Calling Robert Malley. Calling Robert Malley. Time asks, “Was the U.S. Right About Syria Nukes?” The article begins with a ritual dismissal of “Bush” intelligence claims. “Given the Bush Administration’s track record, no one ought to have been surprised when much of the Middle East raised a skeptical eyebrow in response to Washington’s claim that the Syrian site bombed by Israeli warplanes in September of 2007 was part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program.” But now Time grudgingly admits Bush may have been right. Why, because now the UN has confirmed American intelligence.
It turns out, however, that the Bush Administration may well have been right about the Syrian site. Diplomats from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told the press on Monday that the U.N. body’s inspectors found traces of uranium when they inspected the site in June. Apparently, the amounts weren’t large enough to make a definitive conclusion, but the IAEA is putting Syria — which has no publicly declared civilian nuclear program — on the formal agenda for its year-end meeting in late November. Diplomats at the IAEA say the Syrian government, which denies that it was trying to build nuclear weapons, has balked at the agency’s requests for wider inspections.” Time goes on to say that “the New York Times reported that the most recent raid was simply one of dozens that had been conducted on Syrian territory by U.S. special forces under secret orders signed by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
While the world is still a dangerous and volatile place, it is interesting to ask how much more perilous it might be without some of the actions undertaken by the reviled GWB. It’s question for historians to answer. The press has spilled a lot of ink describing all the things George Bush has gotten wrong. But it is virtually certain that historians in the coming years will discover he has done some things right; even in the worst case a broken clock is right by accident at least twice a day. Time believes that confirmation of the Syrian program by UN sources would be a disappointment because “President Assad … had said peace in the Middle East was possible within two years, if only the U.S. would sponsor direct talks, and hopes were high that the incoming Obama Administration would do just that. ” They may do just that anyway.
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27 Comments
1. Unsk:There is nothing to see here- move along.
From the Messiah’s acceptance speech:
” To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security – we support you.”
You see, it was Assad who just trying to achieve a little ” peace and security”. And it was that evil ChimpyBushHitler who was “tearing this world down”.
We shouldn’t aspire to support human rights, or democracy . That sort of thing doesn’t go over too well in all the fashionable , best, A list parties in DC anymore.
Nov 12, 2008 - 3:22 pm 2. Alexis:What if the historians who vilify President Bush as the devil incarnate are the only people able to get jobs in universities or get published by the book industry?
Nov 12, 2008 - 3:23 pm 3. sirius_sir:Diplomats at the IAEA say the Syrian government, which denies that it was trying to build nuclear weapons, has balked at the agency’s requests for wider inspections.
Ok, so let’s take the Syrians at their word and just assume they got these weapons and/or materials from Saddam. I’d balk at requests for wider inspections too.
Nov 12, 2008 - 3:33 pm 4. Talnik:“What if the historians who vilify President Bush as the devil incarnate are the only people able to get jobs in universities or get published by the book industry?”
Alexis, that’s prety much the case now. And for getting a Grammy or an Emmy or a Nobel Peace Prize. But true world peace will come after January 20th.
Nov 12, 2008 - 3:39 pm 5. Voltimand:There was published on FrontPageMagazine a story with a Russian source that immediately before the 2003 invasion of Iraq Russian personnel and trucks were involved in massive movement of weapons from Iraq across the Syrian border. The author interviewed is one Ryan Mauro, a very young “geopolitical analyst.” Here is the link:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=6C7E3B44-6D0A-4521-AEBD-B9D36CA01BD5
We have yet to take the measure of the MSN’s apparently systematic and premeditated 8-year attack on the Bush administration and personally on Bush himself, a point worth considering and researching on the assumption that the election of Obama was significantly due to a common belief among possible democratic voters that Bush and the Republican Party were not only abymally stupid but venal as well. It was a calculated rhetorical attack that employed standard dyslogistic rhetorical means to demonize.
None of this is news, but the allusion in Time to the “abysmal” “track record” of the Bush administration as something universally known across the globe to be established and referenceable at will, discloses one such device, one that could be labeled the “of course everyone knows” smear.
