Today seems to be a good day for warblogging. If you come here to read about politics, I’m pretty sure you already read the sites that the following links are linking to, but hey, the important thing is that I link to them with the words “I agree” following shortly thereafter.
James Lileks has an absolute must-read (I really don’t say that very often) column. You need to scroll down a bit, but before long he produces an evidence-laden decimation of the assertion that there is no connection between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda (an argument I hear being made every day, all day long in the mainstream media). He follows up by pointing out that the “Bush Lied” contingent a) didn’t think President Clinton was lying when he bombed Iraq for non-compliance, and indeed thought this was a great move, so long as it didn’t actually threaten Saddam’s grip on power in any substantial way; b) supported lifting the sanctions once upon a time (those same “genocidal” sanctions that, a few months ago, we were supposed to sit back and allow to “continue to work”–ed.) in a proposed best-case scenario that would have left an even stronger Saddam in power; c) when stripped of their veneer of legalese and “yes, but”s and “perhaps, however”s, advocated courses of action in which this monstrous bastard would remain in charge in perpetuity. God, it’s good, so much better than my clumsy summary.
Little Green Footballs’s Charles Johnson is on fire today, which I guess is to be expected, since pretty much every day is a good day if your hobby is cataloguing the neverending stream of violent fanaticism and duplicity streaming from the Islamic world. Today he notes that Saudi Arabia has initialized plans to acquire nuclear weaponry (joining Egypt and, of course, Iran in the We Want the Islamic Bomb Club currently moderated by Pakistan); that Iraq‘s infamous information minister is now openly bragging about having bribed France, Russia and China with lucrative oil contracts in exchange for their support of the Baath regime; and loads more of the infuriating same. Start at that first link and just start scrolling down.
Instapundit, meanwhile, points out that his long-standing contention that France is now an enemy of the United States and is fighting a proxy war against us through various Islamic dictators and terrorist groups is now being echoed in the New York Times by Tom Friedman; he also has a round-up of the mockery the BBC‘s anti-Blair war has made of the Beeb itself.
Both Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan point to stories illustrating the loudly-voiced antipathy many Iraqis feel toward their “brother” Arabs, whose leaders (in many cases with the enthusiastic support of the people themselves) cheerfully ignored the execrable conditions in which the Iraqis were living (and dying) in order to enrich themselves at Saddam’s trough. The Palestinians, who apparently managed to find enough time in their busy schedules of making their children hold automatic weapons and walk in parades full of masked murderers to come to Iraq in droves, come off particularly badly.
Interesting times, eh what?