Okay, I'm clearer on your message. Maybe I needed to sort it out from the administration's background noise on revisionism.

We are in violent agreement. (that sounds a bit more in keeping with OT tradition than calling you a 'gentleman and a scholar') :-)

Techweenie:

Don't want to be seen as excusing the present leadership. There are no Lincolns among them. 100 years from now, they will be as forgotten as are the presidents between Grant and Teddy Roosevelt.

But we have to try and work with what we have since lives are being lost.

Allright, this love fest has gone on long enough. Brian, Mul, Jeff, sic 'em boys.

Now I'm sorry I shooed Flint away :eek:

Somebody say something outrageous!

Well stated. Probably the most telling argument against the Bush administration's credibility in waging this war is that the motivation for war kept changing every time the previous motivation was rebuffed or refuted.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER


I am beyond caring in the least what weapons Saddam held in March 2003. If the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections in Iraq lead to a party-based government stabilized over time by U.S. troops, then the odds fall that a large and wealthy adversary will try--again--to acquire nuclear weapons in the open market. Saddam may be gone, but what isn't gone is the global marketplace and trade in nuclear-weapons material that is the legacy of the infamous A.Q. Khan network.

In a symposium on the Bush Doctrine for the November issue of Commentary magazine, I wrote: "September 11 changed a lot, but what truly 'changed everything' was the revelation of A.Q. Khan's production network for nuclear-bomb know-how." Khan, the father of Pakistan's Bomb, created a commercial network in centrifuge designs and parts and weapons technologies. His nuke catalog flowed through the same global canals of commerce as legitimate goods and reached shipment points in Iran, Libya and North Korea. If a backwater nation like North Korea can acquire nuclear weapons and develop missiles that may soon reach the U.S., then mass murder has gone mass market.

In short, all you need is money; the expertise and material can be bought. There is wide discussion in the nuclear proliferation literature of the incentives for Saudi Arabia to achieve nuclear capability as a hedge against Iran. The Saudi government denies any such intention, as do all nonnuclear nations suspected of trying.

We have a choice: Do we prefer this ability in the hands of democracies or dictatorships? Will the world's civilian populations be safer if nuclear capability is held by mullahfied Iran, Kim-crazy North Korea and Taiwan-obsessed China, or by democratic Brazil (suspected of seeking nukes), Ukraine (inheritor of 5,000 nuclear warheads) or Iraq? (To believe that an untouched Saddam five years hence wouldn't have been back in the WMD game is fatuous beyond description.)

This week, in a not-much-noticed follow-on report from the 9/11 Commission, one finds this statement: "Preventing terrorists from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction must be elevated above all other problems of national security because it represents the greatest threat to the American people."
By "terrorists" the commission means al Qaeda. By "weapons of mass destruction" it means nuclear devices--specifically the leakage of nuclear bomb-making material from former Soviet sites. The original 9/11 Commission's report said al Qaeda had tried to get nuclear WMD for 10 years, presumably while bleeding Afghanistan. Al Qaeda now is in Iraq. It is trying to push the U.S. out of Iraq. Some in Washington want a withdrawal from Iraq. If we do that before Iraq is secure, leaving its central provinces and neighboring nations as a jihadist transit point, will the commission's reasonable fears about WMD acquisition by terrorists ease? Duh.

Democratizing Iraq is where the hedge has been placed against Islamic extremism's proven compulsion to annihilate civilian populations--with airliners, humans as bombs and assuredly any WMD they can get--each weapon as morally repugnant as the next. Yes, Iraqi democratization may not work. But it is a bet worth making. As former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle wrote on this page not long ago, "The paroxysm after 9/11 would be a hiccup compared with the reaction the morning after one or more nuclear bombs caused massive devastation."

Against this, the current opposition spectacle in Washington is not edifying. How did it come to pass that an opposition's measure of a president's foreign policy was all or nothing, success or "failure"? The answer is that the political absolutism now normal in Washington arrived at the moment--Nov. 7, 2000--that our politics subordinated even a war against terror to seizing the office of the presidency.

The winning of the Cold War was bipartisan. The winning of the war on terror is open to question, every hour.

Not a bad article. And a fair point of view. It would be better for all of us if Iraq became a stable democracy. We're there now and must see it through and I for one hope that we somehow make this right.

But why isn't that goal enough? Why isn't a better, somewhat safer world enough? Why always the veiled Sept. 11 threats behind it? Why all this fear that a big bomb would ruin the world? Is that a fair assumption? Did the destruction of 2 cities ruin Japan?

I hope it never happens. But Warren Buffet put the odds at almost 100% in the next 50 years. So let's not bury our heads. Let's take a look. Let's assume a nuclear bomb, detonated by Islamic terrorists, destroys an American city. Do you really think that Bush or his successor would have trouble convincing the world to wipe clean the area between Egypt and Pakistan, with a little bit left over for N. Korea? Do you really think the American people would accept less, no matter what party the president represented?

And what would be the end-game result? Do you really think that a single bomb, or a couple of bombs in a couple of American cities would ruin modern civilization? Europe, Japan, India, China, Australia - all would continue on with something close to American ideals. We here in America would recover. But "modern" Islamic "civilization" would cease to exist. And OBL's dream of an Islamic Empire would be made impossible due to radioactivity.

Such a disaster would be world-altering, but not world-ending. And I'm pretty certain that our ideals would survive, while the terrorists would not......

Basically, I'm saying WE ARE the wave of the future. THEY can't win. They can slow us down. And we can get lazy and careless and let them hang on a little longer. But we will prevail in the end. It is inevitable, hence I don't understand all the angst. We need defense and military intelligence; we also need freedom and creativity. It is this blend that got us here, and this blend that will see us through.

To only cling to one side of what makes us powerful is the only recipe for disaster.....