Why the World Did Not Know about WMD in Iraq

Posted By Carter Andress On November 19, 2014 @ 12:51 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments

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The yellow cake was found in Iraq in 2003, shortly after a US-led invasion of the country [AP]

After U.S. Central Command called on us to help transport from Iraq enough yellowcake uranium to make several atomic bombs stored at Saddam’s nuclear weapons complex, I realized why neither the Pentagon nor the White House advertised the presence of this WMD precursor: safety and security.

Before the U.S. military moved in to secure the facility after the 2003 invasion, looters had been there first. Even though the universally recognized yellow-and-black radioactivity warnings were posted on the bunkers, locals had ripped open the storage areas and stolen casks of yellowcake with many sickened as a result. More importantly, we did not want the insurgents alerted to the exposed stockpile as they might attack the facility. This is also why the George W. Bush administration did not crow about the approximately 5,000 chemical munitions that U.S. forces uncovered throughout Iraq, as recently reported by the New York Times. That is a serious quantity of WMD, by any standard. Interestingly, the Bush team could have diluted near-uniform shock at the failure to find WMD by highlighting these discoveries instead of allowing the narrative we all know to solidify: “no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq found except a few dozen old, mustard-gas artillery shells left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.” Yet President Bush and his advisors chose to protect the troops and the mission rather than score political points back on the war’s second front, the American body politic. (None of this, however, mitigates any unpreparedness by the Pentagon to treat service members exposed to chemical weapons.)

Before my company arrived to provide guards and to build and operate a base camp for U.S. Department of Energy scientists dissecting Saddam’s nuclear weapons facility, the American Army had occupied the site with almost a company of infantry. This was quite a bit of combat power tethered to a non-populated, static location when needed to actively defend the people against the elusive al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists and Iranian-allied militias rampant until early 2008 when the American Surge forces and the Sunni Arab “Awakening” had turned the tide delivering our victory in the Iraq War. The limited number of combat troops available did not permit fixing them at every site where WMD were found or might be found. Hence the requirement to not advertise that Saddam had left thousands of chemical weapons lying around, potentially under any mound in mostly flat Iraq. That would have set off a dangerous treasure hunt—and if found, a tremendous threat to American troops and everyone in Iraq especially if weaponized nerve gas had ended up with al-Qaeda.

We were able to move the yellowcake successfully because of our proven relationships with the tribes along our supply line to the nuclear weapons facility, located at the center of an area known as the “Triangle of Death,” due to extensive U.S. combat fatalities suffered there. Because of our and other U.S. government contractors’ employment of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, we helped drain the swamp (or “sea” in Maoist terms) whence the al-Qaeda insurgency sprung. The uranium operation caused us, as usual, to rent trucks from the surrounding tribes with comprehensive war-loss insurance (meaning if a truck got blown up then the owner took the loss). This in turn caused the tribes to look outwards on the convoy movements to protect their expensive tractor trailers instead of inwards—searching for a chance to attack. Doing business for the tribes with the American government, and then the Iraqi government, turned out to be safer than supporting the nihilistic, totalitarian jihadis and the traitorous Sadrists, minions of Iran.

Regardless of what position one takes on the U.S. invasion, the world could not abide by large quantities of nuclear weapons precursor in the hands of the genocidal tyrant in Baghdad. As we are seeing with the current, seemingly endless negotiations with Iran, the millionaire mullahs of Tehran are using the pretext of “peaceful” nuclear power generation in order to assert that the denial thereof is a direct assault on a nation’s sovereignty. Consequently, the concept that we could have gotten the yellowcake removed from Iraq as a part of lifting the rapidly degrading sanctions and truly certifying the country clean of all chemical weapons without the overthrow of Saddam defies logic and experience. The continued possession by Iraq of approximately 5,000 chemical warheads undiscovered after almost eight years of aggressive UN inspections along with the existence of enough yellowcake uranium to make 14 or so nuclear bombs with technology that the Iranians and Libyans already possessed calls for a new coda to replace “Bush lied, people died.” Certainly, we should look to the reinstatement of a principle justification for the American invasion of Iraq.

Carter Andress is president of AISG, Inc. (American-Iraqi Solutions Group) and the author, with Malcolm McConnell, of Victory Undone: The Defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Its Resurrection as ISIS (Regnery, October 2014).    

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Don’t Blame Iraq on Obama Alone

Some Republicans are indulging in revisionist history. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

June 14, 2014

I’ve just written Faithless Execution, a book positing that there is such a solid legal case of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by the president that the time is ripe to build a political case for his impeachment. I have argued, moreover, that the president’s policy of appeasing and empowering Islamic supremacists has been a national-security catastrophe, catalyzing a jihadist resurgence across the Middle East.

It is pretty safe to say I am no fan of Barack Obama’s. But it is just as safe to say that for Beltway Republicans to blame Obama alone for the implosion of Iraq — which is now being overrun by the same Sunni jihadists those Republicans have championed in Syria and Libya — is shameful.

Look, I will stipulate that the president’s signature recklessness is abundantly evident in Iraq. He heedlessly withdrew U.S. forces, making no effort to preserve the security gains they achieved in routing al-Qaeda, even as it became obvious that the withdrawal had evaporated those gains and invited the terror network to return with a vengeance.

Still, it was not Obama who agreed to the withdrawal schedule. It was President Bush. And it was not Obama who turned Iraq into an Islamic-supremacist state seething with anti-American and anti-Semitic hatred. Long before Obama came to power, Iraq was an Islamist country, rife with Sunni and Shiite militants who agreed on little else besides their devotion to sharia and their abhorrence of the West.