I think we’re going to get daily evidence as time goes on as to the massive de facto conspiracy between the Obama people and the MSN all devoted to manipulating this election. Those who voted against Obama are facing some forminable enemies.
Nov 12, 2008 - 3:50 pm 6. Sleeper:On the other hand, it’s helpful that now that Obama is in power, US intelligence claims will instantly become globally credible, no?
Nov 12, 2008 - 3:56 pm 7. Thrasymachus:What’s that? It’s coming back- Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer- feathered hair- gold chains- economic chaos- snivelling liberals in the White House- it’s the late 70’s again!
Well, one thing all the decent people know- we have to *support* the moderates! That’s right, *support* *the* *moderates.* Who are the moderates in Iran and Syria? Well we’ll find them and support them! Call Cyrus Vance! Call Warren Christopher! They’ll know what to do!
That 70’s Show- not cancelled, moved from Point Place, Wisconsin to Washington, DC.
Nov 12, 2008 - 4:50 pm 8. 49erDweet:Sleeper somehow thinks after the first of the year there will be future US intelligence claims. How naive is that?
Nov 12, 2008 - 4:52 pm 9. JED:One wonders how reviled Monroe was for his doctrine until it became status quo, compared to the Bush doctrine. I would guess that the press and the self proclaimed elite were as outraged and terrified then as now. It is the press who tell us that we think Bush is a dunce. I, for one, would look for the evidence 10 years hence, and not in today’s sensationalism.
Nov 12, 2008 - 5:11 pm 10. Mike Sylwester:Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember that the Bush Administration ever declared what this bombed facility was. All I remember is a bunch of leaks to the media about the subject.
Since when is a presidential administration judged on the quality of the intelligence estimates that are leaked to the media during the administration?
Anyway, I look forward to the energetic efforts of Republicans inside the Intelligence Communities leaking to the press throughout the Obama administration. As soon as Obama gets ready to release any Gitmo captive, I expect that that the captive’s entire case file, including all his interrogation reports, will be leaked to the media.
The next eight years might be the Golden Age of Leaking of Government Secrets. Watching the Obama Administration try to conduct foreign polic will be like watching poker championships on cable television, where everyone can see all the cards all the time.
Nov 12, 2008 - 5:24 pm 11. Cannoneer No. 4:Voltimand, re: your 3:50 pm
Propaganda Redux
Vilifying Republican presidents is a Soviet dezinformatsiya tradition that The Left continues to this day.
Nov 12, 2008 - 5:36 pm 12. 3Case:“And for getting a Grammy or an Emmy or a Nobel Peace Prize. But true world peace will come after January 20th.
I just figured it out…legions of the Obamaniac civilian defense corps will replace those angry, nasty warmongering dogfaces and jars in the ME and, arm in arm harmoniously, with their Euro-brethren they will provide support to those in need of peace and security in Syria, Iran, et al. How could I have not seen it before?
Nov 12, 2008 - 5:38 pm 13. Doug Miller:“Anyway, I look forward to the energetic efforts of Republicans inside the Intelligence Communities leaking to the press throughout the Obama administration.”
There are Republicans inside the Intelligence community? Where have they been for eight years?
Nov 12, 2008 - 5:43 pm 14. Armitage:Scholars of the Bush administration will likely come to see (among others) two areas of success, though neither admission will come quickly. The first is in Africa, where experts of all stripes acknowledge that the Bush administration made some significant progress (including in the Millennium Challenge Account and the several health initiatives) that has yielded lasting benefits. The second will actually be in the “Long War” or whatever you want to call it. What will come out will come out only in time, and only in selective ways, but there will be a sense that the widespread operations against terrorist groups yielded significant results. The greater the results, or the more connected certain operations are to other important developments, the less likely we are to hear about these particular operations. As a historian in the academy who works on this stuff, I can say that we already have several examples of this kind of revisionism–witness what we now understand about how Great Britain _really_ won the Battle of the Atlantic (Ultra remained a secret until the 1970s), how effective a president Dwight Eisenhower really was, and what role Ronald Reagan really played in bringing about the end of the Cold War. Revisionism occurs, but it does take time, and emotion doesn’t help.
