Who Makes the Terrorists Hate Us?

What other nation in history has obsessively investigated itself during time of war? When are we going to quit beating ourselves up and move down the road?

Just a few weeks ago, we were treated to Phase 2 of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report analyzing our failures of prewar intelligence for the millionth time. The Committee — with a nominal majority of Republicans and a working majority of antiwar members — reported that the administration had been wrong in alleging a relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

As Republican Chairman Pat Roberts made clear, the working majority cherry picked the evidence to conclude there was no relationship when the weight of the evidence indicated there was — going back 10 years, no less. Condoleezza Rice confirmed that there were always dissenting opinions, but that the prevailing view among our intelligence agencies was that there was indeed a relationship.

The committee demonstrated its absurdity elsewhere, too, when it concluded, preposterously, that Saddam didn’t consider the United States an enemy because he said so during his debriefing. The committee chose to believe that obvious lie from a lying, murderous tyrant over his consistently contradictory statements and behavior over the previous decade.

So we’re paying federal dollars to be told we must ignore our lying eyes and ears: that we must conveniently forget Saddam’s myriad verbal jihads against the United States because he later made the self-serving statement that he hadn’t considered us an enemy? This is too much. You might also recall that we fought a war against this maniac in 1991. I suppose he didn’t consider us the enemy then either, or when he shot at our planes in the no-fly zones.

The same kind of counterintuitive, nonsensical analysis has surfaced again this week through yet another leak from the treasonous New York Times, which selectively reported that an April 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concluded the Iraq war has exacerbated worldwide terrorism.

Of course, this little leak wasn’t designed to feed into the Democrats’ November election propaganda message, now was it? Surely you’ve heard the line many times before: President Bush diverted resources from capturing Osama bin Laden — the only terrorist chieftain in the non-global war on terror — to pursue his recklessly quixotic vendetta against Iraq. This unprovoked, preemptive strike on the non-threatening Saddam has caused Muslims the world over to hate us and swelled the ranks of terrorism.

When will these tone-deaf people get it through their heads that Islamic extremists have hated us since before the flood (figuratively, of course)? When will they comprehend that Osama attacked us before we attacked Iraq?

Besides, who would expect that our attack on Iraq would endear us to the enemy? It’s not like we sent them a love letter. But if Iraq were not a terrorist-supporting state, why would the terrorists care? Why have they invested so much of their resources to disrupt the Iraqi freedom experiment? Why are they trying to foment a civil war there if Iraq has nothing to do with the global jihad?

More importantly, why does the left keep dredging this stuff up? The answer is they have no alternative plan for Iraq and they figure the only way they can make headway on the national security issue is to continue to paint Bush as a liar, which brings me to the main point.

Democrats have been telling us nonstop that President Bush’s policies — his alleged unilateralism in general, and his attack on Iraq specifically — have caused an otherwise loving enemy to hate and wage war against us. If that’s true — which it isn’t — how much more true is it that the feelings of the Muslim world (and the European left) toward the United States have deteriorated as a direct result of the Democrats’ constant lies about President Bush?

If they truly believe our policies have intensified the hatred of Islamic extremists toward the United States, then why don’t they quit telling the world — when they know better — that President Bush lied about Iraqi WMD and about Saddam’s relationship with Al Qaeda? Why don’t they quit falsely charging that it is the covert policy of this administration to torture enemy combatant detainees at Gitmo? Why don’t they quit saying that President Bush attacked Iraq for its oil?

Easy. They either don’t believe negative world opinion of the United States spawns terrorism as they claim, or they don’t care whether it does or not — at least they don’t care as much about that as they do regaining political power.