Why powerful interests want to keep you in the dark about the war on terror

What you don't know can hurt you

By Wes Vernon

To say that Iran's nuclear program is "scary" would be an understatement. At the same time, there is mounting evidence that Saddam Hussein was even more of a threat than many Americans have been led to believe. Is America prepared to deal with what President Bush called the "axis of evil," i.e. Iran, Iraq and North Korea?

Here are two stories you're not hearing much about in the mainstream media:

1 — The second highest ranking general in Saddam Hussein's air force says yes, the blood-thirsty dictator did in fact have weapons of mass destruction. He moved them to Syria before the invasion. General Georges Sada tells the whole story in a book titled "Saddam's secrets."

Appearing on the Sean Hannity radio show, the general said the WMDs "were there, hiding" right "up to the summer of 2002." When Hussein "realized that the Americans were coming, and the inspectors are coming" he converted "Jumbo 747 and 727" aircraft to cargo planes to transport the weapons to Syria.

General Sada said he "was shocked" to learn that Saddam was doing this because "I was always waiting when they [the Americans] would find the weapons of mass destruction.... even the papers and the files."

So where in the Syria are they?

"Well, God knows. They were flown to Damascus, and I know the man who [had] received them. But I do not know where they are now." However, Sada did tell Fox News he is certain the Syrian government knows exactly where the weapons are.

The general told Hannity he was able to persuade Saddam not to retaliate for the anticipated invasion by sending airborne chemical weapons to Israel — "half through Jordan and half through Syria' and then "penetrate to Israel." General Sada says he convinced Saddam to scrap the plan because "the Israelis have got plans. They will destroy these airplanes before [we enter] their borders" and "chemical weapons [would] be dropped on our people in Syria and Jordan." Some damage would be done to Israel which would give the Israelis the rationale to retaliate with nuclear weapons, and "the whole region will be destroyed."

This is not the first report of WMDs being shipped out of Iraq to Syria. But General Sada was closer to the action than other credible sources who have come forward saying the same thing.

2 — Documents from Saddam's regime — now in the hands of the U.S. government — show that he trained thousands of Islamic terrorists at camps inside Iraq before the war.

The Weekly Standard broke the story a couple of weeks ago. That magazine's Stephen F. Hayes cites no fewer than 11 sources for his information. He says that from 1999 to 2002, "elite military units" trained some 8,000 terrorists at three different camps.

Hayes takes the Bush administration to task for failing to give a higher priority to the time-consuming job of translating and analyzing the voluminous documents. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page — which is one of the very few general circulation outlets to pay much attention to the story — speculates that one reason for the Bush White House's "lethargy" on this is "its officials don't want to challenge the prewar CIA orthodoxy that the 'secular' Saddam would never cavort with 'religious' al Qaeda."

And why not challenge the CIA view? Isn't the president of the United States supposed to be the boss of the CIA? According to the WSJ, the Bush administration people have "seen what happened to others — 'Scooter Libby,' Douglas Feith, John Bolton — who dared to question CIA analyses." That figures. (See our last column, "Fire the Whole Top-Level CIA Bureaucracy.") The CIA analysis is also endorsed by a liberal media anxious to bring down President Bush.

A third and related story is the Hamas victory in Palestine, this time one which (unlike the other two) has been all over the media, and which does call in to question the practicality of trying to democratize the whole world.

In an interview with this writer, Free Congress Foundation (FCF) President Paul Weyrich, who is generally supportive of the War on Terror and eschews the "isolationist" label, notes that Hamas has not changed its goal of "wiping Israel off the map."

Weyrich believes "democracy in and of itself is not an objective that can be achieved everywhere, and even if it is, it may end up doing more harm than good." Adolph Hitler came to power through the democratic process, he recalled. Similarly, after World War 2, Czechoslovakia "actually voted in the Communist government that ....very soon shut down the democratic process." A lot of would-be tyrants around the world would like to use democracy to get into power. After that, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Their slogan is "One man, one vote, one time," he warned.

To adopt as our foreign policy to, as Woodrow Wilson put it, "make the world safe for democracy" is 'ultimately counter-productive" in Weyrich's view. Cultural and/or tribal differences are often impediments as are such factors as "those who have loyalty only to a religion or an ideology."

Defend this country against any overt threat? Absolutely, the conservative leader says. "We cannot wait for the threat to be carried out before [taking action]." But to take [military] action in countries not immediately threatening this country and then try to set up democratic governments in places that are not prepared for it "is in my opinion, going to cause an awful lot of trouble."

Weyrich believes "the jury is still out" on whether President Bush's attempt to bring democracy to Iraq is successful, or whether we have done more good or more harm in the process of attempting it. We have done some good there, given that the Iraqis have had an opportunity to vote and have a government of their choosing.. But "we also are serving as a tremendous recruiting effort for al Qaeda." The president argues better there than here," and the Free Congress leader agrees with that "But it is not entirely clear that were we not there they would be here."

His reservations notwithstanding, Weyrich "admires this president for having a vision and carrying through on it." Though he does "not want to be blinded to the realities of the world," he is not one of those who will say, "We are the dominant world power, and we ought to do everything in our power to stay that way.

Which brings us back to the question: Under what conditions do we go to war? If as the above reports tell us, Saddam Hussein did in fact have weapons of mass destruction and was training 8,000 terrorists in Iraqi camps, does this provide the rationale for our going to war there? Many security experts will respond with a resounding yes. That will not sway opponents on the left, and apparently leaves some skeptics on the right.

