REPUBLICAN CLUB
OF ROSSMOOR

 

Monthly Meetings held every 2nd Wednesday of the Month - JOIN US!

 

 Home
Meetings
President's Message
the Voting Booth
2010 Board
Our Troops
Downloads
The Republican
Ambassadors Club
Links

 

President’s Message
July 2010
 

In the June 30 edition of the Rossmoor News, my column, From the Right, described the experiences and insights gained from our recent cruise through the Middle East.  Space was not available to provide a complete report so here are some things that were missing.

To begin with, we learned some troubling things about the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, based on intelligence that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.  General Hugh Shelton, at that time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed the strong opinion to President Bush that Saddam was not so engaged.  The military intelligences services could find no evidence of such activity.

The civilian hawks, on the other hand, among them Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney, strongly believed otherwise.  Moreover, these men took the position that the United States had been surprised by the attack of September 11, 2001 and that it would be irresponsible to have such an attack repeated because we were indecisive about making a pre-emptive strike to neutralize a threat.

In support of the argument to attack Iraq, was information in a report the CIA received from a source believed to be credible by the British and German intelligence services.  A single source, mind you; code-named Curveball.  When the CIA asked our allies for a chance to question this source, they refused.  Why in the world would our allies do this in light of the fact that a major war was being planned on the basis of his information?  The answer:  the United States can’t keep secrets.  And because we can’t keep secrets, our allies must protect their intelligence assets by refusing us access to them.

The United States Congress is the major source of intelligence leaks.  After closed-door intelligence briefings, our Senators, Representatives and their staffs are famous for having loose lips following a few drinks in Capitol Hill’s watering holes.  Knowledge of what happens to America’s intelligence secrets made it impossible to develop assets within Saddam’s Iraq.  We were therefore flying blind when we made the decision to invade.

Finally, and saddest of all, we later learned that Curveball was an alcoholic and a congenital liar.  So the next time you look at the list of American young men and women whose lives were lost---or physically or emotionally scarred---in Iraq, remember how our intelligence community has been betrayed by those who had sworn to protect and defend our nation.

Before we leave the subject of betrayals, however, let us not forget the New York Times and its unctuous excuse for revealing our secrets as “the people’s right to know.”  It was the Times that decided to ignore Bush administration pleas and published, in late 2005, the story revealing the administration’s program to track al Qaeda communications.  And it was the Times that later ran a front-page article detailing how the government was tapping into the international bank transfer system, enabling us to track terrorist financing and, with it, names and developing plots.  Thanks to “the people’s right to know,” our counter-terrorism efforts have been severely crippled.

Finally, another thing we learned about the Middle East is that disinformation and propaganda passes for knowledge, even among the supposedly educated.  During our transit of the Suez Canal, an attractive Egyptian woman came aboard to lecture on the waterway’s importance.  As we were passing under a bridge spanning the canal and connecting the Sinai with Egypt proper, we were informed that it was the tallest suspension bridge in the world.  Clearly not the case, when that honor goes to Japan’s Akashi-Kaikyō Bridge that carries the Honshu-Shikoku Highway in a crossing of the Akashi Strait.  Indeed, the bridge we were passing under would look like a tinker-toy when standing next to our magnificent Golden Gate, which is only the 9th tallest in the world.

But it got worse.  Her head decorously wrapped in a colorful hijab, our lecturer told us of the canal’s importance in stopping the Israeli “aggressors” during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.  She told how courageous Egyptian commandoes had crossed the canal under the cover of darkness, sowed panic among the Israeli forces and forced them to turn tail and run for home. With that, many of our fellow passengers walked out in protest.

Gone from this revisionist history was any mention that the war was started by Syria and Egypt, and that in the region of Suez 500 Israeli soldiers faced 80,000 Egyptians.  After being pushed back, the Israelis regrouped, counter-attacked, crossed the canal and were within 65 miles of Cairo before a cease-fire was organized by the U.N.  The Egyptians had in fact been thoroughly humiliated, but that’s not what our “educated” lecturer believed. 

Willful ignorance combined with fevered jihad provides fertile soil in the Middle East for the terrorist efforts against us.  And when we blind ourselves by leaking our secrets and exposing our intelligence assets overseas, we are inviting murderous attacks on American cities.