In late 2008, several weeks before Obama entered the Oval Office, I wrote here about the status of forces agreement (SOFA) the Bush administration was then entering into with the ingrate Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki. Even then, Iraq was pulling ever closer to the terrorist regime in Iran while American troops continued fighting to protect Maliki’s fledgling government from al-Qaeda jihadists — jihadists that the insidious mullahs were also supplying with money, training, and IEDs.

In the SOFA, the Bush administration agreed to strict withdrawal deadlines that invited al-Qaeda to catch its breath, wait out the United States, then resume the jihad as Americans were leaving — the better to make it look to the world like they were chasing us out. All American combat operations were to cease in mid 2009; and, at the end of 2011, all American forces would pull out of Iraq. The 2008 SOFA is the basis for the American withdrawal that Obama so anxiously consummated. It is what promised a resumption of Islam’s eternal, internecine bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites that now has Iraq on the verge of collapse.

To listen to Republicans and those who foolishly repeat their revisionist history, you would think Obama inherited the Iraq so delusionally envisioned by Islamic-democracy-project devotees: a free, pluralistic democracy that would be a reliable counterterrorism ally and a thorn in totalitarian Iran’s side.

In reality, Iraq remains an incorrigible sharia society in which the persecution of religious minorities and homosexuals is routine. Far from democratizing the country in any cultural sense, Bush officials fortified these tendencies by encouraging Iraq’s adoption of a constitution that enshrined Islam as the state religion and sharia as a primary source of law. Under American occupation, Iraq continued to shun diplomatic relations with Israel and to cheer the “resistance” waged by Hamas and Hezbollah. It sought closer ties with Tehran, a desire the Bush administration indulged on the fantasy rationale that Iran had a strong interest in a stable Iraq — even as everyone knew Iran was fueling anti-American terrorism in Iraq by both Shiite and Sunni jihadist cells.

Why did President Bush agree to the SOFA on his way out of office (under the pressure of a December 31, 2008, expiration of the U.N. mandate approving U.S. military operations there)? Because it was the best deal he could get in an Islamist country that despises America.

Beginning in 2003, fatwas calling for violent jihad against American forces in Iraq were issued by influential sharia jurists, including Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi and Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah (who are now Obama administration consultants). Because our government eschews the study of Islamic-supremacist ideology, most Americans remain unaware that these fatwas represented a mainstream interpretation of sharia in the Muslim Middle East: If Western forces occupy Islamic territory, and especially if they are peddling concepts like Western democracy, they must be driven out — even if, in their own minds, they are do-gooders trying to make life better for Muslims.

The Iraqi mindset was obvious in public polling: In 2008, four in ten Iraqis continued to see Americans as legitimate terror targets — and the figure had recently hovered close to six in ten. Fully 80 percent of Iraqis said they wanted Americans to vacate their country. In the one vestige of Iraqi democracy about which the Bush administration could brag, the nation’s holding of popular elections, candidates competed with each other over who could most strenuously condemn the United States and demand that our troops leave yesterday.

It is certainly understandable that after thousands of lost lives and hundreds of billions of wasted dollars, veterans of the war in Iraq are incensed to see the triumphant march of an al-Qaeda offshoot — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (greater Syria or “the Levant”) — through cities they once heroically wrested from terrorist control. After all the American sacrifice, it is infuriating to watch jihadists triumph while Obama idles.

But is it fair to blame these developments on our overmatched commander-in-chief?

Many of us on the right supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein. He was a terror supporter. In those post-9/11 days, there was reason to believe our government was serious about dealing with terror-supporting regimes as if they were terrorists. If Saddam was the next domino to fall after the Taliban, all to the good — it didn’t seem like he’d be the last.

But then the Bush doctrine morphed from a crackdown on the jihad into a reimagining of the Middle East. When democracy predictably didn’t take, the dreamers decided to define democracy down rather than admit failure. “Democracy” somehow became fully compatible with repressive sharia, and we fantasized that anti-Western Islamic supremacists were democratic allies and that Iran would play a constructive regional role.

It was absurd. Yet it was the unquestioned premise for concluding, in 2008, that a sharia state gravitating ever further into Iran’s orbit — an Iraqi state that was dependent on the loyalty of Shiite militias and was already in a simmering conflict with its restive Sunni minority — could be trusted in the imminent draw-down, then complete absence, of American troops to preserve the security gains hard won by American bravery and know-how.

Our troops did astonishing work given the severe limitations placed on them. It was not within their capabilities, though, to democratize Iraq — not unless we were willing to occupy that country for generations with a firm purpose to stamp out its sharia culture. And while our troops demolished al-Qaeda in Iraq, it was not within their capabilities to conclusively defeat a global enemy by demolishing it in one country.

In 2008, we announced we were leaving and provided a timeline for our departure under circumstances where a new American president, bitterly opposed to the war in Iraq, was about to assume power. From that point on, al-Qaeda’s return was inevitable.

Has President Obama been a disaster in Iraq — as in every other place? Sure he has. The security situation in Iraq steadily deteriorated as American forces departed. Maliki was sufficiently desperate that he’d surely have renegotiated the SOFA if Obama had been interested in preserving what our troops had fought for. Obama, however, is all about Obama: He wanted to run for reelection as the president who “ended” the war in Iraq, just as he is now legacy-chasing to be the president who “ended” the war in Afghanistan — even if “ending” really means al-Qaeda and its allies win.

