I’m having trouble keeping the faith these days, what with the “free” (falling) market collapsing all around us.  I attempted an analysis of the credit-meltdown from a Paulistinian persepctive earlier today, looking at the reasons this may have occurred due to too much Government intervention, bad regulations and so forth.

I likened the current financial climate to an overgrown forest, long overdue for a burn, but so “unnatural” now as to make any conflagration utterly devestating.  I think this analysis was correct.

I would like to come to a new conclusion, however.  Indeed, such an American economy as envisioned by the free-market advocates, unburdened by pesky Government intervention, may have created the many small fires necessary to keep the economy stable, orderly, and natural.  The Social Darwinism may have worked to keep America’s most successful businesses alive, and let the most feeble die off.

But I’m beginning to doubt that this would have been the case.  Too often capitalism is ruined by greed, by monopolies, by corruption–all things that the free market does a bad job at regulating on its own, at least without devestating consequences.  Essentially, the economy is not like a forest, because a forest grows without the influence of greed or corruption.  It grows naturally based on environment, sunlight, and so forth.  Not so with our economy, which without regulation becomes rife with all sorts of odd self-serving games and scams–the very sort we see today causing its collapse.

It’s also true that the economy does not protect itself from monopoly, which is why we have anti-trust laws in place.  This to me seems like one indicator that a truly free market must be the stuff of myth.  If a free market relies solely on competition, and yet by its very nature stifles competition, and thus requires some form of moderation, then how can there even be such a thing as the free market?  There can be varying degrees of free markets, but the archetypal invisible hand variety is surely the stuff of the imagination.

Polecolaw, in his brilliant recap of the current bailout plan, writes:

With absolutely no proof that trickle down Reagan/Bush-onomics has ever worked, an exploding national debt, an exploding national deficit, and the impending baby boom retirement isn’t it time to stop talking about tax cuts for the investor class?

Two weeks ago I would have hesitated.  Now, like Lefthawk and Roland Dodds, I want some payback.  And not just that, but I want fairness where before I viewed fairness as an excuse the Government used to raise taxes.  Now that the Government is ready to spend more on this mess than they ever have on health care or education or other so-called “fairness” programs, I’m starting to believe that fairness may just actually be an issue here.

The investor class has shown itself to be greedy, reckless, and utterly dependent on the Government when the going gets tough.  And by the Government, I mean you and me.  The taxpayers who suddenly are supposed to reverse-trickle-down and start trickling up our hard-earned tax dollars to the rich, not-so-smart-after-all investment bankers, real-estate nincompoops, and greedy businessmen of all stripes.

I’m losing the faith.  I still believe that trade is the best way toward peace and I’m still an avid Globalist.   I still believe that capitalism is the best way for the most people to prosper–but perhaps a different variety than the kind we employ today.  As the rich grow ever richer, the one hope was that their intelligent investment of our money (and theirs) would be spent better than the Government could spend it.

With the Government poised to spend possibly trillions of our tax dollars on these selfsame businessmen and investors, the question of who spends money more wisely becomes infinitely more complex.

Only one thing is certain.  This whole thing stinks.  Something has to be done to protect Americans from a total financial meltdown.  As Polecolaw writes:

If this market freezes your credit card may not work, and the resulting panic could be devastating. Think how you would react if told you could not charge your groceries on your credit card because Citibank doesn’t have the money to lend you. In addition, companies could find it impossible to fund payrolls causing more panic. This is one of the reasons Treasury acted on its plan – justified fear.

Let’s just hope our Congressmen don’t write a blank check.  It’s time we started holding these people accountable.

If, indeed, we need to do something to fix this (as I believe we do) then let’s make sure we act with wisdom and caution, rather than rushing forward out of fear alone, however justified it may be.

Further Reading

Alms for the Rich? by the Omipotent Poobah

CNNMoney: Bailout Plan Under Fire

Naked Capitalism on consumerism and why the bail-out won’t work

Why the Antibailout Right is Wrong

The Antibailout Right

If anyone has more good reads on this subject, link to them in the comments section.  Thanks!

Gordon C Chang has harsh words for NATO.  Harsher words for President Bush.

