"The Right Angle"Heidi ParentNote To The Impatient LeftBe patient!by Heidi Parent "If the weapons are not found, that will indicate a very serious intelligence failure, "It appears to this senator that the American people may have been lured into Okay. Let me get this straight, Democrats. You're charging that President Bush lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction? How can this be? We know for a fact that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons in the 1980s. After all he used them to murder tens of thousands of Kurds. We know he had chemical and biological weapons in the 1990s, as remnants of such weapons were found after the Gulf War in 1991. We know he had them in 1998 when the then Democrat controlled Senate Armed Services Committee sent a letter to President Clinton citing evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and asking that he take action. And in December of that year President Clinton ordered air strikes in Iraq in an effort to, in his words, "attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, and its military capacity to threaten their neighbors." But the facts don't end there. Fast-forward four years and the U.N. Security Council believed Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction because in 2002 they once again passed a resolution citing evidence of such weapons and demanding that he disarm and allow weapons inspectors into Iraq. So how is it that Democrats like Senators Bob Graham and Robert Byrd now claim President Bush fabricated intelligence? Because the way I see it in order to believe President Bush lied or manipulated intelligence, you'd have to believe that President Clinton did the same. You'd also have to believe the intelligence of numerous other countries was also false. And you'd also have to buy that the Democrats who sent the 1998 letter to President Clinton demanding he take action also lied. And interestingly since Bob Graham had a different take on the matter back in December ("We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has and has had for a number of years a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.") he, one of the accusers, would also have to have been lying. So since we know the weapons existed, we can discount their charge that Bush fabricated intelligence. So, you might be asking, what would motivate Democrats to make such a blatantly false accusation? Funny you should ask. I can sum it up in four words, the four words that are behind everything Democrats do: the acquisition of power. Or in this case, the reacquisition of power. Democrats recognize that one of President Bush's strengths, if not his main strength, is his integrity. So they are trying to knock it down a peg or two by making an outlandish accusation hoping against hope that it comes true. This is nothing new. They've employed the same tactics in the recent past. Take for example their claim that President Bush purposely ignored warning signs before September 11th and allowed an attack on our nation to occur. Then there's their hand wringing over the War in Afghanistan. If you'll recall they declared Afghanistan a quagmire before we even went in. They warned that we would be fighting the fiercest fighters the world has ever seen - they had defeated the mighty Soviet army, after all - and we were sure to lose hundreds of thousands of troops. Even after the war had barely begun Democrats were front and center proclaiming that things were going badly. Days later Mazar i Sharif fell to coalition forces. You would think they learned their lesson with Afghanistan, but no, we heard the same dire warnings going into Iraq. Hundreds of thousands would die, the Arab Street would rise up, blah, blah, blah. After the first week (the first week!) they declared that things were not looking good for our troops and that Iraqi forces were putting up more resistance than we expected. Days later, Baghdad fell. Now they're hoping to take advantage of Americans' sitcom length attention span and declaring "time's up" after only a couple of months of searching a country as big as California for weapons that could be hidden in coffee can sized containers. Does anyone else see the pattern here? The truth is the "smoking gun" the media are so hot to report is not going to be lying out in the open. After all, Saddam had decades to hide his weapons and delays caused primarily by the Left provided Saddam additional time to hide them on the eve of war. Furthermore, he had motive to hide the weapons as he knew the weapons inspectors were looking for them. (The fact he allowed weapons inspectors back into Iraq, by the way, serves to prove just how confident he was in the manner in which the weapons were hidden.) But most importantly, just because we haven't found them yet doesn't mean they don't exist, as Democrats are now claiming. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said it best, "We haven't found Saddam Hussein and I don't know anyone who is running around saying he didn't exist." So all of this adds up to one thing: finding the weapons will take time. Patience is a virtue. Unless you're the party who doesn't control the White House or either chamber of Congress facing a tough election less than two years away, then patience is your enemy. And Republicans would be remiss if they didn't use this hysteria by Democrats in the 2004 campaign. After all, Democrats have been nothing but negative about everything President Bush has done to protect this country. But no matter how wild their accusation, it is Bush who has been right every time. So I for one am hoping they continue their Chicken Little strategy and that the 2004 election proves to be their Foxy Loxy. |