Let’s not pretend, though, that America’s Middle East mess is strictly an Obama production. Today, a Sunni jihadist in Iraq might be killed by an American drone in support, incredibly, of the Iranian military intervention to prop up Iraq’s Shiite government. But if that same Sunni jihadist instead crosses the border into Syria, he will be given American-supplied weapons to fight against the Iranian military intervention that props up Syria’s Shiite government.

That kind of insanity does not happen overnight. It happens after more than 20 years of willful blindness to the ideology of our enemies, and more than 20 years without a strategic vision of the global jihadist challenge.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, was released by Encounter Books on June 3.

Book review: ‘Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House’ by Peter Baker

By James Mann

http://www.washingtonpost.com

October 31, 2013

James Mann, a resident fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.” He is working on a biography of George W. Bush for the American Presidents series.

We are in the midst of a wave of revisionism about George W. Bush and his administration.

For years, amid the rancor of the Iraq war, Bush was often portrayed as a simple idiot or sometimes as a demonic manipulator. More recently, amid an outpouring of coverage prompted by the April openingof the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, we have been treated to even thinner caricatures of W.: Bush the humanist, a contemplative painter who was misunderstood at the time and did little to inspire the passions that engulfed him.

This recent rethinking will prove no more enduring than the original perceptions. The historical judgments of the Bush administration are only beginning to take shape. It has taken several years for the key actors to write their memoirs and for the president’s friends and subordinates to offer stories they wouldn’t volunteer at the time the Bush team was in the White House.

Peter Baker’s impressive new book, “Days of Fire,” one of the first efforts to set out the history of the Bush administration, is a distinguished work, notable for its scope and ambition, that should become a standard reference for historians. After tracing the upbringing and early careers of both Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, Baker chronicles their time in office from start to finish, encompassing their foreign and domestic policies. (The book’s title is a play on a quote from Bush’s second inaugural address: Referring to Sept. 11, 2001, the president said, “And then there came a day of fire.”)

The book has few groundbreaking revelations or startling judgments. Its virtue lies in the mass of information Baker has collected and the way he has pulled it together, so that the jumble of material on the Bush years is consolidated in one smooth narrative. He has read the memoirs so you don’t have to. From them he unearths gems, such as Bush’s quip about the icy reception he would get when addressing the United Nations General Assembly: “It’s like speaking to the wax museum. Nobody moves.” (This comes from former spokesman Ari Fleischer’s memoir.)

Baker also gathers a wealth of other revealing quotes and anecdotes, not previously published, from interviews and from private notes of White House meetings. “Write this down,” Bush told Republican governors in the fall of 2002. “Afghanistan and Iraq will lead that part of the world toward democracy.”

The heart of “Days of Fire” lies in the changing relationship between Bush and Cheney — how Bush in the early years of his administration relied heavily on his vastly more experienced vice president, but during his second term he increasingly operated on his own, relegating Cheney to the margins. Baker draws out each development in this tangled relationship in much the same way that Robert Caro wrote about the relationship between John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

In this, Baker sometimes succeeds, yet his approach has some flaws, too. The book is overwhelmingly event-driven and chronological. On occasion, it reads too much like a tick-tock of Bush’s eight years in office, dwelling on time and detail until it becomes eye-numbing: When Bush has a routine colonoscopy in 2002 and transfers power to Cheney for a couple of hours, Baker informs the reader that the White House physician “performed the procedure, finishing at 7:29 a.m. without finding any polyps. Bush awoke at 7:31, got up soon thereafter, ate a waffle and played with his dogs.” This is simply too much information.

The book dwells more on the personalities in the Bush administration than on the ideas and larger forces at work. Baker depicts the relationship between Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell as an old friendship turned sour; Powell had been Cheney’s “once-trusted sidekick during the first Bush presidency,” he writes. This is doubly off-kilter: Powell, both as a former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan and as the most powerful chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the nation had ever known, was anything but Cheney’s sidekick; his stature and influence in George H.W. Bush’s White House engendered considerable mistrust on the part of Cheney and top civilian aides such as Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. At the root of this mistrust was the fact that Cheney and Powell represented different ideas about America’s post-Cold War role in the world.

When the two men returned to office under George W. Bush, they brought with them these distinct worldviews. In addition, each man (particularly Cheney) installed a network of allies and supporters who reflected his beliefs. Amid these larger conflicts, the personal relationship between Cheney and Powell was almost irrelevant; it was bound to be strained.

Baker’s careful reconstruction gives readers a good sense of the day-to-day flow of the Bush administration. He describes the events as the White House saw them — switching often, in short order, from one subject to another, with Baker drawing the connection that “even as” one thing was happening, another was. “The economic crisis began to worsen dramatically the day after [Adm. William J.] Fallon’s resignation,” he writes in one typical passage, leaving time as the sole connector between unrelated events.

“Days of Fire” makes far too little effort to separate the wheat from the chaff. Events of historic consequence, such as the Bush tax cuts, are given comparable treatment with White House staff feuds and minor personnel changes that had little significance at the time and none at all by now. Why should we care about the conflicts between, say, political strategists Matthew Dowd and Karl Rove, or between press secretary Dana Perino and one of her predecessors, Scott McClellan? Such material distracts from the important story Baker has to tell about the administration’s leading actors and about events including the Iraq war.

The final verdict on the Bush administration, of course, remains to be written. After nearly five years of the Obama administration, some of Bush’s counterterrorism policies — the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for example — have proved more lasting than they seemed when he left office. It will take years, perhaps decades, to judge what Bush’s tax cuts did to America’s economic and social structure. Over time, we will be able to see just how badly the war in Iraq eroded American power and damaged its international standing.

“Days of Fire” doesn’t try to make these larger assessments. It is, however, as thorough and detailed an account of the Bush years — day by day, week by week — as we are ever likely to get.


