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August 27, 2004
Tommy Franks on WMD
Tommy Franks reflects on the end of the war in his autobiography (p.548)
I was surprised that WMD were not used against our troops. And I am surprised that we have not found stockpiles of such weapons in Iraq. But I am gratified by the fact that regimne that used weapons of mass destruction to mjurder thougsands of it's own people will nver have a chance to use them on America.It would have been inexcusable for the United States to allow Baathist Iraq to facilitate the nexus between weapons of mass terror and terrorists such as Abu Musab Zawahiri. Tens of thousands of average Americans I hvae met over the past year have convinced me that the majority of my fellow citizens understand that principle and agree.
I recall the eighteenth-century Brititish philopspher Edmund Burke, who reminded us that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Count me as one of those citizens who understands, General Franks.
And on page 562
Colin Powell said recently that he was disappointed that some of the intelligence on Iraq's WMD program was "inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading." That, of course, is the nature of human intelligence. The issue is not whether the source of the intelligence information nwas telling the truth, but whether George Tenent, Colin Powell, and President George W. Bush believed that the information was true. I believe they didn. I know I did. And I do not regret my role in disarming Iraq and removing it's Baathist regime.
We know now that some expatriate Iraqis were telling us what we wanted to hear. And why did they do that? Because they wanted us to invade. They wanted their country back from the evil dictator who had stolen it from them. It's hard to defend their lies, but one can understand and sympathize with their motivation. They wanted a free Iraq. Is that so bad?
But of course to the left it's all "Bush lied!". Debating them on this is almost impossible. Try to explain that one can only lie if one knows that it is not true at the time it is said. Try patiently explaining that if you have good reason to believe one thing, yet upon further examination it turns out to be untrue, that is not a lie but a mistake. Try explaining that every other intelligence service on the planet had independantly reached the conclusion that Saddam had stockpiled WMD. Try explaining that King Abdullah of Jordan and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt personally warned Franks that his troops would be attacked with WMD. Your reward will be an ever more shrill cry of "But Bush Lied!!"
Posted by Tom at August 27, 2004 9:38 AM
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