So asks Robert Scheer in a San Francisco Chronicle column on found on Real Clear Politics.
Are Americans unusually stupid, or is it something our president put in the water?
His complaint is that Americans show strong support for John McCain, the only remaining presidential candidate who believes invading Iraq was the right course of action in the war on terror, even though he has been particularly harsh in his comments about the execution of it. So Scheer asks, assuming Americans are not just closet racists, are they stupid?
Assuming likely voters are not now thinking of yet another Republican president simply because John McCain is the only white guy left standing - an excuse as pathetic in its logic as the decision four years ago to return two Texas oil hustlers to the White House because they were not Massachusetts liberals - must mean that tens of millions of Americans have taken leave of their senses.
Scheer undoubtedly hopes to persuade misguided Americans to be smart, to vote Democratic. His argument rests on the senselessness of the Iraq war. Take a look at his reasoning, if that's what you would call it.
In the name of fighting the 9/11 terrorists, the Bush administration overthrew the one Arab government most adamantly opposed to the Saudi financiers of that son of their system, Osama bin Laden. Instead of confronting the royal leaders of a kingdom that supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers, we invaded a nation that supplied not a single one. While Bush overthrew Saddam Hussein, who had no ties to the hijackers, he embraced the leaders of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the only three nations in the world that had diplomatically recognized and supported the Taliban sponsors of al Qaeda.
It reads like it was a television advertisement, designed to sound impressive, to have a microbe of truth in it, but at the heart of it Scheer's intent is to deceive. Saddam Hussein, he implies was adamantly opposed to Osama bin Laden. No, wait, that's not what he said. He said we invaded the one Arab government that was opposed to Saudi financiers of Osama bin Laden. The reader is left to make the jump -- there was no love lost between Saddam and Osama. By extension Scheer implies that there was no connection between Saddam's government and al Qaeda.
Though presented as fact, it's actually a shaky proposition. In order to prop it up, a distinction must be made. "Connection" must be qualified for lefty arguments to have some truth, as when they trumpeted findings of a recent Pentagon report because it found no "operational" connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. Case closed? Hardly.
Perhaps the IDA report's most significant new disclosure is that the Iraqi Intelligence Service, known as the Mukhabarat, established an alliance with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). A captured 1993 memo from the IIS to Saddam said that Iraq had aided the group previously and was restarting contacts to help with attacks on the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally.
EIJ was founded by Zawahri, an Egyptian surgeon who, along with other members, sought to overthrow the secular Egyptian government. After the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he was arrested but served jail time only for illegal arms possession. He met bin Laden in Afghanistan while with the mujahedeen resistance fighting the Soviets. He returned to Egypt in 1990 and, in 1998, merged Egyptian Islamic Jihad with al Qaeda.
In Scheer's way of thinking America should be in a war on al Qaeda, not in a war on terror. America should have focused on the perpetrators of 9/11, al Qaeda. The rest of the terrorists, the innocent ones who like Saddam would presumably never dream of cooperating with al Qaeda, should not subject to harassment by villainous Republicans. Republlicans like John McCain.
So Scheer resurrects nearly every flawed and dicey argument against the invasion of Iraq to urge Americans to be smart. He even mentions Halliburton. Vote lefty, Americans, lest you reveal your true stupidity, urges Mr. Scheer. But when you read his column you will no doubt be struck by one thing overall. For a piece of persuasive writing it's really pretty stupid.
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