DAYS OF FIRE Bush and Cheney in the White House
By Peter Baker Doubleday. 800 pp. $35

Barack Obama is proving an embarrassing amateur on the world stage compared to George W. Bush

By Nile Gardiner 

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner

30 August 2013

George W. Bush was widely mocked by the Left during the Iraq War, with liberals jeering at the “coalition of the willing,” which included in its ranks some minnows such as Moldova and Kazkhstan. Michael Moore, in his rather silly documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, went to great lengths to lampoon the Iraq War alliance. But the coalition also contained, as I pointed out in Congressional testimony back in 2007, Great Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, Poland, and 16 members of the NATO alliance, as well as Japan and South Korea. In Europe, France and Germany were the only large-scale countries that sat the war out, with 12 of the 25 members of the European Union represented. The coalition, swelled to roughly 40 countries, and was one of the largest military coalitions ever assembled.

As it stands, President Obama’s proposed military coalition on Syria has a grand total of two members – the US and France. And the French, as we know from Iraq, simply can’t be relied on, and have very limited military capability. It is a truly embarrassing state of affairs when Paris, at best a fair weather friend, is your only partner. John Kerry tried to put a brave face on it at his press conference today, by referring to France “as our oldest ally,” but the fact remains that his administration is looking painfully isolated.

There can be no doubt that David Cameron’s defeat in the House of Commons was a huge blow to President Obama, and has dominated the US news networks this morning. The absence of Britain in any American-led military action significantly weakens Obama’s position on the world stage, and dramatically undercuts the Obama administration. The vote reflected not only a lack of confidence in the Commons in the prime minister’s Syria strategy, it also demonstrated a striking lack of confidence in Barack Obama and US leadership.

In marked contrast to Obama, President Bush invested a great deal of time and effort in cultivating ties with key US allies, especially Britain. The Special Relationship actually mattered to George W. Bush. For Barack Obama it has been a mere blip on his teleprompter. Bush also went out of his way to build ties with other allies in Europe, including with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, and an array of countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Obama simply hasn’t bothered making friends in Europe, and has treated some nations with sheer disdain and disrespect, including Poland and the Czech Republic. He has found common currency with France’s Socialist President Francois Hollande, an ideological soul-mate, but finds himself in a very lonely position elsewhere across the Atlantic.

In addition, and most importantly, George W. Bush was a conviction president on foreign policy matters, driven by a clear sense of the national interest. President Bush emphatically made his case to the American people and to the world, explaining why he believed the use of force was necessary, and dozens of countries decided to follow him. In the case of Barack Obama, whose foreign policy has been weak-kneed, confused and strategically incoherent, the president hasn’t effectively made the case for military intervention in Syria, and has made no serious effort to cultivate support both at home and abroad. President Bush may not have been greatly loved on the world stage, but he was respected by America’s allies, and feared by his enemies. In marked contrast, Obama hasn’t generated a lot of respect abroad, and he certainly isn’t feared.

Read more by Nile Gardiner on Telegraph Blogs

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Tags: Barack Obama, George W Bush, iraq, John Kerry, Syria

The Presidential Wheel Turns

Disaffection for Bush gave us Obama. That explains the new affection for Bush


By Peggy Noonan
The Wall Street Journal
http://www.wsj.com
April 26, 2013

Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 because he was not George W. Bush. In fact, he was elected because he was the furthest thing possible from Mr. Bush. On some level he knew this, which is why every time he got in trouble he'd say Bush's name. It's all his fault, you have no idea the mess I inherited. As long as Mr. Bush's memory was hovering like Boo Radley in the shadows, Mr. Obama would be OK.

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In an excerpt from a longer interview, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush is asked by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution whether he plans to run for president in 2016. "Uncommon Knowledge" is produced by the Hoover Institution for WSJ Live.

This week something changed. George W. Bush is back, for the unveiling of his presidential library. His numbers are dramatically up. You know why? Because he's the furthest thing from Barack Obama.

Obama fatigue has opened the way to Bush affection.

***

In all his recent interviews Mr. Bush has been modest, humorous, proud but unassuming, and essentially philosophical: History will decide. No finger-pointing or scoring points. If he feels rancor or resentment he didn't show it. He didn't attempt to manipulate. His sheer normality seemed like a relief, an echo of an older age.

And all this felt like an antidote to Obama—to the imperious I, to the inability to execute, to the endless interviews and the imperturbable drone, to the sense that he is trying to teach us, like an Ivy League instructor taken aback by the backwardness of his students. And there's the unconscious superiority. One thing Mr. Bush didn't think he was was superior. He thought he was luckily born, quick but not deep, and he famously trusted his gut but also his heart. He always seemed moved and grateful to be in the White House. Someone who met with Mr. Obama during his first year in office, an old hand who'd worked with many presidents, came away worried and confounded. Mr. Obama, he said, was the only one who didn't seem awed by his surroundings, or by the presidency itself.

Mr. Bush could be prickly and irritable and near the end showed arrogance, but he wasn't vain or conceited, and he still isn't. When people said recently that they were surprised he could paint, he laughed: "Some people are surprised I can even read."

Enlarge Image

EPA

Presidents present and past gathered for the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, April 25.

Coverage of the opening of his presidential library Thursday was wall to wall on cable, and a feeling of affection for him was encouraged, or at least enabled, by the Washington press corps, which doesn't much like Mr. Obama because he's not all that likable, and remembers Mr. Bush with a kind of reluctant fondness because he was.

But to the point. Mr. Obama was elected because he wasn't Bush.