That’s it? Russia invades a country, and the Atlantic Alliance sets up a commission? Dmitry Rogozin, the Kremlin’s NATO envoy, put it best. He labeled the emergency summit a “mountain that gave birth to a mouse.”

But we shouldn’t blame the Alliance for its uninspiring response. The establishment of an organizational structure to deepen ties to endangered Georgia actually looks resolute in comparison to the American reaction.

Chang is correct.  The NATO reaction is flawed, but the utter lack of any sort of meaningful diplomatic reaction from the Whitehouse is stunning. The silence, as they say, deafening.

Mr. President, your Russia policy, which appears to have been based on your personal relationship with an autocrat, was fundamentally misguided. Yet what is especially disheartening is that, when it is clear that the assumptions underlining that policy have been proven wrong by the events of the last eleven days, you have failed to change course or even show leadership. This, as you may have noticed, is a critical moment for the West.

Where are you?

I need to update my morning post on Stephen Biddle, Michael O’Hanlon, and Kenneth Pollack’s new article at Foreign Affairs, “Standing Down as Iraq Stands Up.”

As noted, the piece isn’t all that impressive. Most of the analysis seems somewhat behind the curve of events, and the conclusion’s basically the authors’ attempt to curry favor within the Democratic foreign policy establishment by re-floating the “Bush lied” meme on the origins of the deployment.

Well, the antiwar bloggers aren’t too happy no matter the motives. Indeed, this liberal warhawk-neocon triumvirate is being attacked just like the old days, although not just as war cheerleaders for the GOP imperialist project, but as enablers of American war crimes in Iraq to boot!

The meme’s getting a lot of play, but Spencer Ackerman’s attack is the most vociferous:

Matt Yglesias is on vacation until his new ThinkProgress blog launches August 11. But he IMs to ensure I don’t miss this argument in the new Steve Biddle/Mike O’Hanlon/Ken Pollack Iraq piece in Foreign Affairs:

It is worth noting that separation resulting from sectarian cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence, as some have claimed. Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful. And whereas a cleansing argument implies that casualties should have gone down in Baghdad, for example, as mixed neighborhoods were cleansed, casualties actually went up consistently during the sectarian warfare of 2006. Cleansing may have reduced the violence somewhat in some places, but it was not the main cause.

I had to reread this to make sure I didn’t misunderstand. Ethnic cleansing is a violent process of extirpating members of a rival ethnicity or sect. If the ethnic cleansing occurred in 2006, of course casualties went up consistently. This argument makes no sense.

But there’s actually a broader point to make. Ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. The U.S. quite rightly intervened in the Balkans in the 1990s to stop it. The horrors of ethnic cleansing are unfathomable to those who haven’t experienced them. What you really, really shouldn’t do is treat other people’s ethnic cleansing as a debaters’ point. It’s perverse, isn’t it, the way that ethnic cleansing that occurred during a U.S. occupation can be treated so nonchalantly by Washington polemicists.

I’d be remiss not to send a quick message to Yglesias: Dude, take some time off. You’re going to be swamped with that new, nasty gig at Think Progress.

But back to the debate at hand!

Actually, it’s not illogical for sectarian violence to have dropped if the term “cleansing” is recognized in its very common useage as a broad shorthand for the consolidation of ethnic neighborhoods and the internal displacement of populations from their homes. Iraq’s ethnic cleansing has not generally been seen as genocidal. Indeed, surge proponents using this shorthand terminology have been savagely attacked for allegedly seeking to minimize the refugee tragedy of “millions of Iraqis being robbed of their homes.”

The fact is that the antiwar hordes have never accepted the COIN strategy of President George Bush and General David Petraeus. The victory of the beefed-up troop contingents along with the tactical adjustments on the ground have long been slandered as an alleged “false narrative” of success. Just over a week ago some of the most implacable Bush-bashers on the left smeared success under the surge as a myth, or that perhaps it has “worked tactically, but hasn’t succeeded strategically, at least not yet.”

Yet now, with all the mainstream political actors accepting the new realities of Iraq - including both John McCain and Barack Obama - most of the antwar contingents are seeking to push the war debate past the question of victory to that of culpability in alleged American atrocities.

