The cautious-to-a-fault communication deficiencies in the Bush White House are truly stunning, but on top of that there seems to be an ideological maelstrom blanketing the entirety of American popular culture. True facts are not getting out, and what is getting out is Orwellian-scary and fun-house-weird. Today's post is meant to help remedy this situation.

WMDs in Iraq: The American Thinker has a fascinating article, by Douglas Hanson - who "was a US Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and is a Gulf War I combat veteran. He was an Atomic Demolitions Munitions (ADM) Security Officer, and a Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Officer" - raising serious questions about what is going on with the Iraq Survey Group.

One of the reported incidents occurred near Karbala where there appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area of 55-gallon drums of pesticide. In addition, there was also a camouflaged bunker complex full of these drums that some people entered with unpleasant results. More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to nerve agent. A full day of tests on the drums resulted in one positive for nerve agent, and then one resulted in a negative. Later, an Army Fox NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] Recon Vehicle confirmed the existence of Sarin. An officer from the 63d Chemical Company thought there might well be chemical weapons at the site.

But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into non-existence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers six feet underground. The "agricultural site" was also co-located with a military ammunition dump, evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG.

Another find occurred around the northern Iraqi town of Bai’ji, where elements of the 4th Infantry Division (Mech) discovered 55-gallon drums of a substance that mass spectrometer testing confirmed was cyclosarin and an unspecified blister agent. A mobile laboratory was also found nearby that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. And only yards away, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, as well as gas masks were found. Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up. It seems that Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping their ammo dumps insect-free...

Hanson provides a great deal of additional insight and disturbing facts, so please go read it. This ISG deal is really baffling. What is going on with these guys?

Fallujah: Understanding the enemy is a slow, sort of evolving process, apparently. Tammy Bruce says it is now time to raze Fallujah:

I’ll remind you of what it took to quell the beasts of Germany and Japan in 1945: complete and total destruction. There was a reason why we bombed Dresden into oblivion. There was a reason why Berlin was not saved. There was a reason why two atomic bombs had to be dropped on Japan after Hiroshima: they still refused to surrender unconditionally.

Beasts of violence and destruction understand one thing: destruction. The media, of course, are comparing the Fallujah horror with Mogadishu. Almost with gleeful hysteria, the Left and their water boys, the mainstream media, seem desperate to cast this as Mogadishu. Why? To make George W. Bush look bad, that’s why. Because they revel in horror. Because they need Americans to be just like them. We must see a pit like Fallujah as Saddam's last bunker. The time for political correctness, worry about inflaming the situation, and restraint, are over. This is war. The people of Fallujah have decided to continue the war, so it should indeed be visited upon them with no mercy.

Lee Harris has a slightly more depressing take, but one well worth absorbing and contemplating:

Fallujah should spell the end of the neo-conservative fantasy that all human beings want the same things. It should awake the Bush administration from its dream that what the Arab street really needs is democracy. Fallujah represents the end of the road for that kind of thinking and that kind of talk.

I think the fact of the matter is there are still plenty of sick-minded lowlifes in Iraq. Saddam Hussein did not preside over such a monstrous dictatorship for so long because EVERYONE lived in fear of him and his sons. Chesterton once said that in any society, 20 men can overcome even the strongest tyrant. There had to be a significant Baathist body politic beyond Saddam's family for the former regime to maintain control.

But in the run up to the war, there was in the news coverage and probably in the minds of many of us an assumption that once we killed the head, the body would die off quickly, Saddam's henchmen would return home to their farms moist-eyed, and the 99% of the population living in fear would rise up to thank us. Well, the government body did die pretty quickly, but that 99% figure deserves some consideration. If the let's-put-'em-through-the-plastic-shredder demographic was only 1% of the population, that's 200,000+ ungrateful bastards living amongst the remainder of the population welcoming our soldiers as heroes. If the bad guys and the beneficiaries of the old regime were a larger percentage of the population, as is likely the case, well, the situation is going to stay ugly for a while.

Having said that, we turn to the Left's interpetation of events. This was a post by Daily Kos after the Fallujah outrage:

Every death should be on the front page

Let the people see what war is like. This isn't an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush's folly.

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

by kos on Thu Apr 1st, 2004 at 15:08:56 GMT

You can't find it on his site anymore, because there is now a semi-semi-retraction:

My language was harsh, and, in reality, not true. Fact is, I did feel something. That's why I was so angry.

I was angry that five soldiers -- the real heroes in my mind -- were killed the same day and got far lower billing in the newscasts. I was angry that 51 American soldiers paid the ultimate price for Bush's folly in Iraq in March alone. I was angry that these mercenaries make more in a day than our brave men and women in uniform make in an entire month. I was angry that the US is funding private armies, paying them $30,000 per soldier, per month, while the Bush administration tries to cut our soldiers' hazard pay. I was angry that these mercenaries would leave their wives and children behind to enter a war zone on their own violition.