Mr. Bush is popular now because he's not Obama.

The wheel turns, doesn't it?

Here's a hunch: The day of the opening of the Bush library was the day Obama fatigue became apparent as a fact of America's political life.

When Bush left office, his approval rating was down in the 20s to low 30s. Now it's at 47%, which is what Obama's is. That is amazing, and not sufficiently appreciated. Yes, we are a 50-50 nation, but Mr. Bush left office in foreign-policy and economic failure, even cataclysm. Yet he is essentially equal in the polls to the supposedly popular president. Which suggests Republicans in general have some latent, unseen potential of which they're unaware. Right now they're busy being depressed. Maybe they should be thinking, "If Bush could come back . . ." Actually, forget I said that. Every time Republican political professionals start to think that way, with optimism, they get crude and dumb and think if they press certain levers the mice will run in certain directions.

***

The headline of the Bush Library remarks is that everyone was older and nicer.

Jimmy Carter, in shades, with wispy white hair, was gracious and humorous. Anyone can soften with age, but he seemed to have sweetened. That don't come easy. Good for him.

George H.W. Bush was tender. He feels the tugs and tides of history. "God bless America, and thank you very much." He rose from his wheelchair to acknowledge the crowd. That crowd, and the people watching on TV—the person they loved and honored most was him.

Peggy Noonan's Blog

Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

Bill Clinton does this kind of thing so well—being generous to others, especially former opponents. "We are here to celebrate a country we all love," he said. He was funny on how he wanted Mr. Bush to paint him and then saw Mr. Bush's self-portrait in the bath and thought no, I'll keep my suit on. He got a laugh when he called himself the black sheep of the Bush family.

I said everyone was older and nicer. It's occurred to me that the Clintons and both Bushes were president when baby boomer journalists were in their 30s and 40s and eager to rise. Everyone was meaner, both the pols and the press, because they were all young. Now they're in their 60s. When they went through the 9/11 section of the library, the day before the opening, some had tears in their eyes. They understood now what that day was. Young journalists: You're going to become more tolerant with time, and not only because you have more to tolerate in yourself. Because life will batter you and you'll have a surer sense of what's important and has meaning and is good.

President Obama was more formal than the other speakers and less confident than usual, as if he knew he was surrounded by people who have something he doesn't. "No matter how much you think you're ready to assume the office of the president, it's impossible to understand the nature of the job until it's yours." This is a way of seeming to laud others when you're lauding yourself. He veered into current policy disputes, using Mr. Bush's failed comprehensive immigration reform to buttress his own effort. That was manipulative, graceless and typical.

George W. Bush was emotional: "In the end, leaders are defined by the convictions they hold. . . . My deepest conviction . . . is that the United States of America must strive to expand the reach of freedom. I believe that freedom is a gift from God and the hope of every human heart." He then announced that on Saturday he would personally invade Syria.

Ha, kidding. It was standard Bush rhetoric and, in its way, a defiant pushing back against critics of his invasions and attempts to nation-build. Who isn't for more freedom? But that bright, shining impulse, that very American impulse, must be followed by steely-eyed calculation. At the end Mr. Bush wept, and not only because the Bush men are weepers but because he means every word of what he says, and because he loves his country, and was moved. John Boehner weeps too when he speaks about what America means to him. You know why they do that? Because their hearts are engaged. And really, that's not the worst thing.

Back to the point. What was nice was that all of them—the Bush family, the Carters and Clintons—seemed like the old days. "The way we were." They were full of endurance, stamina, effort. Also flaws, frailty, mess. But they weren't . . . creepy.

Anyway, onward to Obama fatigue, and the Democratic Party wrestling with what comes next. It's not only the Republicans in a deep pit.

A version of this article appeared April 26, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Presidential Wheel Turns.

Reopened for Business

By WILLIAM MURCHISON on 4.26.13 @ 6:10AM

The American Spectator

http://spectator.org/

Former President George W. Bush is back to stay.

DALLAS — Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. Maybe not outright, rapturously smitten but anyway fond; and fonder and fonder still, it may prove, as the calendar puts distance between the present day and the presidency of George W. Bush.

We shall see. I can report developments on that front already — from rising approval levels shown in a new national poll, to the exuberance of 10,000 people spread across the SMU campus as the George W. Bush Presidential Center came to life Thursday.

Well, let me back up: 9,990 or so might have been exuberant. President Barack Obama, along with Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, were on hand for the occasion: behaving pretty nicely as it happened but clearly scrounging for evidence of agreement with their presidential brother Bush 43.

All three Democrats praised Bush for his administration’s commitment to fighting AIDS in Africa. Clinton and Obama spoke of their personal liking for the man. Clinton praised his successor as “disarmingly direct” — a nosegay no one ever tossed in his own direction. Obama sang of Bush’s “incredible strength and resolve” after the 9/11 attacks, an observation all the more poignant as coming only 10 days after the nation’s second terrorist attack, in Boston.

Presidential library dedications are odd affairs anyway — emphasizing a bipartisanship rarely on view in the great Colosseum known as Washington, D.C., where political gladiators would as soon eviscerate each other as pretend to anything like philosophical agreement. Everyone who speaks on these dedicatory occasions has on his best Sunday suit and bears evidence of a healthy scrubbing behind the ears. No one lays a glove on anyone, or for that matter attempts to.

The oddities of the Bush Library dedication at Southern Methodist University on a resplendent Thursday morning — e.g., Dick Cheney in a cowboy hat, a frail George H.W. Bush propped up in a wheel chair, Hillary Clinton silent — were peripheral to the bigger show.