I raised that question with Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration Assistant Secretary of Defense. Gaffney now heads the Center for Security Policy which has backed the administration to the hilt in the War on Terror. If anything, CSP believes the Bush regime has fallen short on such issues as border security and the need for a healthy skepticism about Red China. He participated in a news conference on The State of the Conservative Movement on January 27, which preceded my discussion with Weyrich, whose organization sponsored the event.

Two 20th Century conservative icons, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater would have no problem with today's involvement in Iraq, I pointed out. Robert Taft, conservatism's third icon of the last 100 years, probably would. To what extent has the conservative movement evolved on the war/foreign policy issue over the years since Taft's time?

Gaffney's response was that "tragically," with notable exceptions such as Weyrich, many conservatives stopped thinking about foreign policy and security issues after the Cold War ended. That contributed to a lack of attention by Americans in general and to "our lack of preparedness as to what has happened [since then, i.e. 9/11]." However, he added that conservatives would once again, "in the tradition of Reagan and the tradition of Goldwater," bring the necessary strength to bear in order to prevail "in today's world," a possible reference to the fact that Bob Taft was living in an entirely different era.

Another questioner asked about the "military-industrial complex" which he described as "a whole establishment in Washington that benefits from almost antagonizing [other nations] and having military confrontations in many parts of the world."

Gaffney's response to that was direct to the point: "I think it's rubbish." He went on to say, "There is nobody I know in the national security field, in the defense industry, aerospace and the community of people who are experts in national security who wouldn't prefer to be out of business. [They would] prefer to have this country at peace and without a threat — to not have to send our children — and by and large by the way, many of the people who are going to war are from that community, as well — to fight in the nation's wars or have our tax dollars applied to these purposes. There is a view....that we are the reason everybody hates us. I reject that view. And I think, looked at analytically, objectively, and clearly people would recognize that people do indeed hate us for what we are. But we are not about to stop, I hope, being freedom-loving people. And espousing it and protecting it wherever we can around the world is in our interest as well as that of freedom-loving people, because there are folks who are determined to destroy that."

In a Wall Street Journal interview January 28, Vice President Cheney was asked if, in retrospect, it was a mistake for the president to lump Iran, Iraq, and North Korea together as the "axis of evil." He replied no it wasn't. "There are ways to approach different problems, and I think we've got to be sophisticated enough to figure out which one is likely to work."

What to make of all this? For what it's worth, my view:

Gaffney is correct. Going into Iraq was an absolute necessity. Saddam did have WMDs (as nearly every intelligence agency in the free world had determined), and he ultimately would have used them, and he did train terrorists on Iraqi soil. The media won't spread that information around very much, largely for fear that if it were widely accepted by Americans, it could change the whole political dynamic here at home. And the Bush-hating media can't allow that. The very fact that some TV anchors and newspaper editors — consciously or subconsciously — calculate newsworthiness of matters related to a life-and-death struggle on the basis of how it will affect politics says something about why many Americans hate the media. For that matter, there is a mountain of circumstantial evidence that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, another story effectively blacked out, but that is a subject for another column.

At the same time, I share Weyrich's position that spreading democracy "everywhere," while well-intended, is likely not achievable and may in fact backfire, as it has in Palestine. He points out that the U.S. Marines and other troops are committed in 103 locations around the world. One can say that George Washington's farewell warning about "entangling alliances," when applied to 21st Century realities, means beware of spreading ourselves too thin lest we are unable to confront another major threat to our security. Moreover, the Father of our Country would endorse Weyrich's disdain for the idea of doing whatever it takes to see that we are "the dominant power."

So if it was necessary to go into Iraq militarily, what alternative do we have other than to help Iraqis democratize their country? The short answer is that now we are there and have embarked on that course, we must see it through and pray that it succeeds. Those kids who are putting their lives on the line have put heart and soul into helping those wonderful people on the path to a freedom the likes of which we take for granted, but which they have never before known. And our sons and daughters on the front line are disheartened whenever they hear a Ted Kennedy or Richard Durbin compare them to terrorists or Nazis and Stalinists and accuse them of torture. Our fighting men and women in uniform deserve better than that. They should know the wacko fringes of the left do not speak for the American people back home.

But before we try to democratize yet another country in the Middle East, there needs to be a serious analysis of the pros and cons — based on our recent experiences. There are those who say we might want to consider going back to a Cold War strategy of supporting friendly pro-U.S. "benevolent dictators" and hope they will treat their people well. If we go that route, we would have to hope that America never again elects a president like Jimmy Carter, who stabbed the Shah of Iran in the back. The Shah no doubt was a strongman. But had he remained in power we would likely not be threatened today by an "unstable government" (to put it kindly) developing nuclear weapons in Iran.

The most basic principle of American foreign policy should be one that is rooted in the safety and well-being of the United States as its highest priority. Whatever alliances we form should have that as its number one aim. Every other nation on the face of the earth looks out for its own people. From whence comes this home-grown "Blame America First" mantra that we cannot act in our best interests lest some tin pot dictator (Saddam, the late Arafat, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-the new half-crazed president of Iran) take offense?

A foreign policy for Americans is not a call to mindless "isolationism" or jingoism. It is a call to common sense.

© Wes Vernon