the Clinton Administration officials and its sympathetic press outlets.
There are of course many other international, Arabic media, and U.S. press reports leading up and subsequent to the invasion that are still available in internet-based media outlet archives covering Iraq’s well-known involvement in international terror, al Qaeda, and WMD production. And with the Oil for Food Scandal, many more will be on the way.
In summary, the progressives’ politicized antiwar activities not only caused them this election but have caused them to lose the trust of the majority the U.S electorate during wartime. Its refusal to confront obvious facts while instead celebrating a propagandist like Michael Moore or lining up behind Kofi Anan or Barbara Boxer, have caused a voter backlash which they still fail to see. While progressives were fooled into believing their own version of events, thankfully the majority of the electorate was not.
