To hear some Democrats tell it, the United States must have been occupying Baghdad before the terrorist attacks in New York City and Arlington on Sept. 11, 2001, against the U.S.S. Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, on U.S. embassies in Africa on Aug. 7, 1998, at a Saudi Arabian military complex on June 25, 1996 … .
The list goes on, and so does the opportunistic yakety-yak of all those Democrats saying the war in Iraq instigated the ambitions of recently arrested British terrorists who surely would have been sleepily peaceful if only the United States had left Saddam Hussein in power.
Just keep your hands off the bad guys, these critics say, and the world will love you. But we know that even if the world is in one of its exceptionally rare moods of more or less not hating a nation stronger, richer and freer than the rest, the bad guys will still come at you. They will still kill as many of you as they can, and they will get bolder as they go along, especially if they can count on you responding with nothing more than a missile stirring up desert sand.
Ah, but Iraq was no threat, the critics say, overlooking the fact that Saddam was a genocidal madman ceaselessly hostile to the United States and about as likely to be restrained by U.N. weapons inspectors as a rattlesnake by rabbits.
The critics argue that he had no links with terrorists, but he did; the conclusion of 9/11 Commission investigators was only that he didn’t collaborate with al-Qaida on the Sept. 11 attack. He himself was something of a terrorist who could have had weapons of mass destruction in a jiffy, even if he didn’t have them when deposed. Replacing his murderous regime with something sane, decent and consensual could make the Middle East a place much less likely to send Islamic fascists to kill us anyway they can.
That’s why it’s so puzzling that so many Democrats want us out of Iraq not as events persuade as that’s it’s safe to scat — that the Iraqi government won’t be replaced by another Saddam-type or crazed ayatollahs — but on a timetable reassuring our enemies they can simply wait us out.
Vice President Cheney has some worries about that. He wondered aloud about the encouraging message sent to our enemies by the victory of Ned Lamont (a phased-withdrawal champion) over Joe Lieberman (a supporter of Iraq intervention) in Connecticut’s Democratic Senate primary.
Democrats where aghast. After all, aren’t they the ones who are supposed to warn that the policies and victories of the other side are endangering? Why, for someone else to hum this tune of theirs is un-American. It also happens to be un-good for them, a political threat.
Something else that’s politically threatening for the Democrats is the lesson underlined bythe British arrests that few things count in the war on terrorism as much as the sort of intelligence that is forever causing them to grumble about the administration.
Although one of the Bush intelligence programs ought to be supervised by the courts to make it legal, the worst threat to American liberties is that the government just might listen in to those conversing with overseas terrorists without benefit of a warrant. Meanwhile, news reports quote anonymous sources saying the United States’ interception of “terrorist chatter” was instrumental in stopping the plot to down airliners crossing from Britain to America — not so bad an endorsement of efforts by an administration that certainly has its faults in this war on terrorism, but nowhere near what the Democrats allege.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies.
