Best of the Web Today - November 17, 2003
By JAMES TARANTO
O.J. Hussein
Have you noticed how Saddam Hussein has become the O.J. Simpson of the Angry Left? Just as antiwhite prejudice led many people (including his jury) to insist Simpson was innocent against all evidence of his guilt, today antiright prejudice is leading many on the left to mount a spirited defense of Saddam Hussein. He never had weapons of mass destruction! He had nothing to do with Sept. 11! He can't stand Osama bin Laden!
Here's a hilarious bit from today's USA Today interview with Wesley Clark:
Clark said he hadn't seen the evidence of Saddam's war crimes, a comment that prompted adviser Chris Lehane to slip him a folded note. "You should make clear that Saddam is a bad guy," the note read. Clark glanced at the note but didn't return to the topic.
In his August speech to the far-left group MoveOn.org, Al Gore echoed the Saddam-is-innocent line: "The evidence now shows clearly that Saddam did not want to work with Osama bin Laden at all, much less give him weapons of mass destruction." Not only did Saddam not work with bin Laden, he didn't even want to!
Yet according to The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, the Pentagon has provided the Senate Intelligence Committee a detailed 16-page memorandum laying out evidence that Saddam and bin Laden "had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta":
The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.
According to the memo--which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points--Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which in some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source.
Hayes quotes at length from the memo, and closes with the observation that "it covers only a fraction of the evidence that will eventually be available to document the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda":
CIA and FBI officials are methodically reviewing Iraqi intelligence files that survived the three-week war last spring. These documents would cover several miles if laid end-to-end. And they are in Arabic. They include not only connections between bin Laden and Saddam, but also revolting details of the regime's long history of brutality. It will be a slow process.
The notion that Saddam is entitled to a presumption of innocence is itself an error. This is a war, not a criminal proceeding; and in any case the U.N. Security Council had already effectively found Saddam guilty, even if America's adversaries on the council were inclined to let him get away with his crimes. But even in a criminal proceeding, innocence is only a presumption that holds until the evidence is in.
Enraged over their loss of political power, Gore and some of his fellow Democrats have assumed the role not of supporters of their own country as it prosecutes a war, or even of impartial judges, but of Saddam's defense attorneys--not just skeptical of the charges against and suspicions about the erstwhile dictator, but outright advocates of the proposition that he is innocent.
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U.S. must catch Saddam — and soon, Clark says
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Retired general Wesley Clark warned Sunday that the failure to capture Saddam Hussein was likely to undermine any new Iraqi government. And he said it was important to capture Saddam alive so he could be tried for war crimes.
Clark's comments, at a session with USA TODAY and Gannett News Service reporters and editors, came as the Bush administration was accelerating the turnover of civilian authority to Iraqis. Clark praised the decision as a move "in the right direction" but said no regime was likely to succeed if Saddam stayed on the lam.
"It's going to be very hard for the United States to turn the problem over to the Iraqis if Saddam is still there as the, we might say, illegitimate ruler," said Clark, a Democratic presidential contender. "It's going to make it very hard for an Iraqi government to survive." The Bush administration, under fire for a growing toll of U.S. casualties, agreed this weekend to turn over political control by July 1, regardless of Saddam's whereabouts.
Clark also announced that he would go to the Netherlands next month to testify at the United Nations war-crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president. As supreme allied commander of NATO, Clark led a 78-day bombing campaign in 1999 to expel Yugoslav forces that were brutalizing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a province of Serbia.
Clark said capturing Saddam should be "a high priority," though administration officials now downplay the search for him. An audiotape purportedly by the ousted Iraqi leader was aired on Arab TV on Sunday. It exhorted Iraqis to wage war against U.S. forces.
Saddam's ability to elude the United States has been an embarrassment for the Bush administration. In the war's early days, President Bush vowed that Saddam would be caught "dead or alive."
Paul Bremer, U.S. administrator of Iraq, said on Fox News Sunday that Saddam should be killed. "The fact that he's still alive and on the loose gives the ability of people around him to hold open the idea that the Baathists will come back," He said, referring to Saddam's party. "So it is important to kill him."
Clark said it was important to catch him alive: "I would hate to see us bust into a bunker and not be able to bring him out alive to stand trial. One of the things you really want to establish is rule of law. It's the essence of peacekeeping and stability operations."
For the same reason, he said, the United States should have participated in the International Criminal Court. The Bush administration has refused for fear that U.S. forces would be subject to politically motivated prosecution.
Clark said he hadn't seen the evidence of Saddam's war crimes, a comment that prompted adviser Chris Lehane to slip him a folded note. "You should make clear that Saddam is a bad guy," the note read. Clark glanced at the note but didn't return to the topic.
Clark has been at or near the top of national polls since he entered the race in September. However, he trails in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the first contests will be held, and his missteps have raised questions about his campaign. He is trying to regain momentum with a $1.1 million, two-month TV ad campaign in New Hampshire. The ads highlight his military career.
Clark, 58, fielded questions for more than an hour. He was most passionate in defending his decision to push for U.S. military action against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. He says debate over that action accounts for criticism leveled at him by William Cohen, who was Defense secretary at the time, and Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"I don't think Secretary Cohen or the Pentagon fully appreciated what was going on," he said. Cohen moved to cut short Clark's tenure at NATO. Shelton has said Clark's early departure "had to do with integrity and character issues."
"There was never any integrity or character issue there," Clark said. "This was just a policy dispute that people let get personal."
At one point, tears welled in his eyes as he leafed through a book of photographs he had brought of the conflict in Kosovo. He displayed pictures of a Serb soldier kicking a woman lying on the street and of a 5-day-old baby who had died of exposure in the mountains, where her family had fled.
"This is the pornography of violence," he said. He noted that the United States didn't act to stop a bloody civil war in Rwanda. "We dillied and we dallied," he said. "I said I never would let something like that happen again."
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