Former Reagan Asst Sec of Defense also thinks Bush is an idiot

[Corso482]

Quote from Pabst:

Well that REALLY flies in the face of the popular liberal argument that states Al Queda was NEVER in Iraq. Nonsense. Iraq is merely a starting off point. Syria is next.

It's perfectly consistent with the argument that states Al Queda was NEVER in Iraq. The argument says that Sadam and Al Queda were enemies and that Sadam wouldn't permit Al Queda, or any Islamist extremists for that matter, to operate in his country.

Now that Sadam's gone, they can.

 

[waggie945]

True.

 

[Pabst]

Al Queda's presense in Iraq was effectively squashed by Saddam.
I certainly didn't imply Saddam was an Al Queda colloborator. However it's clear that Islamc extremists were waiting for a Saddamless culture in which to opperate. As you know I was not totally anti-Saddam.

However one cannot make a moralist argument that Saddam was acceptable. It's like saying don't go after Castro because he represses street crime in Havana.

 

[AAAintheBeltway]

I just read a lengthy article in the wash times that made a compelling case that saddam's intelligence service had an ongoing collaboration with al qaeda. we know there were training camps in Iraq, there is the whole issue of the meetings bewteen 9/11 planners and saddam's agent in poland I believe and the safe haven he gave to various al qaeda figures. Probably he wasnot involved as much as others in the region but neither was he an avowed enemy as some are intimating.

 

[Pabst]

Quote from AAAintheBeltway:

I just read a lengthy article in the wash times that made a compelling case that saddam's intelligence service had an ongoing collaboration with al qaeda. we know there were training camps in Iraq, there is the whole issue of the meetings bewteen 9/11 planners and saddam's agent in poland I believe and the safe haven he gave to various al qaeda figures. Probably he wasnot involved as much as others in the region but neither was he an avowed enemy as some are intimating.

Believe the meeting was in Prague. Is the article in todays paper?

 

[fxtrading]

Quote from AAAintheBeltway:

I just read a lengthy article in the wash times that made a compelling case that saddam's intelligence service had an ongoing collaboration with al qaeda. we know there were training camps in Iraq, there is the whole issue of the meetings bewteen 9/11 planners and saddam's agent in poland I believe and the safe haven he gave to various al qaeda figures. Probably he wasnot involved as much as others in the region but neither was he an avowed enemy as some are intimating.

wherent the camps in the no fly zones - under us air protection

 

[Madison]

Bush will rank high, Rice says
Security chief believes he will be compared with Roosevelt and Churchill

By Bob Deans, Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- As President Bush begins a week of foreign diplomacy, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice insists that he will one day rank alongside such towering pillars of 20th century statecraft as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

"When you think of statesmen, you think of people who seized historic opportunities to change the world for the better, people like Roosevelt, people like Churchill, and people like Truman, who understood the challenges of communism. And this president has been an agent of change for the better -- historic change for the better."

Her assessment, as Bush leaves Thursday for Europe, stands in stark contrast to the election-year critiques of the president's political opponents and many policy analysts. They charge that he has pursued a go-it-alone approach to diplomacy that has strained U.S. alliances and divided world opinion rather than uniting it.
...
She said Bush is engaged in a "classical American role" by trying to rally international support for efforts to help shift the Arab and Muslim worlds toward democracy and economic integration in ways meant to undermine the roots of militant Islam.

She praised the invasion Bush ordered that toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where Rice said democracy is taking root and "women are being schooled, not beaten, where people are planting their crops and building their stores and building their homes without fear of being whipped in a public stadium."

"The Iraqi people now have a chance to build a free and democratic Iraq, which will make a huge difference in creating a different kind of Middle East," said Rice. "And, unless you create a different kind of Middle East, unless you deal with the circumstances that produced the ideologies of hatred that led people to fly airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington on September the 11th, we are never going to be able to fully deal with the terrorist threat."
...
Bob Deans may be e-mailed at bobdeans(at)coxnews.com
ENDIT
Story Filed By Cox Newspapers

see also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink