Rewriting history for political gain

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History shredded in Iraq uproar
By SALIM MANSUR, The Toronto Sun

Bravo, Mr. Mansur... too bad you can't run for our American Congress. It would be nice to know at least one Congress member had a grip on historical facts instead of being self-consumed with his or her political future.

The present uproar in American politics over the Iraq war is an illustration of how readily history gets shredded for partisan politics in the United States.

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Democrats contend if they knew what they know now about faulty intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), they would not have voted for the 2002 Congressional Resolution authorizing use of force against Iraq.

But what Democrats know now and more, as does the rest of the world, could only have been known by liberating Iraq from tyranny.

We now know the extent to which UN oil-for-food was corrupted by the Iraqi despot that would not have been known without the fall of Baghdad and, consequently, why some member-states, such as France, disclosed the intention to veto a second resolution authorizing enforcement of Security Council resolution 1441 passed unanimously in November 2002.

It has been repeatedly pointed out that intelligence on pre-war Iraq's WMD was widely shared knowledge among Democrats and Republicans, and there was a consensus on these matters among permanent members of the Security Council.

The determination of the Bush administration to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom as part of the global war on terror was also backed by the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act voted by the Congress and signed into law by then president Bill Clinton.

The 2002 Congressional Resolution listed 23 "whereas" clauses, of which only two identify stockpiles of WMD as reasons for the necessary use of force, and 12 refer to continuing violation of Security Council resolutions by Saddam's Iraq.

Diplomacy at the UN required emphasizing WMD, given the consensus on the matter, rather than the nature of Saddam's regime and its gross violations of human rights.

The obvious question Democrats want to evade is: How serious were their votes in 1998 and 2002? Did they naively believe their votes were sufficient in themselves to deliver freedom to Iraqis while removing the threat to regional and global peace Saddam's regime represented since at least the end of the Gulf War in 1991?

The public record of Democrats speaking about Iraqi threats prior to the 2000 election and in support of regime change is long and tedious to quote. Their accusations against President George Bush on the Iraq war increasingly appear as a shameless Stalinist technique of air-brushing history ahead of the 2006 mid-term elections.

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