The Bush Center — all 226,000 square feet of it (barely smaller than the Reagan library) — flings down in a manner of speaking the gauntlet to Bush’s opponents, some still as obstreperous now as they were five or six years ago. I don’t mean to depict Bush as charging forth from the library breastworks with lance leveled, skewering his critics, including those with honest (as opposed to purely partisan) objections to his policies. What the center does, with striking and yet tasteful effect, is lay out the case for a controversial presidency, inviting visitors to judge for themselves.

One striking feature of the Bush museum’s offerings is an interactive video board highlighting the considerations that indicated action of one sort or another on Iraq, the troop surge, Hurricane Katrina, and the financial blow-up of 2008. The invitation is open to visitors: Here’s what I knew as president, here’s what I did. What about you? Would my way be yours, or would you strike out in another direction? Fine either way; your choice.

I didn’t get to try it, so much there was going on all around us media drones as we trudged through the hall. I think the experience could all the same be called challenging.

To my own mind – working in sync, I anticipate, with the minds of thousands who will see the same sights, the same exhibits — the centerpiece of the museum is the 9/11 exhibit. The terror and horror of the moment are very much on display here: inviting comparisons with the terror and horror of the Boston bombing. A beam from the south tower of the World Trade Center at the point of impact rises jaggedly from the floor. The name of every 9/11 victim is chiseled into the limestone wall; it makes for emotional reading, even though I hadn’t known a single one of the fallen. The Fanon bullhorn Bush used in spontaneously rallying a Ground Zero crowd is on display.

So much, from that historical point, went south: mistakes, arguments, controversies, misappraisals, bad judgments, the rekindling of liberal anger at the candidate who had “stolen” the 2000 presidential election.

Who knows how the Bush presidency would have turned out but for al Qaeda? Barack Obama, gazing out over 10,000 upturned faces in Dallas, might easily have entertained similar questions about the course of his own presidency in the aftermath of Boston. Obama’s disinclination to abolish the Bush apparatus for fighting terror — Guantanamo and so on — is a datum that may already have sunk silently into numerous brains, not all of these brains Republican.

Governing a complex and rambunctious place like the 21st century United States seems to some of us oldtimers a more and more challenging enterprise all the time: bidding to become a near impossibility. Anchorage of some sort is needed. It helps — a lot — to see and hear at the Bush Center repetitive admonitions concerning the unsurpassed value of freedom.

“My hope,” said Bush on Thursday, “is that the United States of America must try to expand the reach of freedom” — which, after all, is “a gift from God.” Among the gifts of freedom, the former president emphasized — and wouldn’t he know? — is disagreement. Or worse: being called a liar and a loser by the likes of Harry Reid; being yelled at, cursed, caricatured by bloggers as well as the uptown intelligentsia. What keeps Bush going? I barely know the man myself; the many who know him better point to a kind of inner serenity that bids him, in the immortal words of Davy Crockett, “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.”

The current Bush approval rating of 47 percent —a seven-year high, as reported by the Washington Post and ABC News — puts him approximately at eye level with his celebrated Dallas guest, Barack Obama. It’s quite a comeback in four years’ time. The Man Who Wasn’t Clinton in 2000 is for quite a few now The Man Who Isn’t Obama: maybe not the finest figure of a president you could ever imagine and maybe not the worst either. Maybe far from the worst.

We do go through these cycles of presidential reappraisal, such as blunt, outspoken Harry Truman’s rescue from ignominy during the depths of Nixonian trickiness. Those wishing to reappraise, or perhaps genuinely appraise for the first time, President George Walker Bush have now a spectacular place in which to pursue the task: lots of iconography, naturally, but a lot more honesty than such as Harry Reid would find plausible in a family man and patriot we used to be assured was a loser.

The Bush Legacy

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: April 25

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

Clare Boothe Luce liked to say that “a great man is one sentence.” Presidents, in particular. The most common “one sentence” for George W. Bush is: “He kept us safe.”

Not quite right. With Bush’s legacy being reassessed as his presidential library opens in Dallas, it’s important to note that he did not just keep us safe. He created the entire anti-terror infrastructure that continues to keep us safe.

That homage was paid, wordlessly, by Barack Obama, who vilified Bush’s anti-terror policies as a candidate, then continued them as president: indefinite detention, rendition, warrantless wiretaps, special forces and drone warfare, and, most notoriously, Guantanamo, which Obama so ostentatiously denounced — until he found it indispensable.

Quite a list. Which is why there was not one successful terror bombing on U.S. soil from 9/11 until last week. The Boston Marathon attack was an obvious security failure, but there is a difference between 3,000 dead and three. And on the other side of the ledger are the innumerable plots broken up since 9/11.

Moreover, Bush’s achievement was not just infrastructure. It was war. The Afghan campaign overthrew the Taliban, decimated al-Qaeda and expelled it from its haven. Yet that success is today derogated with the cheap and lazy catchphrase — “He got us into two wars” — intended to spread to Afghanistan the opprobrium associated with Iraq.

As if Afghanistan was some unilateral Bush adventure foisted on the American people. As if Obama himself did not call it a “war of necessity” and Joe Biden, the most just war since World War II.

The dilemma in Afghanistan was what to do after the brilliant, nine-week victory. There was no good answer. Even with the benefit of seven years’ grinding experience under his predecessor, Obama got it wrong. His Afghan “surge” cost hundreds of American lives without having changed the country’s prospects.
It turned out to be a land too primitive to democratize, too fractured to unify. The final withdrawal will come after Obama’s own six years of futility.

