Defending Rove?

Kevin Williamson pens a defense of Karl Rove in National Review online and does a good job. But in doing so he manages to skirt THE issue that has brought Rove back into the national conversation.

I can agree with pretty much all that Kevin Williamson wrote. I have no problem with a political consultant who backs the candidate he believes is most likely to win, and Rove had a good track record.

But the thing that landed Rove back in the headlines recently is an article in the NY Times about WMDs in Iraq. Tons of them …. thousands of them.

And the Times accuses the Bush administration of covering it up.

Here’s my problem with Rove, he is “credited” with advising Bush to ignore the evidence of WMDs in Iraq, one of the primary reasons for the invasion. Keep in mind that Saddam was our sworn enemy and the last thing we wanted to experience after 9/11 was a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or atomic weapons. So Bush … and the UN … demanded that Saddam declare and surrender all his WMDs. As the NY Times now reports, this did not happen.

The Rove theory was that the ”no WMDs” battle had been lost and we must move on. Team Bush never fought back against the lie that there were no WMDs in Iraq. The lie that “Bush lied” became a “fact” because there was never any pushback even when the evidence was there. Even today, I will wager that most people will tell you that there were no WMDs found in Iraq. A good case can be made that the 2008 election was lost years before when Rove and Bush surrendered to the MSM and allowed them to get away with one of the greatest propaganda coups in modern times.

Rove may be very good at counting electoral college votes and supporting Republican candidates for office, but beyond that his strategic thinking is incredibly faulty and resulted in a stupendous loss of the Republican Party. And, by the way, George Bush is ultimately to blame for taking his advice.

This is why Wiki is not a reliable source.

Brian Cates ‏@drawandstrike  10m10 minutes ago

Oh, hey, looks like all the Lefty editors at Wiki are gonna have to update this now... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMD_conjecture_in_the_aftermath_of_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq …

WMD conjecture in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq concerns the failure by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the U.S.-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) to locate undeclared stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction both before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[1]

I THOUGHT IRAQI CHEMICAL WEAPONS WERE A BUSHITLER/CHENEY FANTASY

Glenn Reynolds:

New York Times: The Secret U.S. Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons. “From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule. In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs.”

If you read the NY Times story, it's another attack on Bush for keeping the finding of chemical weapons secret because they were old. In the NY Times world, finding old weapons is worse the not finding any WMDs.

Ace of Spades  documents the lies the Times printed.

Progressives deeply invested in the lie during the Bush years that no WMD were found in Iraq. Bush gave many reasons for the war, but progressives seized on just the presence of WMD and then pretended it was the only reason for war. We've known they've been wrong about the lack of WMD for many years now. But, upon the chance that ISIL will find and use any remnants of WMD, however, progressives have had to modify their story even more.

Now, progressives have finally admitted that Hussein's stockpiled weapons were found during the Iraq War, but claim these were not the weapons Bush said would be found. This is just one more lie. And they've compounded it with another lie: that the sole reason for the Iraq War was an active weapons program.

As I have demonstrated from Bush's own contemporaneous words, an active weapons program was not the sole reason for war. In fact, an active weapons program was not even mentioned in the multiple speeches Bush delivered to the American public and to an international audience.

Do not let the NYTimes get away with its false history of the Iraq War. The war was not made solely based on claims of an active Iraqi weapons program. It was made because, as President Bush explained repeatedly to the American public: Saddam Hussein possessed old weapons of mass destruction, desired to evade inspections so as to keep them, hoped to restart his weapons programs in the future, and could pass weapons to terrorist groups with ambitions to harm the West.

Iraq crisis: Isis jihadists 'seize Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons stockpile'

I thought that Saddam's "chemical stockpile" was a myth created by Bush and Cheney?

Just in case someone lies about the case for war with Iraq

Quotes by Democrats about WMDs in Iraq.

On Syria: “The Obama administration can’t do a damn thing.”

In a few short years of Obama's rule the US has gone from being omnipotent to impotent.

Let’s spell out it again for emphasis. “The Obama administration can’t do a damn thing.” So too bad about the Syrian people. Too bad about the real and dire consequences of Syria falling apart, watching its WMDs (are you sure? Where did they come from?) fall into the wrong hands, become a locus for regional instability. Too bad about everything. Because “the Obama administration can’t do a damn thing.”

And what's this about Syrian WMDs? Where did they come from?

WMDs found in the US

San Diego Port Director Claims WMD Found in U.S.

It appears that the government does not want us to know. 

Wikileaks: "Each dead Iraqi died six times"

Not really, unless you believe Lancet who exaggerated the death toll by a factor of six.  What's interesting is that the death toll for the same period in South Africa, now that the "good guys" are in charge is greater than the death toll in Iraq - during an active insurgency war.

Via Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit):

I SAID BEFORE THAT WIKILEAKS’ JULIAN ASSANGE WAS CLEARLY A TOOL, BUT WHOSE? Well, so far the two biggest scoops from the latest document dump are that the infamous Lancet study was bogus, and that WMDs were found in Iraq in quantity. Neither of these stories is actually news to people who were paying attention, but now — conveniently enough just before an election, and even nicely timed for George W. Bush’s new book release — these stories are getting a fresh round of play. . . .

Remember the Lancet article that claimed that over 655,000 Iraqis were killed by the American invasion? Well, the secret’s out. Not only did this report exaggerate the death toll by 600%, but the Allied forces actually identified the people killed and how they died.

And those non-existant WMDs? 

WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.

...

Nearly three years later, American troops were still finding WMD in the region. An armored Buffalo vehicle unearthed a cache of artillery shells “that was covered by sacks and leaves under an Iraqi Community Watch checkpoint. “The 155mm rounds are filled with an unknown liquid, and several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance.” Initial tests were inconclusive. But later, “the rounds tested positive for mustard.”

In WikiLeaks’ massive trove of nearly 392,000 Iraq war logs, there are hundreds of references to chemical and biological weapons. ...

But even late in the war, WMDs were still being unearthed. In the summer of 2008, according to one WikiLeaked report, American troops found at least 10 rounds that tested positive for chemical agents. “These rounds were most likely left over from the [Saddam]-era regime. Based on location, these rounds may be an AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] cache. However, the rounds were all total disrepair and did not appear to have been moved for a long time.”

... But the more salient issue may be how insurgents and Islamic extremists (possibly with the help of Iran) attempted to use these lethal and exotic arms. As Spencer noted earlier, a January 2006 war log claims that “neuroparalytic” chemical weapons were smuggled in from Iran.

The Wired writers are and were flaming Liberals and of course ridicule the idea that Saddam had any WMDs.  Now that WMDs have been found, the new backup position is that some of the newer WMDs were NOT smuggled out of the country before the invasion.

‘I found Saddam’s WMD bunkers’

Unlike 99% of people who believe that Saddam’s WMDs never existed or were destroyed, I don’t believe it. Despite not uncovering vast stockpiles in Iraq, we know he used the. Ergo he had them. We know he had a nuclear program; his reactor at Osiraq was destroyed by the Israelis in 1981. Saddam tried to reconstitute this program.

When the stockpiles could not be discovered and displayed, all sorts of explanations were given, none of them compelling: he destroyed his weapons in compliance with the UN demands, or alternatively, his generals lied to him about his weapons program. Neither explanation survives the laugh test. If Saddam voluntarily disarmed he would have been the first dictator in history to have done so. To lie to Saddam was a self-imposed death sentence.

So what’s the truth? Here’s a possible answer:

It’s a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It’s also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam’s Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam’s use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war.

Read the rest...