Tag: Anthrax Attacks

Did Wesley Clark Act Under False Pretenses?

According to Fox News, Wesley Clark is going to announce his candidacy for president. Given his performance as a talking head, I think he’s wasting his time, but what I’m especially curious to see is how the press treats Clark’s numerous waffles and bizarre accusations (like the implication that the White House told him to blame Iraq for 9/11 — a claim that Clark had to quickly retreat from).

For example, Clark seems to want to capture the same Left wing Democratic voters who are inspired by Howard Dean’s anti-war rhetoric. So Bloomberg reported in August that Clark said the war against Iraq was waged “under false pretenses,” adding that,

You’d be taking him to the Better Business Bureau if you bought a washing machine the way we went into war with Iraq.

But the problem is that Clark himself all but endorsed the administration’s pre-war claims of Iraq in offering pessimistic analyses of possible outcomes of a war with Iraq.

For example, here’s Clark in an October 2002 interview in which he correctly predicts that one scenario is a quick war with minimal U.S. casualties, but that there was a more pessimistic alternative (emphasis added),

The high-end casualty assessment is that Saddam sees us coming as we’re staging in Kuwait. He says, “I’ve never liked those Shias anyway,” and unleashes on them all his biological and chemical stocks, such as anthrax by the truckload, south of the 33rd parallel. When the Americans drive through on their way to Baghdad, we will ingest all that dust and it will present a high risk to us.

But more importantly it will affect the Iraqi people themselves. And Saddam will try to say to say we caused it. Here we are talking about 12-14 million people at risk in southern Iraq. Even if we have our protective suits on, how are we going to take care of all the sick and dying?

Saddam may also try to use his few remaining Scuds to strike Israel. The Israelis will shoot back with their anti-missile systems. And we will also be attacking the Iraqis to neutralize the threat from the Scuds. Still, there is always the possibility that a Scud loaded with anthrax spores might slip through and strike Israel.

And in that event, say the Israelis, they would have to respond against Iraq. This is the recipe for tens of thousands of civilian casualties.

Was Clark acting under false pretenses when concocting a scenario where Hussein uses chemical/biological weapons and Scud missiles, neither of which have yet to be found in post-war Iraq? Or was he, like the administration, making a reasonable guess based on sketchy intelligence and other information about a dictatorial regime known to have used such tactics in the past? I’d really like to see Clark square this round hole.

Also, there is an interesting quote at the end of Clark’s interview about American foreign policy,

Somehow we have to overcome the legacy of fear and anxiety from the events of 9/11. While we must remain strong, and occasionally take actions to anticipate and eliminate immediate threats to us, we must also recognize that our greater security will be achieved not by killing our opponents and destroying their regimes but by supporting our friends and reinforcing those who share our values.

We should do both — support our friends and allies and kill our enemies and destroy their regimes. Unfortunately the Bush administration’s biggest flaw is that it excels at the latter, while bungling on the former.

Sources:

General Clark Accuses Bush of `False Pretenses’ in Iraq War. Bloomberg, August 17, 2003.

CLARK: FIGHTING WITH IRAQ COULD BE OVER IN TWO WEEKS; AMERICA CAN’T BE ‘NEW ROME’ WITH VOLUNTEER ARMY. New Perspectives Quarterly, October 7, 2002.

Disagree with Tom Daschle? Watch What You Say!

Henry Hanks comes through again with a link to ridiculous comments by Tom Daschle, in which the soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader links people who publicly disagree with him to death threats he’s received,

“What happens when (radio talk show host) Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life is that people aren’t satisfied just to listen,” the South Dakota Democrat explained. “They want to act because they get emotionally invested. And so, you know, the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically, on our families and on us, in a way that’s very disconcerting.”

Daschle, whose office was a target in last year’s anthrax mail attacks, declined to go into detail about the nature of the threats. But he said that when he was accused by Republicans of being an obstructionists the number of threats against him and his family rose.

Ohmigod they called him an obstructionist — call out the National Guard.

Of course Daschle despises the obstructionist label because that was part of the Republican strategy in the mid-term elections. They painted Daschle has partisan intent on blocking important bills in Congress, such as the Homeland Security Act, and it worked rather well.

Apparently Daschle and others are forgetting how Bill Clinton used largely the same strategy to beat the tar out of Republicans over the otherwise boring appropriations process that led to the temporary shutdown of parts of the federal government in 1995.

Source:

Daschle: Shrill Political Talk Spurs Threats. Yahoo! News, November 20, 2002.

Mugabe Exploits Anthrax Attacks

Another example of someone in the developing world taking advantage of publicity over terrorism in the United States to advance his or her agenda. Somebody sent several envelopes containing a white powder to government officials in Zimbabwe. Although tests have confirmed it is not anthrax, they are still supposedly trying to find out exactly what the substance is.

Which did not stop officials in Robert Mugabe’s government — which has become an informal dictatorship — from quickly determining who was behind the letters: white people and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change party.

A more likely explanation is that someone in Mugabe’s party sent the letters. For example, last year somebody — probably Zimbabwe security forces — set off a bomb at an MDC headquarters, and Mugabe’s government wasted no time in blaming the act of terrorism on the MDC itself.

This week, Zimbabwe’s legislature will almost certainly pass legislation making it illegal to for opposition parties like the MDC to criticize Mugabe without getting his permission first. Great Britain is on the verge of suspending Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth and the European Union is considering sanctions targeted at Zimbabwe’s ruling elite.

And, as usual, the Americans will probably have to step forward with plenty of food aid to prevent starvation in Zimbabwe for years to come.

Source:

Zimbabwe’s anthrax ‘gimmick’. The BBC, January 10, 2002.