What the anti war left believes that is not true

Frank Gaffney:

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• President Bush did not “lie” about Saddam Hussein’s regime posing a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat. In addition to the obvious point that the Iraqi dictator had used such weapons against his own people and Iranians in the past, it is irresponsible to ignore the fact that, therefore, he had the know-how and infrastructure to produce and maintain stocks of such weapons.
  
  We now also have evidence – thanks to defector accounts and captured Iraqi documentation – that Saddam engaged in a massive effort to deny us a “smoking gun” by dispersing his WMD before U.S.-led Coalition forces launched their invasion. For example, Georges Sada, the former Iraqi general who was responsible for organizing air-shipments conveying chemical and biological weapons across the Syrian border and into Syrian-controlled Lebanon, has confirmed that such movements occurred.
  
  What is more, even the oft-cited Iraq Survey Group, which found no evidence of WMD in Iraq after the invasion, confirmed that Saddam had plans when sanctions were lifted (an imminent prospect until Operation Iraqi Freedom intervened) to convert some of his inherently dual-use facilities to the manufacture of chemical and/or biological agents. The plans called for such agents to be placed in aerosol cans and perfume sprayers for shipment to the United States and Europe. These are precisely the sort of intentions and terrorist applications for WMD that caused President Bush properly to believe it necessary to act preemptively against Saddam’s regime.
  
  
• There is, similarly, no doubt that Saddam Hussein was involved with and supportive of international terrorism. In fact, his regime had been designated a state-sponsor of terror for years before George W. Bush became president, due to the safe-havens, training facilities, intelligence and logistical assistance and arms he provided to an assortment of Islamist and other terrorist organizations.
  
  Some still cavil that al Qaeda was not among the beneficiaries of Saddam’s largesse. Typically, they make much of the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “operational” connections between al Qaeda and the Iraqi despot’s regime. In fact, as the Weekly Standard’s Steven Hayes (among others) has demonstrated, U.S. and allied intelligence have accumulated information about myriad contacts and meetings, both inside and outside of Iraq, between Osama bin Laden’s operatives and those of Iraqi intelligence or its intermediaries. To ignore such associations and their potentially devastating implications would have been irresponsible.
  
  
• We will not encourage the Iraqis to “get their act together” by convincing them they will shortly be abandoned to contend with the myriad enemies at home and abroad who wish to snuff out their fragile experiment with democracy and freedom. It is nonsense – not to say insufferably condescending – to ignore a central reality: People like those of Iraq, who have long been traumatized by despotic misrule and the existential threat it can pose at any time, simply will not line up with the cause of freedom unless they have reason to believe it is going to be the winning side.

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There is more. There are much better ways to get the Iraqis to get their act together than to threaten their abandonment. As the Democrats have demonstrated in the past abandonment certainly did not help the South Vietnamese fight off the communist. This is just another example of why Democrats cannot be trusted in foreign policy. Many of these guys voted for the war, but when the going gets tough they want get going somewhere else, or as Murtha ludicrously suggest "over the horizon" to Okinawa. I am glad I do not have to share a fox hole with any of them. The Democrats need to stop listening to the pathetic shells of former servicemen who learned too little from the experience.