The President’s Failure and the MSM’s Calumny Again Bury Saddam Hussein’s Villainy.

So, those of us who have been paying even a little attention over the past six years already know that Saddam Hussein was in with the Islamists up to his eyeballs. The Pentagon released a report, painstakingly written, that reviewed well over half a million documents from Iraq that showed exactly that. Nevertheless, the story this week was just the opposite. The words “no links” were thrown around like party beads at Mardi Gras and were based on a tendentious reading of one sentence out of the whole report. The folks at McClatchy, New York Times, and elsewhere latched onto the phrase “no smoking gun” like the only life preserver that could keep their fictional narrative of the past five years alive.

But, as Stephen Hayes finds, the report is a treasure trove that proves without a doubt that Saddam Hussein and all sorts of Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda were as thick as thieves. Hussein helped al-Qaeda in nearly every way it was possible to help them. He sent money to one of the co-founders of al-Qaeda (Ayman al Zawahiri, who is also Obama bin Laden’s second-in-command) for years, he funded a group headed by another very close bin Laden associate, he trained al-Qaeda groups, he sent Iraqis to fight alongside al-Qaeda in Somalia, he stocked Iraqi embassies with bombs and guns and other nasty things, and he set his own intelligence service to keep and build contacts with al-Qaeda groups.

The real question, then, isn’t whether Saddam Hussein was closely associated with al-Qaeda. There’s no doubt that he was.

When we look back at the 1990s “contained” Saddam Hussein, the only thing it seemed he wasn’t doing with Islamists was planning and executing specific attacks (which is where the “no smoking gun” thing comes from). So when we say that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, that is not quite true. His money helped pay for 9/11. His people made it possible for al-Qaeda to use other people to carry out the attacks. His support gave al-Qaeda groups a safe haven and a place for training and refitting. What is true is that Saddam Hussein did not actually plan and direct the 9/11 attack. That’s a rather narrow hair to split. As I said, that’s not the question. Hayes asks and partially answers the real question:

How can a study offering an unprecedented look into the closed regime of a brutal dictator, with over 1,600 pages of “strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism,” in the words of its authors, receive a wave-of-the-hand dismissal from America’s most prestigious news outlets? All it took was a leak to a gullible reporter, one misleading line in the study’s executive summary, a boneheaded Pentagon press office, an incompetent White House, and widespread journalistic negligence.

In other words, George Bush failed to aggressively get the facts into our hands. This is the same failure that’s been repeating for his entire administration. Ed Morrissey calls it “business as usual since 2003″. It’s tough to disagree with that. His critics are generally allowed to say whatever they want with little more than a tepid response. It’s infected everything from Iraq to his spectacular failure to do anything with Social Security to, well, you name it. The only times he’s mounted a vigorous defense agaisnt critics is when the critics were on the right (Immigration? Harriet Miers? Alberto Gonzalez? No Child Left Behind? Medicare Prescription Plan?). In that, he and John McCain are the bosomest of buddies. They can’t hit folks on the right hard enough but they can manage to completely ignore any attack from their dear treacherous friends on the left.

Why that is I’ll never understand. Scott Johnson says that it’s part of “a sorry story that goes back to the Bush administration’s retreat in the face of the controversy over the ‘sixteen words’”, sixteen words that were exactly right when we said them in 2003 and are still correct. I don’t get it and I probably never will. I’m simply don’t understand what special brand of timidity has gripped the President so that he’s never been able to mount a fierce defense of what is a pathetically simple thing to defend: the destruction of an Islamist-aiding and brutal tyrant.

(via memeorandum)

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media.