Iraq was, of course, far more problematic. Critics conveniently forget that the invasion had broad support from the public and Congress, including from those who became the highest-ranking foreign-policy figures in the Obama administration — Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and Biden.

And they forget the context — crumbling sanctions that would, in short order, have restored Saddam Hussein to full economic and regional power, well positioning him, post-sanctions, to again threaten his neighbors and restart his WMD program.

Was the war worth it? Inconclusive wars never yield a good answer. Was Korea worth it? It ended with a restoration of the status quo ante. Now 60 years later, we face nuclear threats from the same regime that was not defeated in a war that cost 10 times as many American lives as Iraq.

The Iraq War had three parts. The initial toppling of the regime was a remarkable success — like Afghanistan, rapid and with relatively few U.S. casualties.

The occupation was a disaster, rooted in the fundamental contradiction between means and ends, between the “light footprint” chosen by Gen. George Casey and the grand reformation attempted by Paul Bremer, who tried to change everything down to the coinage.

Finally, the surge, a courageous Bush decision taken against near-universal opposition, that produced the greatest U.S. military turnaround since the Inchon landing. And inflicted the single most significant defeat for al-Qaeda (save Afghanistan) — a humiliating rout at the hands of Iraqi Sunnis fighting side-by-side with the American infidel.

As with Lincoln, it took Bush years of agonizing bloody stalemate before he finally found his general and his strategy. Yet, for all the terrible cost, Bush bequeathed to Obama a strategically won war. Obama had one task: Conclude a status-of-forces agreement and thus secure Iraq as a major regional ally. He failed utterly. Iraq today is more fragile, sectarian and Iranian-influenced than it was when Bush left office — and than it had to be.

Like Bush, Harry Truman left office widely scorned, largely because of the inconclusive war he left behind. In time, however, Korea came to be seen as but one battle in a much larger Cold War that Truman was instrumental in winning. He established the institutional and policy infrastructure (CIA, NATO, the Truman Doctrine, etc.) that made possible ultimate victory almost a half-century later. I suspect history will similarly see Bush as the man who, by trial and error but also with prescience and principle, established the structures that will take us through another long twilight struggle and enable us to prevail.


Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more about this subject: Michael Gerson: George W. Bush, a principled president Richard Cohen: George W. Bush, eternally serene Stephen F. Knott: George W. Bush is victim of a rush to judgment

© The Washington Post Company

NEXT TIME, USE FEDEX

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
May 4, 2011

The CIA stepped up the search for Osama bin Laden last week after becoming as sick of royal wedding coverage as the rest of us.

American intelligence operations located Osama by following his trusted couriers, whose names were given up by al-Qaida members during harsh interrogations at CIA black sites under President Bush.

Yes, the same interrogations endlessly denounced by the entire Democratic Party (save Joe Lieberman), the mainstream media, and an especially indignant Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

The most-wanted terrorist in the world was living in a moldy, million-dollar mansion in a gated community just outside of Islamabad. It took the CIA five years to figure out the four-digit code to get in.

One important missed clue was that Osama was living at 72 Virgins Way. He might still be alive today if only he hadn't borrowed his neighbor's shoulder-mounted rocket launcher and never returned it.

Our mighty Navy SEALs not only put a bullet through Osama's head, but carried off his computers, disks and hard drives. So far, all they've revealed is that Osama had multiple Netflix rentals of "Rendition," "In the Valley of Elah," "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Love Actually."

Can you imagine what's on Osama's hard drives? I mean besides the goat pornography. Pants are wetting throughout Pakistan's military establishment.

The New York Times reports that the raid that killed Osama is being bitterly denounced on Pakistani TV as a breach of that country's sovereignty. Osama, our dear allies say, was not a terrorist, nor has al-Qaida ever been unfriendly to Pakistan -- unlike the United States, which they call "an enemy of Pakistan and Muslims."

(Also, bin Laden's entire video crew is in line at the Islamabad unemployment office today. Thanks, Barack.)

The one Islamic country that openly cheered our taking out bin Laden is Iraq. According to reports from inside the country, TV stations are treating the raid as a great victory for Iraq -- the final battle in a war that was mostly fought by Iraqis on Iraqi soil. They view bin Laden's killing as their own personal triumph in the war against Islamic terrorism.

Similarly, when there was an explosion of violence throughout the Muslim world in response to some Danish cartoons in 2006, guess which Islamic nation was nothing but placid contentment? Again: our plucky Iraq. (Having U.S. Marines in your midst apparently has some sort of calming influence.)

It's great that we got bin Laden, but if the last Democratic administration had been doing its job, there would have been no Osama bin Laden and no 9/11 attack to begin with.

Democratic presidents are always too busy feverishly redistributing wealth at home to devote serious attention to our national interests abroad.

Obama gets to reap the rewards of Bush-era terrorism policies -- policies that he, his fellow Democrats and Jane Mayer hysterically denounced at the time -- while Reagan and Bush had to deal with the consequences of Carter's Iranian policy and Clinton's bin Laden policy.

According to Michael Scheuer, who ran the bin Laden unit at the CIA for many years, President Clinton was given eight to 10 chances to kill or capture bin Laden but refused to act, despite bin Laden's having publicly declared war on the United States and launched various terrorist attacks against us, murdering hundreds of Americans.

(If only one of those opportunities had presented itself on the day of Clinton's scheduled impeachment, instead of Clinton's bombing Iraq, he might have postponed his problems at home by finally taking out bin Laden.)

Clinton's CIA director, James Woolsey, never once met with Clinton in a one-on-one meeting. This is in contrast to Monica Lewinsky, who got about a dozen face-to-face -- or face-to-something -- meetings with the president.