This all ties into the big push on the left for “accountability” of the Bush administration foreign policy decisions, such as the treatment of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the domestic surveillance operations and the question of telecom immunity.

Ideally, for war opponents, Bush administration “criminals” would be prosecuted for war crimes under a Barack Obama administration come January 2009. What’s most likely to happen, in the advent of an Obama regimes, is that Congress would establish a “commission on torture” to investigate alleged wrong-doing under the Bush-Cheney years. Yet, the recent hard-left uproar over Obama-advisor Cass Sunstein’s recent dismissal of war crimes prosecutions indicates that the antiwar forces want a bit more than “truth and reconcilliation.”

Thus, today’s uproar over the Biddle, O’Hanlon, and Pollack essay can be seen as building more war crimes charges against the administration.

The whole thing may well end being a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing, especially as Barack Obama’s been dropping in the polls like an anchor.

On the other hand, the war crimes push is an international movement, and U.S. bloggers like Ackerman, Ezra Klein, and the crew at Newshoggers - with no substantive loyalty to the principle of American sovereignty - would like nothing more than the establishment of a universal jurisdiction of vengeance and star chamber prosecutions of Bush’s neo-imperialist cabal next year.

~cross-posted at American Power

Over the past five days we’ve been inundated with all sorts of talking points emanating from the usual suspects in the Democratic Party and the leftwing echochamber of the blogosphere that one, the Iraqis, President Bush, and Gen. Petraeus have mirabile dictu suddenly found the wisdom of the Great Man’s pronouncements on Iraq vis-a-vis the “timetable” for the withdrawal of US forces in Iraq freeing them up for General Obama’s coming campaign to eliminate the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the “real focus” of the “Global War on Terror”. What utter nonsense.

Leaving aside the utter fatuousness of their claims as regards the complex problems in Afghanistan that I alluded to in my article of Monday 21 July of which a greater troop presence is hardly the solution in and of itself there’s the small problem of the fact that the only thing the improved security situation in Iraq has to do with Obama’s magical sixteen month timeline is one of mere coincidence. Contrary to the received wisdom of the braying jackasses in the press who likened the president’s acceptance of a “time horizon” to some kind of volte face on Iraq the president has always been of the position that our troop levels there will be contingent on both the level of security and the Iraq’s ability to “stand up as we stand down”:

“The principal task of our military is to find and defeat the terrorists,” he said. “And that is why we are on the offense. And as we pursue the terrorists, our military is helping to train Iraqi security forces so that they can defend their people and fight the enemy on their own. Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

Note that these remarks were delivered exactly three years ago in June. Besides, as we all know from our reading of the malarial swamps that constitute the antiwar blogosphere the president couldn’t possibly be backing a drawdown of forces since it is our aim to have a strong US military garrison in Iraq manning those supposedly permanent bases for decades yet to come. Have the Obamaites, in their adoration, begun drinking White House-spiked Kool Aid?

And now comes the charge of the keyboard kommandos of the Kossack Army alleging that John McCain is “lying” about the surge and the Anbar Awakening or worse yet doesn’t understand it at all. Another half-truth masquerading as the truth. Ilan Goldenberg is not a stupid person but he’s leaving out quite a bit of what actually went down in Anbar in 2006.

For most of the war, the US had been employing pretty heavy-handed tactics which consisted of making smash and grab sweeps from FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) which only repeated many of the mistakes of Vietnam and had little effect upon the enemy in that they were overly concerned with body counts and bringing massive firepower to play to kill a few bad guys and then hightail it back to the FOB leaving the locals to fend for themselves. This proved pretty ineffective in Anbar and it alienated the very people we were trying to win over.

