Tuesday, October 08, 2002 MAKING THE CASE: It seems to me that the critical part of President Bush's elegantly constructed speech last night was his rebuttal of the only credible and responsible line of criticism from the Democrats:

Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror ... Terror cells and outlaw regimes building weapons of mass destruction are different faces of the same evil. Our security requires that we confront both. And the United States military is capable of confronting both.

As brief as this discussion is, it's persuasive. When anti-war Democrats argue that we cannot "focus" on both Al Qaeda and Iraq, they make no sense at all. Philosophically, pre-empting terrorists from getting weapons of mass destruction must logically include preventing the allies of terrorists from harboring such weapons. And practically, I've yet to read a single, credible military account of why we cannot both disarm and remove Saddam and keep up the pressure on Al Qaeda at home and abroad. The whole "focus" issue is as fake as the whole "delay" issue, as Charles Krauthammer deftly pointed out yesterday. If Saddam has weapons, if he won't give them up, and if such weapons are a threat to the region and to the U.S., what possible reason is there for delaying? These "arguments" aren't really arguments, of course; they're desperate rhetorical roadblocks thrown up by some Democrats terrified to face their responsibilities in a time of war. The last phony anti-war argument was that President Bush had yet to "make the case" for war against Iraq, as if grown-ups didn't have the capacity to make their own minds up on the issue without constant guidance from the commander-in-chief. But that surely must now be in tatters as a point, since the president has made speech after speech in the last year clearly laying out the rationale for the war on terror, a rationale that has always included defanging Saddam. And now he's gone and laid it out in full, at length and in detail in prime time. And what did the networks do, the same networks that routinely feature talking heads bravely pronouncing that the president hasn't made his case? They ignored him. Of coourse they did. What losers and sophists.

-- Anonymous, October 08, 2002

Answers

So, how are the inspectors doing in Iraq? Any interference from Saddam?

-- Anonymous, October 08, 2002