It was hard for me to type the title of this entry without a joke about "contradictions in terms".

Yes, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee made a valiant effort at relevance today by actually releasing a report.  Not only that, the report focused on a matter of actual substance—the pre-war connection, or lack thereof, between Saddam Hussein and the dearly departed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Here's the "news" it produced:


The Senate Intelligence Committee said today that there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein had prewar ties to Al Qaeda and one of the terror organization's most notorious members,Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.


Since charged with this investigation in late 2004, Sen. Pat Roberts, the Republican chair of the committee, has waited almost two years, or 1,400 American lives, to tell us something that everyone in America knows, or should know—that there was never any connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization that attacked us on 9/11, Al Qaeda.  Sen. Roberts has been re-elected to Congress 9 times (8 as Representative), and makes a minimum of $162,000 a year.

President Bush has known of the non-connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda since at least September 21, 2001, despite repeating the opposite in one form or another for 4 + years.  He makes a minimum of $400,000 a year as the CEO of the most incompetent administration in our nation's history, and was re-elected in 2004 with more votes than any other presidential candidate in history.

Saddam Hussein makes a good point in the same article, if anyone would listen:


As for the cliché that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," Saddam Hussein has told interrogators since his capture in December 2003 that his government had not cooperated with Mr. bin Laden.  "He specified that if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with North Korea or China," says a passage in the nearly 400-page report.

Those analysts who have been skeptical of any meaningful links between Al Qaeda terrorists and Saddam Hussein have noted that some Al Qaeda members have professed deep religious beliefs and embraced martyrdom, while Mr. Hussein and his comrades had a more secular orientation and seemed more interested in power and pleasure on earth rather than bliss in an afterlife.


There is a common sense explanation for this: Saddam Hussein, like Kim Jong Il and Moamar al-Qadhafi, was an odious yet rational actor on the world stage.  This is a natural symptom of having to actually manage and maintain a nation, rather than lead a movement.  The head of a nation may have his own ideology, but their primary concerns are maintaining domestic tranquility, and preventing foreign interventions.  Whether maintaining domestic tranquility means providing for a healthy system of social welfare and civil liberties, or gassing insurgent sectors of the population, does not make a difference in terms of the leader's rational urge to maintain and consolidate their power over a diverse and unwieldy population, rather than embark on an ideological crusade.  Therefore, it makes perfect sense that, while Saddam Hussein was excluded from an alliance with the United States, he would most certainly not entertain a partnership with an anti-state organization like Al-Qaeda whose friendship only invites his regime's utter destruction.  He would instead ally himself with countries like North Korea and China, whose administrations have proven their ability to survive without the sponsorship of the United States—allies he would like to emulate.

The leader of a movement, however, has no such restrictions on their behavior.  Their "population" is neither diverse nor unwieldy, since it is composed of willful adherents to a cause, rather than random subjects consigned to a natural geographic authority.  Therefore, the leader may direct the movement internationally, converting adherents from multiple nations, and subverting the civic restrictions the "managers" of said nations have put in place.  Where the movement is vanquished in one nation, it can always survive in another, as long as its cause has a potent resonance among enough of the international masses.  In this respect, the international movement is the natural enemy of the state. In the case of the movement of jihadism, embodied by the international terrorist organization Al Qaeda, nothing could be truer.

So it is that by deposing Saddam Hussein, we eliminated one of Al Qaeda's most daunting obstacles in the Middle East: a secular dictator who had neutered the fundamentalist passions of his country's ethnic groups, opposed and thwarted the spread of international jihad across his borders, and removed the yoke of educational isolation and cultural misogyny from his society, creating a non-Islamic republic that had double the literacy rate for women in the entire Middle East (80% in pre-war Iraq compared to 40% for the outside region).

A final excerpt from this depressing "Senate Intelligence" article must be added:

The intelligence panel's ranking Democrat, Senator John D. Rockefeller 4th of West Virginia, told the A.P. that the Bush administration had "exploited the deep sense of insecurity among Americans in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, leading a large majority of Americans to believe — contrary to the intelligence assessments of the time — that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attacks."

But Senator Roberts said Democrats were indulging in selective amnesia about their own earlier support of the war and were "cherry-picking through the intelligence and the facts in a political attempt to rewrite history."

Insofar as he is referring to cowardly Democrats who voted for the war out of fear they would be branded as wimps, or even terrorist-sympathizers, Sen. Roberts is absolutely right.  There are many Democrats indeed "indulging in selective amnesia".  One of them would be his co-chairman, Democratic Sen. John D. Rockefeller.


And the Republican National Committee started a Web site, www.demfacts.com, to call attention to the Democrats' "hypocrisy" by comparing what Democrats said a few years ago and what they have been saying of late.

The RNC is right to do this very thing.  Every Democrat who voted for this war should be held accountable.  Every Democrat who whines about how they were "tricked" into supporting the war, when the facts were available to anyone who cared to look, should be held out to dry.  I don't care if it takes a mcwebsite by the Republicans to make it happen.