Yes, "Kos" is an idiot on whom we normally should not waste even the slightest mental energy, but there is a useful perspective to be gained from the above. I'm not going to get into the issue of why the government pays for mercenaries versus what U.S. soldiers earn, or what the mercenaries are doing there, or what has been done in past wars, because I have no idea and for now do not really care. The interesting point is that this twisted fellow is missing the sheer horror of what the bad guys did to these Americans. WHAT THE BAD GUYS DID. No sympathy for the dead, and the mob of barbarians is viewed as some kind of value-neutral fact of nature, a given, in the situation which Bush has foolishly led America into.

And his conclusion seems to be, better that America had left people like this running the country. War is horrible, therefore never is war justified. This is a vivid, unedited, certainly unintended exemplification of the total hypocrisy of the modern Left. While professing to advocate for humanitarian goals, they reflexively turn a blind eye to - if not outright support - the most odious regime if it furthers their current political aims. They will turn a blind eye to - if not outright support - the most universally recognized wickedness if by doing so they can score points against President Bush. Their anger at Bush has completely supplanted their own humanity.

Lileks does a much better job than I at smashing the clay feet of the false ideology:

Is the world angry at Russia, which spends nothing on AIDS and rebuffed Kyoto? Is the world angry at China, which got a pass on Kyoto and spends nothing on AIDS for other countries?

Is the world angry at North Korea for killings its people? Angry at Iran for smothering that vibrant nation with corrupt and thuggish mullocracy? Angry at Syria for occupying Lebanon? Angry at Saudi Arabia for its denial of women’s rights? Angry at Russia for corrupt elections... Is the world angry at the thugs of Fallujah?

But even if you admit that the world is angry at America - so angry that the poorest of them can’t wait to come here and stake a claim – you have to stand in awe at the sheer political idiocy of Kerry’s conclusion. Boiled down:

There are countless numbers of things that we could be do minimize the kind of anger and ... almost recruitment that has taken place in terrorist organizations as a result of the way the administration has behaved.

"It's all about what we have done to make them angry, because if we had been more flexible and treated them better they would never have done anything bad to us in the first place - truth being relative, human nature being essentially good, and America and Israel being essentially bad." These are the central lies in the ideology.

"Bush must go down." This is the emotional wellspring.

In the further interest of unmasking lies, we turn to an excellent capsule summary of the events leading to 9-11 by Ann Coulter which you should go read right now. Here's the conclusion:

On Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush had been in office for barely seven months, 3,000 Americans were murdered in a savage terrorist attack on U.S. soil by Muslim extremists.

Since then, Bush has won two wars against countries that harbored Muslim fanatics, captured Saddam Hussein, immobilized Osama bin Laden, destroyed al-Qaida's base, and begun to create the only functioning democracy in the Middle East other than Israel. Democrats opposed it all -- except their phony support for war with Afghanistan, which they immediately complained about and said would be a Vietnam quagmire. And now they claim to be outraged that in the months before 9-11, Bush did not do everything Democrats opposed doing after 9-11.

What a surprise.

Finally, in reference to our note yesterday about the poor jobs situation providing the lone issue on which the Democrats could argue against Bush with any type of cogency...it looks like we're gonna have to take that one back. First, there's this interesting perspective from Bloomberg:

The movement of U.S. jobs abroad "has been blown out of proportion" mainly because domestic companies in the United States have been slow to increase hiring, said Martin Baily, chairman of former President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. "There was lots of offshoring going on in the 1990s, but job growth was so strong in the U.S. that nobody really took much notice."

While reliable figures aren't available for the last two years, the Commerce Department estimated on March 18 that the number of Americans employed by U.S. affiliates of majority non-U.S. companies grew by 4.7 million from 1997 through 2001. In the same period, the number of non-Americans working at affiliates of majority-U.S. companies abroad rose by 2.8 million.

The creation of jobs outside the United States by American companies hasn't played a significant role in the current "jobless recovery," said Baily...

But the big news is this:

Economy Adds 308,000 Jobs in March

U.S. employment rose last month at the fastest pace in nearly four years as hiring jumped in a wide array of industries, the government said on Friday in a surprisingly strong report that stunned financial markets.

There was other good economic news today as well. The interesting thing to watch now is, should the economy really continue to improve, in what ways the big-lie ideology is amended to address it. We'll be following this pretty closely, although if the best they can offer is this kind of inanity, we won't be following it for very long.

Kerry: That's why I've proposed a strategy that revitalizes our manufacturing sector and puts us on track to create 10 million new jobs in the next four years.

I'm sorry, but if I'm going to analyze a piece of propaganda I require a certain level of creativity, some devious ingenuity in the truth-bending and myth-weaving, or it's really just not worth my time.