Through most of 2005 and into early 2006, General David Petraeus, mastermind of the “surge”, after having served as division commander of the 101st Airborne Division in the war’s early days in Mosul and enjoying some success there by employing classic counterinsurgent tactics, busied himself at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas with writing the Army’s new Counterinsurgency Manual which hadn’t been updated since Vietnam. It was distributed to the Army beginning in 2006 and surge-like tactics started although the extra troops would only get fully in place in the summer of 2007. And this was begun in Anbar province beginning with Tal Afar as related by Col. H.R. McMaster, one of Petraeus’s key lieutenants, and the commander of a regiment of the 3rd Armored Cav, related to Laura Logan in an interview in ‘06:

But Col. McMaster told 60 Minutes that using numbers to measure victory is a mistake.

“Body counts are completely irrelevant. I mean, what is relevant is, ‘Is the population secure so that political development, economic development can proceed?’” he explains.

So the U.S. military began training a new police force right away, recruiting both Shiites and Sunnis to patrol the streets. Schools and markets were reopened. And Col. McMaster was able to bring together religious leaders who hadn’t spoken for months.

American soldiers like Capt. Jesse Sellars have taken on added responsibilities. On regular patrols through the city, he is part politician and part policeman.”

And in another interview last fall, this one with lefty Laura Rozen of Mother Jones, McMaster talked about the early on shift in tactics in ‘06:

MJ: And you guys have had big success doing that in Anbar? Is that right?

HRM: Yes, it’s a huge success in Al Anbar province and there are also successes that were underreported, or maybe not fully understood, previous to that in Ninewa province, which is where our regiment operated and where the First Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division operated before us in Mosul. They really stopped this cycle of ethnic violence predominantly in Mosul between Kurds and Sunni Arabs and other sub-communities within that city of two-and-a-half million people. The success in Anbar has now spread to Baghdad, Babil, Diyala, and Salah ad Din provinces. Ours and Iraqi forces have been able to break that cycle of sectarian violence and create the conditions for sustainable stability in some of the most critical mixed-sectarian areas. This approach of emphasizing population security, breaking the cycle of sectarian violence, rekindling hope among the population, lifting the pall of fear off the people, and then actively engaging the various communities to bring about political accommodation is working at the local level. What’s key now is to sustain that effort at the local level and try to elevate those successes to the national level. Now, one of the things that is going for the Iraqis, and for us in that connection, is how tired they are of the violence. The number one cross-cutting issue is security. My personal experience in Ninewa province has been that at the most fundamental level people don’t really care if it’s a Shiite, a Sunni, a Kurd, or a Turkoman that’s providing them security, as long as that force treats them with respect.

MJ: Is that really true of the Sunni tribal sheikhs?

HRM: If you have a force that’s professional, that’s well led, that treats people with respect, that’s not advancing a narrow sectarian agenda in a way that’s destabilizing to the situation, people will accept that force after a period of learning about that force and meeting the people. It doesn’t happen easily, and it takes what we call an information campaign, a real effort to reintroduce the Iraqi population to their own security forces. When we first went to Iraq we thought, “Hey, there is a big part of this culture that has to do with mediation and we’re going to have to look for Iraqi mediators to really help us with the population.” What we have found is that we were the principle mediators in many cases between the Iraqis and their own security forces and their own government, and so you have to almost embrace that role. Now you don’t want to create dependency. A big part of this problem is not just the capability of Iraqi security forces but their legitimacy. One of the ways to do it is you recruit from the population. What we found is probably the best setup is a combination of indigenous forces, mainly in the police force, but also some outside forces too, that help insulate these security forces from some of the tribal pressures associated with criminality, for example, or a particular tribal agenda. So you don’t want a homogeneous force, but a force that is, at least to some degree, representative of the local population.

What the people yammering on about the Anbar Awakening predating the “surge” don’t seem to fully understand is that the additional combat troops (not a large number given the tooth to tail ratio in many US units) are only one part of the overall strategy. As equally important is the shift in tactics and giving the locals a chance to earn the trust of the occupier and take over the task of their own protection. With it comes vastly better intelligence which in counterinsurgency is half of the battle. For most of the war the US Marine Corps had taken up most of the battle in Anbar province including both of the bloody Battles of Fallujah in 2004. But here too the shift in tactics started to take place in the summer of 2006 as part of the overall “surge” strategy as related by a reporter from Stars and Stripes:

. . .Marine after Marine here says a revival of classic Marine anti-insurgency doctrine is helping them turn the tide from a conventional fight toward a sophisticated anti-insurgency that is cutting into insurgent support.

During the last three months, his Marines have begun using bold counterinsurgency tactics, putting companies on the streets of insurgent strongholds where they fight while finessing locals. Some small teams slip from house to house, paying families to put them up for brief periods.

Squad leaders liken the effort to campaigning for office back home: a street-level, round-the-clock effort to be a positive, responsive presence while going person by person, street by street, settlement by settlement between Ramadi on the west and Fallujah on the east.

The moral of this story is that it’s foolish and inane to try and separate out the additional troop part of the “surge” from the larger mission which involves not only more troops in certain areas but a broad-based shift in strategy and tactics on all fronts.

What has not really changed in this, however, is the fact that Barack Obama’s focus hasn’t been on winning the war in Iraq it’s been on simply leaving it behind by whatever means necessary and that ranges from the kickoff of his campaign sixteen months or so ago when he said he would have all US combat forces out of Iraq by March 2008 to his op-ed in last week’s New York Times when he ended by simply stating — “It’s time to end this war”.

Last Friday in a 5-4 decision with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Sect. 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006(PDF) (hereinafter MCA) which denied the detainees held at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay Cuba access to the federal civilian courts to hear petitions of habeas corpus was unconstitutional and ordered that said detainees shall have the right to have their claims heard in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

While this writer believes the majority acted poorly with a rationale based on flimsy historical and jurisprudential precedents, the practical outcome of this decision may be less than is commonly assumed on both sides of the ideological divide. (more…)

~from Churchill’s Parrot

This March 17, while the civilized world dutifully besots itself in taverns the world over, Lefties will be taking their impaired judgment to the streets and parading it about for all the world to see. This March 17, you see, is especially significant to Lefties as it represents the 40th anniversary of the 1967 March on the Pentagon as well as the 4th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. Massive demonstrations (such as these planned here and here) have thus been organized to commemorate the first and decry the latter: the “criminal invasion of Iraq.”

No doubt among these Lefties are a few who sincerely believe Bushie’s decision to invade Iraq was a something he concocted out of thin air at his ranch in Crawford, or a misguided attempt to avenge the attempted assassination of his father, or the desire to line his cronies’ pockets with oil money, or his unthinking allegiance to those neo-con Jews who just don’t like Arabs and were itching for a fight.

(more…)

There is an absurd notion floating (or perhaps burning wild-fire-like) throughout the anti-war camp that Iraq is some invention of the Bush Administration.  Now, while I have professed many times to having been a critic of our entrance into Iraq due to what I perceived as poor (and avoidable) timing, I take offense at the notion that somehow this is Bush’s war, pawned off on the American public and the US Congress alike in some epic hoodwinking–as though there was no lead-up whatsoever during the Clinton years.

This ignores history, of course, and parces quite selectively the situation in Iraq in ways that are utterly untrue. (more…)

I must confess: I was completely against the War in Iraq from the beginning. It felt so…reckless. Right off the bat, I had the ominous sense that things hadn’t been thought through. Unfortunately, I was right.  My neocon brethren had rushed too quickly, or perhaps there were too many differing views on how the War should be carried out, or….

Maybe Rumsfeld’s vision of a New American Military was too ambitious or naive or visionary…I’m not sure. I wasn’t there. All I know, is that I felt we should have handled Hussein similarly to how the Israelis did in 1981. “Walk softly and carry a big stick” is how Teddy Roosevelt put it. Well it’s too late for the “walk softly” part. So what about that stick?

We diverted massive resources away from graver threats, such as Iran and Syria, and North Korea. Oh, and Afghanistan, while not really a threat anymore, was and still is unfinished business.  So entering Iraq was not really defensible, even if the blame for that can’t be laid solely at the feet of the Administration–many a Democrat participated in the march to war.   Invading Iraq wasn’t in our best interest at the time.

