For those of us who are occasional targets of the Soros-funded
propaganda machines, it’s encouraging to discover a useful purpose
that they can serve. The hyperlib machinery, and the reactions it
commands, are as accurate a gauge as I can find to measure the
import of the key points of the liberal dogma. As demonstrated by
the reaction they manufactured to some comments I made on MSNBC
last week, the volume of hate mail the organized hyperlibs generate
is directly proportional to the importance they assign to an issue
and the weakness of their position.
At issue was the so-called “Downing Street memo,” a top-secret
Brit document memorializing a meeting in July 2002. The document
says that the decision to take military action against Saddam had
already been made two months before we took the case of Iraq to the
U.N. Security Council. It is as significant historically as Nick
Nolte’s DUI record, and far less accurate. After Ron Reagan pressed
me to admit our casus belli was a tissue of lies, I told
him that the fact we haven’t found Saddam’s WMD proved precisely
nothing. That’s so, I said, because while we fiddled and diddled in
the U.N. for six months before military action began, Saddam almost
certainly moved all his WMD and scrubbed away all the evidence of
it.
When Reagan pressed me further, contending that none of the
commissions investigating the missing WMD said they had been moved,
I cited the report of Charles Duelfer’s Iraq Survey Group, which
spent many months searching for WMD in Iraq. That report, I said,
showed the substantial body of evidence that a lot of people,
money, and materials, possibly including WMD, were
smuggled out of Iraq in the months before March 2003. The
destination of these cargoes was Syria. I had touched a nerve: by
the time I got home, the “Media Matters for America” blog had
accused me of lying, and dozens of nearly identical e-mails (on the
intellectual plane of, “liar, liar, pants on fire”) were pouring
in. I quickly stopped reading them and just hit “delete” when I saw
them.
I hadn’t merely touched a hyperlib nerve. I had challenged the
basis for the hyperlibs’ existence: to discredit George Bush and
the war at any cost. But the problem, for them, is that I had stuck
to the facts. Which are very uncomfortable things, if you’re Soros
or Howard Dean. Or any of their Michael Mooron drones. Having
demonstrated that I can drive them into a fit of apoplectic rage
with a 30-second comment on television, the scientific method
requires a controlled, repeatable experiment to see how many can be
driven to nervous breakdowns with a more elaborate exposition of
the facts. In the interest of science, let us proceed.
WHAT I SAID ON MSNBC was, of course, just what the Duelfer’s ISG
report said, and what Duelfer has said personally and repeatedly in
Congressional testimony. You can look it up. On November 17, 2004, Duelfer told the
House International Relations Committee that a lot was moved by
Saddam’s people from Iraq into Syria and no one knows whether or
not the WMD were among the shipments to Syria: “I can’t confirm
anything one way or the other. What we do know is that a lot of
stuff was crossing the border before the war. Trucks, but you don’t
know what was in them. So that’s — you know, I would like to be
able to state definitively one way or the other an answer to that.
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to.” On October 6, 2004, Duelfer
told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “…But what I can tell
you that I believe we know is a lot of materials left Iraq and went
to Syria. There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border
points. We’ve got a lot of data to support that, including people
discussing it. But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was
WMD-related materials, I cannot say.”
Duelfer’s report also said that Saddam’s Iraqi Intelligence
Service “operated a series of laboratories in the Baghdad area” (up
to five in that area alone) and that one of them, a clandestine lab
in the Baghdad Central Public Health Laboratory, was “emptied of
all equipment and documents in December 2002,” and that other labs
were also found in the scrubbed-clean-of-evidence condition.
The only reasonable conclusion anyone can draw from the Duelfer
report — even if we ignore the other mountains of evidence about
Saddam’s WMD — is that Saddam had WMD and in the six months we
spent trying to convince Kofi, Dominique, and their pals to act,
Saddam’s regime moved the WMD, cleaned out the evidence, and did
their best to conceal what they had done. That they did so with the
active participation of Assad’s Syria is also terribly clear.
It is a pity that the embittered hyperlibs can’t accept facts or
use them to assemble the logical, and inevitable, conclusions to
which they lead. When any of them — Soros, Moore, Dean, Franken,
or any of them — call a conservative a liar, it must create a
rebuttable presumption that it is the lib who is falsifying. Not
that they care.
Jed Babbin, a contributing editor of The American
Spectator, was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first
Bush administration, and now often appears as a talking warhead on
MSNBC.
