One of the enchanting fables of the Left, a lullaby to bring a dreamy smile to the face of a Code Pink or MoveOn lemming is the old song "Bush lied and people died."
It's based on the famous '16 words' in President Bush’s January 28th, 2003 State of the Union speech in which he said "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame as well as countless leftard politicians and commentators made their fortunes and reputations off this, as you know.
Now, the British Butler Commission (their equivalent of our 9/11 Commission) re-examined the intel on Iraq and ended up standing by MI5's original assessment that Saddam was trying to buy yellow cake uranium from Niger....and as it turned out, they were right.Not only did Saddam seek to buy yellow cake, but he actually had a stockpile at the Iraqi nuclear center in Tuwaitha.
Today, buried under the fold in the dinosaur media, it's being reported that 550 metric tons of Iraqi"yellowcake" uranium— the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment needed for the making of nuclear weapons - reached Canada today. This was part of months long secret U.S. operation designed to get rid of the nasty stuff and get it out of the region.
The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corporation, in a transaction described as being worth "tens of millions of dollars." The uranium will be shipped to Ontario for use in energy-producing nuclear reactors to produce electricity.
It's important to keep in mind that the illegal nuclear materials fund in Tuwaitha only represent the stuff we were able to find, and does not take into account anything Saddam may have sold or shipped to say,his fellow Baathists in Syria.
As I've often written, Saddam had 19 months to do just that,thanks to the ridiculous tantrums of the Left in Britain and here in the US in the farcical run up to war.
With that kind of lead time,I'm amazed we found anything,let alone the significant amounts of dangerous materials we actually found.
I should also add that much of Congress has been aware of what we found at Tuwaitha and elsewhere, which is why in spite of all the angry rhetoric, President Bush has never been in any serious danger of being impeached....some inconvenient truth might just surface.
No, far better for their purposes to keep him there as a target and engage in deliberately false political posturing during wartime....
Don't hold your breath waiting for the dinosaur media or certain politicians to admit they were wrong on this one. Being a Leftard means never having to say you're sorry,no matter what kind of mess you created.But at least it's out in public who the liars really were.
Josh,
ReplyDeleteBush might not have "lied," but he certainly did had a reckless disregard for the truth.
This yellowcake removal/sale to Canada, which the AP is reporting on, was not from any yellowcake obtained after 1991, was not from Niger and was not weaponized.
So when Bush and his administration consistently said: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" they, at the very least, exaggerated the threat and were at variance with the truth.
They were also not telling the truth about insinuating, which they did so often, that Iraq was involved in 9/11.
This is why the recent Senate Select Committee on Intel's report, which two Republican senators, Snowe and Hagel, signed is still valid: Bush & Co. made false statements or statements they should have known to be false based on they evidence and intel they had at hand at the time they made them.
So the Left might have been spinning this particular claim, but the Right is also stretching it to now defend Bush by saying this story justifies the invasion and vindicated Bush's policy vis-a-vis Iraq, which was first and originally based and presented to the American people and Congress on the still untrue WMD claim.
Iraq did not have WMD, Josh. Sorry, but that is another exaggeration based on what we know right now.
If Bush had originally argued we are going to war whether there's WMD or not, or to remove his nuclear materials, then maybe the country would have had a better idea of what we were getting into.
There are many countries that have uranium for civilian, non-military applications. Some are even hostile to us. Should we invade them too?
Thanks for letting me post this, I welcome and await your considered responses.
--- The Truth Bandit
Cody, Wyoming
Hi Truth Bandit, and welcome to Joshua's Army.
ReplyDeleteIf you search the site, you'll find that I actually agreed with Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, that invading Iraq was unnecessary,particularly in the way it was done...a punitive strike on Iraq's military and suspected WMD sites would have done the job just fine.
Iraq was a threat, but not an imminent one and obviously there were other motives for invading.
That said, here's where we differ:
The AP story bases its opinion that the yellow cake uranium that was found predates 1991 and was not from Niger based on the opinion of the IAEA, an organization that had no clue Iran and Libya had ongoing WMD programs until they were disclosed from other sources.It was Iranian dissidents who outed the Mullah's decade-old illegal nukes program.
Fact is, no one knows with any certainty exactly where the uranium came from, or when or where it was purchased, just as we don't know, to this day exactly what Saddam had or didn't have with any certainty.
The reason we don't is because Saddam had 19 months to hide,sell or dispose of whatever he wanted because of the political posturing in this country and the UK and if you look at the links in the article to Syria, there are plenty of indications he did so.
As to it not being weaponized...can you guarantee that Saddam had no capability or intentions of doing so in the future? Pretty slim bet if you ask me...considering that a number of Saddam's own scientists (in that right wing organ, the NYT) said that the knowledge and technology existed in Iraq.
I agree with you that Iraq was probably not directly involved in 9/11 ( although the 1992 WTC bombing might be a very different story). So what?
There has not been a single modern terrorist group that has been able to survive in any significant way without a safe haven to train, recruit and finance. During Saddam's regime, al Qaeda high level operatives like Imad Mugniyeh, Ayman Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, among others had free run in Iraq an dth esame Senate Intel committe admitted as much, in a report that a number of reasonable folks might call self contradicting. In fact, what the Committee actually did was to waffle.
We might just disagree on how active a part Saddam's regime played in 9/11, but there's no doubt that Iraq was a haven for al-Qaeda. Read up on the terrorist training camp in Sal Pak outside of Baghdad, complete with a mock up of a 747.
It's my position that we will never defeat the jihadis until we confront ( militarily or otherwise) the nation -states that fund, harbor and support them.
Iraq was and should have been on that list.
FTR, I totally agree with you that the way Bush `sold' the Iraq War was unfortunate. Because of his failure in getting Congress to formally declare war on al-Qaeda and any country found harboring and supporting them (which was what the Bush Doctrine was supposed to be), it meant that each separat eincrement of th ewar had to be 'resold' to the public anew each time.
That said, I think the president made a call based on the intel he had even if he fumbled the execution rather badly.QED.
And as far as I'm concerned,the debate should have ended once Congress agreed to go along wioth the president and put our warriors in battle.
The attempts to use the war for political posturing and to sabotage our war effort there have been disgraceful, in my view...to say the least.
Thanks for dropping by, an dfor a great comment.
Regards,
rm
Rick Moran had an informative post on the topic - 3 years ago.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.americanthinker.com/2005/07/about_that_500_tons_of_yellow.html
He argues that the yellowcake pre-dated 1991, but that was irrelevant. Saddam couldn't use that yellowcake because the IAEA was aware of it. That's what prompted him to search for other sources of yellowcake.
It's also worth reading Douglas Feith's acoount in the WSJ last week.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121504452359324921.html