It wasn’t in our best interest and it certainly wasn’t in the best interest of Israel, either.  Many critics of the so-called “Israel Lobby” claim America always acts in the best interests of Israel, or that Iraq was somehow a war for Israel, but that is purely absurd as can be seen here and here.  Besides, it’s not hard to see that an unstable region is bad for Israel.  A weak Saddam is better than a strengthened Iran.  America often does work to benefit Israel, which makes sense.  We have common allies and common foes.  Many Americans are also Israeli citizens.  We share commerce, technology, and have an intelligence relationship rivaled only by the one we share with the United Kingdom.

Well What About Now?

Now that we’re in Iraq we need to decide how to get out of Iraq. Nobody wants to be there anymore, least of all the soldiers who have to risk their necks every day to try to make the world safer. There are many schools of thought on this subject, but the two most popular are:

1. Begin withdrawing troops and funds immediately. The only way the Iraqis will ever solve their problems is if we let them hash it out. Like a crowd letting a fight continue with breaking it up. “Eventually they’ll tire out, you’ll see.” Eventually….

or,

2. Continue the “surge” and maintain troop levels and funds until the job is done. Nobody is quite in agreement on what “the job” is that needs to get done, but several things are agreed upon:

• The Iraqis need a stable political system and a government than can actually operate on its own. To get here, they obviously need a stable and secure enough country in which to operate said government.
• A solution to the Civil War has to be political, and this will be heavily influenced by economic factors such as the division of oil profits; the autonomy of the Kurds; and the under-representation of the once politically dominant Sunni Muslims.
• No political aims will ever be achieved in a state of chaos, which is likely if too many American troops are withdrawn before Iraqi security forces can take over.
• That’s going to take time and money, and its going to take its tole in lives as well.

What’s the result of our early withdrawal?   Will the Iraqi people simply duke it out–and when the punches stop, and the dust settles, will they help each other up like two spent boxers and shake hands?

Doubtful.

The only reason there wasn’t Civil War under Saddam was that he provided security and stability. Of course, he did so with brutal and inhumane tactics, but nevertheless, the various groups were able to live together relatively peacefully. I think what most Iraqi’s want is running water, roofs over their heads, a steady paycheck, and no lines at the gas pump. It is the minority that wants death, suicide bombings, and constant chaos.

The problem with Option #1–our early withdrawal–is that I don’t think it will give the moderate majority time to do what they need to do - cast out the radicals and retake the country.  A moderate majority is easily cowed by a radical minority–especially one so well armed and well-funded by hostile Iranian and Syrian interests. So the only option to create a political solution in which the moderates win and the radicals lose, is to stay and provide the necessary peace-keeping and security that only American troops can provide, at least until Iraqi troops can take over.

Too bad NATO and the UN decided not to help. More peace-keeping forces are needed until the Iraqis can take the reigns. Until such time, though, we need to “stay the course” because it’s the only humane thing to do, now that we’re here. I wish we’d been wiser in the beginning, but at least we can be wise, and humane, now.

~by Michael A Minton

I have been watching this situation between Israel and the Palestinians for a long time. I was a freelance reporter for Talon News when Condoleeza Rice was named Secretary of State. And I remember her making promises that she would spend however much time was necessary to hammer-out a peace agreement between the two sides.

Then came a spate of Palestinian rocket attacks, suicide bombings, and kidnappings, not just of Israelis, but of Western reporters, workers, and so on. There was, of course, retaliation for these acts on the part of Israel, who has every right to defend and protect herself. What started out as a hopeful process has sadly turned back to “the way we were” for the Israelis and Palestinians.

I actually was hopeful when Yasser Arafat died that a more moderate leader would be able to step to the fore of Palestinian politics. And one did: Mahmoud Abbas, who was at least ready to admit that the state of Israel had a right to exist…kind of a rarity in those parts.

(more…)

from Bruce Kelly

If President Bush lied then so did these people…

“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.” Hillary Clinton October 2002

“Moreover, if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam. We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.” Al Gore September 2002

“Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.” Nancy Pelosi December 1998

“When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region.” Senator John Kerry, October 2002

The list of so called liars would also include German, French, Italian and British government officials and military intelligence. That’s why no serious person will endorse impeachment of the president over the Iraq war and those of you driving around with your impeach Bush bumper stickers look like ignorant fools.