Nov 12, 2008 - 6:06 pm 15. wildernesscalling:What will be interesting in the coming Obama term will be can the secret SOF operations keep us out of other wars by remaining very selective and secret or will Obama become desperate because he waits to long and doesn’t have the balls to do it when it should have been done and gets into a bigger operation that leads to a full-scale war or a under manned operation leading to a disgraceful fubar (Somalia)for American forces which leads to the “paper tiger” group think which further throws the hard earned respect that the dead in IRAQ and AFGHANASTAN have gain us todate?
Nov 12, 2008 - 6:14 pm 16. Steve Skubinna:Of course statements of the “discredited” Bush administration will be taken more seriously now, despite its “abysmal” record. For one thing, there’s no political risk any more in admitting that he and everyone around him is not a dunce.
Second, it’s now Obama’s turn to live in that world Bush has been in the past eight years.
Look for many other grudging admissions from Obama’s clique and the media (yes, there is a difference, which will become apparent the farther we get into his administration) that maybe Bush got some things right. They will be in areas in which Obama finds himself operating. God help Obama (and us) if al Qaeda pulls off another attack on US soil. The likelihood of that has been hugely diminished by Bush’s administration, and one of Obama’s biggest challenges is going to be in continuing that success without appearing to be following in his predecessor’s footsteps.
Nov 12, 2008 - 6:58 pm 17. Tony:Have you ever met a liberal person or a Democrat who has read “The 9/11 Commission Report” and is willing to admit it? Of course not.
The Bush Administration did more in its first 8 months to confront Al Qaeda in depth and detail than the Clinton Administration (Richard Clarke in charge) had accomplished in 8 years.
The simple history of the matter, that is the attacks on US embassies, ships, plans for 9/11 all went virtually unanswered during the Clinton time. Read the book – for example – they didn’t respond to the act of war against the USS Cole because it would interfere with the election!
Bush, with the majority support of all Democrats in Congress, launched a far-ranging “War on Terror” and has been vilified for it ever since.
Compare the success of Al Qaeda under Clinton to the defeat of Al Qaeda under Bush.
I am so happy the Democrats are completely in charge, and I wish godspeed to my President Obama.
I feel like I hear our enemies in Al Q, Russia, China, Euro … licking their lips in anticipation.
I hope Obama will be strong, and will not be the next Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Some of our strongest war-time presidents have been Dems. Well, at least two of them, FDR and Truman.
Nov 12, 2008 - 8:11 pm 18. Marcus Aurelius:Teddy Roosevelt had a thing to say about snipers & critics.
I think the prevailing sentiment here is correct. In fact, it is already underway, the tone of the press in its reports involving W have lost a lot of their sharply hostile edge. I get the feeling the only Republicans/Conservatives the left respects are dead, outgoing, docile, or losing ones. In fact, the gushing over John McCain’s losing speech would have been much different had McCain gave a victory speech instead.
Early on, it was said by W that much of this fight would be in the dark alleys and shadows, successes may not be publicized for years or decades later and failures would find their way into the public eye quicker.
Nov 12, 2008 - 9:27 pm 19. Insufficiently Sensitive:None of this is news, but the allusion in Time to the “abysmal” “track record” of the Bush administration as something universally known across the globe to be established and referenceable at will, discloses one such device, one that could be labeled the “of course everyone knows” smear.
For confirmation of this meme, see any recent issue of the Economist, and check the adjectives applied to the Bush administration in general, and Iraq in particular. In no time at all one finds “abysmal”, “failed”, “botched”, “mismanaged”, “insufficient” and “ill-conceived”. These at a time when even the MSM (now that the sacred Obama has safely won his election) is admitting that the Iraq war is indeed won.
Nov 12, 2008 - 9:30 pm 20. Voltimand:It’s important to remember one thing about Obama, because it may be the determining factor in all of his dealings: that he is at bottom a con artist with a con artist’s contempt for his mark. He believed, e.g., if he got his people to put up hundreds of signs with the single word “Change” on it that he would grab hundreds of thousands of mindless middle-class white twits and cause them to go into prolonged hysterics. And he was right, and he knew he was right, and they proved he was right.