That's why Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, was caught stealing documents from the National Archives during the 9/11 commission hearings. That's also why Clinton blew a gasket and forced ABC to cancel the DVD release of the docudrama "The Path to 9/11" -- based on the commission's report.

Bush had to deal with the ticking time bomb of Osama bin Laden left by Bill Clinton.

All presidents have had to deal with the ticking time bomb set by Carter's passive acceptance of the Iranian revolution in 1979, giving Islamic lunacy its first nation-sponsor.

What ticking time bombs are being set around the globe by our current Democratic president?

Following the Democratic playbook, Obama's overall approach to national security is to pointlessly fling our influence and military around the globe -- in Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan -- with no evident national security purpose.

Thanks to our feckless president, most of the Middle East is rapidly degenerating into a terrorist fever-swamp.

The Muslim Brotherhood is emerging as a power broker in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya. Meanwhile, the "democracy" movement in Syria seems likely to end with President Bashar al-Assad gaining a tighter grip on power, after he's killed enough of his own people to remind them why he's their president.

All of these countries are becoming worse than they were before. (On the plus side, Obama is set to announce the SEALs have just found Joe Biden.)

But George Bush's legacy -- Iraq – will be standing there, all on its own, the one point of light in a sea of Islamic darkness. And the media will coo about how reassuring it is that we now have a "thoughtful" president in the White House, instead of a cowboy.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER

Why Aren’t Democrats Angry that Obama Got the Wrong Guy?

By Daniel Flynn
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
May 4, 2011

President Barack Obama directed Navy Seals to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on Sunday. Do most in his political party believe that the president got the wrong guy?

When Scripps Howard asked, “How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?,” more than fifty percent of Democrats answered “very likely” or “somewhat likely” in 2006. A May 2007 Rasmussen poll found that 35 percent of Democrats believed George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. An August 2007 Zogby poll reported that 43 percent of Democrats believed that Bush either caused or allowed 9/11 to happen.

These polls were commissioned, of course, when George W. Bush was president. Since Barack Obama took the oath of office the views of the Democratic Party’s left-wing have, well, “evolved.” They are not as vocal about Guantanamo Bay, Middle Eastern wars, military tribunals, or the shadowy machinations supposedly behind 9/11. But it is worth remembering that once upon a time a substantial chunk of Democratic voters didn’t believe that Osama bin Laden was behind the terrorist attacks that felled the Twin Towers and smashed the Pentagon. For the hardcore party conspiracists, the real perpetrator was not holed up in Abbottabad, Pakistan, but in Dallas, Texas.

The Truthers have achieved a success in making the Democratic Party look like a magnet for fools. Indeed, the kooks touting various conspiracy theories regarding 9/11 are a significant portion of the Democratic electorate. Though the number of 9/11 conspiracy theorists among the foot soldiers may greatly outweigh their numbers among the commanders, the truth about Democratic Trutherism is that it could not command the support of one-third to one-half of Democratic voters without having the encouragement of a considerable number of party luminaries.

Days before the 2004 election, a coalition of leftists released the 911 Truth Statement. The document charged that “people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext to war.” Signatories included Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus author John Gray, former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, “people’s historian” Howard Zinn, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, “Lou Grant” actor Ed Asner, perennial presidential candidate Ralph Nader, and Rabbi Michael Lerner.

Included among the questions, the signatories wanted a new investigation to answer: “How were the FBI and CIA able to release the names and photos of the alleged hijackers within hours, as well as to visit houses, restaurants, and flight schools they were known to frequent?” and “Why haven’t authorities in the U.S. and abroad published the results of multiple investigations into trading that strongly suggested foreknowledge of specific details of the 9/11 attacks, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of traceable gains?” The campaign tested the wisdom of the aphorism that “there is no such thing as a stupid question.”

Gore Vidal contended in his post-9/11 bestseller Dreaming War that “we still don’t know by whom we were struck that Tuesday, or for what true purpose.” Though the attackers remained a mystery to the colorful novelist, the president’s motives were clear. George W. Bush “allowed the American people to go unwarned about an imminent attack upon two of our cities in anticipation of a planned strike by the United States against the Taliban in Afghanistan.” Anticipating Michael Moore’s insinuations in Fahrenheit 9/11, the octogenarian author continued that “the conquest of Afghanistan had nothing to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for replacing the Taliban with a relatively stable government that would allow Union Oil of California to lay its pipeline for the profit of, among others, the Cheney-Bush junta.” A decade later, there is no pipeline—and no bin Laden.

Scores of Democratic candidates for federal office, including 2008 Democratic presidential candidates Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich, have courted the Truther Movement. Finding “many disturbing facts consciously ignored by the 9/11 Commission,” the Colorado Democratic Party’s 2010 platform called for a new grand jury investigation “to find the truth of the September 11, 2001 attacks.” “I’m in the assisted-it-to-happen camp,” former California Congressman Dan Hamburg explained. “I think there was a lot of help from the inside.” And then there is Van Jones, President Obama’s ill-fated selection as green jobs “czar” who lost his post in the administration after his embarrassing activism as a Truther became public knowledge.

Partisanship is a disease that can prove fatal to rationality. It can compel one to see political adversaries behind nefarious deeds such as mass murder. It can cause one to minimize a massive national victory when engineered by the president of the opposing party. Partisanship is an obstacle to patriotism.

May 1, 2011 was a day of celebration for Americans. But for Democrats who imagined their domestic partisan enemies behind the 9/11 attacks, one can’t help but wonder if they think that Obama executed a framed man.

- Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). He writes a Monday column for Human Events and blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.