I mention this twisted comedy because I think this is the key to Obama’s personality, and to his singular, almost eerie lack of either achievement or shouldered responsibility in his life heretofore, and that is he has got by entirely by conning people.
The successful con artist, as playwrights who dealt with “con artist” comedies such as Ben Jonson and Machiavelli demonstrate, must never, ever believe his own con. And I think Obama is stupid (N.B. I didn’t say he isn’t clever) enough to believe his own con.
Look at his “public service” initiatives: he’s got his operatives out there calling in and herding the drones, and he knows he can do this because they are drones.
The real disaster in this country is not that Obama is president, but that there are so many terminally silly people out there willing and ready to vote for him.
None this is nice to contemplate, but I think those of us who are going to refuse to be conned by this charlatan, are going at least to incorporate this sort of information into their judgments, responses, and actions. For one thing, I think it is necessary to stand up and tell this Obama story in public and without pulling punches. I think we’re going to see that utterly new thing under the sun: marches and demonstrations by conservatives. And one of the truths we need to say to the Obamaniacs is that we are not stupid, that we do see through this charlatan, and that we refuse to allow our country to be taken away by his robotoid operatives.
This is only part of what I’d like to see, but it’s a start.
Nov 12, 2008 - 9:30 pm 21. Derek:>What if the historians who vilify President Bush as the devil incarnate are the only people able to get jobs in universities or get published by the book industry
The next time something happens they will look more and more like the 9/11 truthers.
Reality has a nasty way of intruding. Count on it.
Derek
Nov 12, 2008 - 9:37 pm 22. Derek:The odd thing about all these things is that there are possibly other ways of handling these challenges. But no one seems ready to admit the reality of the situation. If you can’t admit the problem, you can’t define a solution.
That is what is scary about this whole mess.
Derek
Nov 12, 2008 - 9:47 pm 23. Wadeusaf:I’ll bet the information has more to do with Syrian attitudes than with US or other civilian perspectives. The NYT will print anything, as long as it can refer to the failed adjective du jour it matters not the substance of the piece. In that way it is the best means of sending messages.
Who was the journalist during in the 60’s and 70’s who won a Pulitzer reporting a totally false and ironically a “leaked” story?
Nov 12, 2008 - 11:03 pm 24. Tinfoil Hatter:“I hope Obama will be strong, and will not be the next Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Some of our strongest war-time presidents have been Dems. Well, at least two of them, FDR and Truman.”
At least in Truman’s case, a consider amount of evidence would suggest he would be to right by a considerable amount of every national level Democratic politician.
What truly is maddening about current Democratic politics is that, since they’ve pretty much ceded the field of battle of serious ideas, they’ve decided to run national popularity contests, in the manner of pre-civil rights Southern Democrats.
Since everyone that “matters” pretty much agrees on the big topics, we might as well vote for the most “clean” and “articulate” (their words, not mine) candidate.
Even Democrats can’t run on their handling of foreign affairs since 1973. So, excuse me if I think all the “Maybe Obama will be a hawk” happytalk is so much whistling past the graveyard.
Nov 13, 2008 - 8:26 am 25. tomw:15. wildernesscalling:
Here, I have some extras:
!!!! ,,,, …. ????? ….. ???? ;;;;
::::
Other punctuation marks available upon request.
tom
Nov 13, 2008 - 9:57 am 26. tomw:15. wildernesscalling:
Sorry, I meant to comment on your question. IMO, O’ma will be too indecisive. His bumbled conversation with the Poles about the installation of anti-missiles, where public disagreement with a friendly government occured, is the first example of not being able to make up his mind. Say things in private, and then divorce from them once revealed. Not a good indicator. See John Bolton in WSJ.
Nov 13, 2008 - 10:01 am 27. mnotaro:tom
Anyone notice in Barak’s acceptance speech…NOW he’s saying he doesn’t think all the damage can be repaired and all of his goals can be achieved in “one year”…or maybe even “in one term”!! HELLO! Can you believe it? He is already setting up the public for when he fails at all of the ridiculous promises and lies he has told…remember, he is a politician people…this is what he does for a living…and the public fell for it! Liberal illuminati at work again….
Nov 13, 2008 - 10:52 amSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.