Why Do They Feel Vindicated By This News?

I've been flipping through BlogExplosion, one of those "Buy Credits or Surf Other Blogs To Get Visits To You Blog" kind of thing. Realized I had some leftover credits, and decided to see what was out there now.

I've seen several right-wing blogs that have taken the news that Saddam Hussein warned of terrorist attack in the 1990s as vindication for Bush's military operations.

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein told his Cabinet in the mid-1990s that the U.S. would fall victim to terrorists possessing weapons of mass destruction but that Iraq would not be involved, tapes released Saturday at an intelligence summit reveal...

Hussein also said on the tape that he warned British and U.S. officials of an imminent attack employing weapons of mass destruction.

"Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans a long time before August 2 and I told the British as well, I think," Hussein tells then-Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. "I told them that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction."

Okay, so Hussein saw terrorism readying itself to rear it's ugly head in the 1990s, when Clinton was president. And I believe it was Clinton's administration that worked to bolster the intelligence-gathering capabilities and reinforce anti-terrorism agencies. Take a look at excerpts from this (eerily foreshadowing) Mother Jones article written in Sep/Oct 2000:

No agency has benefited as much as the FBI. Under the Clinton administration, the bureau's antiterrorism budget has soared from $78 million to $609 million, while the number of agents devoted to counterterrorism has jumped from 550 to nearly 1,400. Twenty percent of the FBI's budget now goes to fight terrorism, up from just four percent in 1993...

Other federal agencies have carved off smaller but significant slices of the antiterrorism pie. This year alone, seven separate agencies -- FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Defense, Justice, Energy, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services -- are spending $611 million to train and equip local and state police, fire departments, and emergency medical teams. In all, budgets for such "domestic preparedness" programs have skyrocketed from $42.6 million in 1997 to $1.3 billion this year.

At the time it was written, the article suggests that common opinions felt Clinton was too obsessed with terrorism. Perhaps he was, but upon taking office he had to deal with the first Trade Center attack (resulting in arrests and convictions) and later, the USS Cole attack. These operations at the beginning and end of Clinton's administration might have been good reason for the Bush administration to continue the vigilance.

I could go on and bring up the Hart/Rudman Report or the Phoenix Memo as two other examples of why counter/antiterrorist should have been priority #1, but that's not the point of my post. Let's head back to the original CNN article...

The article goes on to state that Hussein and his son-in-law, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, are on tape discussing the rationale for lying to UN inspectors. The underlying issue, however, is whether they had anything at all or were simply talking about how they would handle the UN inspectors IF they ever got anything. I say this, because the article goes on to say:

Kamel defected to Jordan in August 1995, the highest ranking member of Saddam's inner circle to do so. He returned to Iraq in February 1996 and was executed on the orders of Saddam's son, Uday.

The date of the recording is not known. But Kamel told CNN in September 1995: "No, Iraq does not possess any weapons of mass destruction. I am being completely honest about this."

Kamel had defected, made a statement about Iraq's weapons cache, and then got executed by his brother-in-law. Could he have been set up by Hussein (or his son)? I suppose, but the US operations have revealed no WMDs, so it appears that any talk by Hussein of wanting WMDs was simply wishful thinking.

So, in the end, I am left to wonder why right-wing blogs seem to feel this is a sort of vindication, since it looks to me like it does just the opposite, reinforcing the notion that Bush took his eye off the ball and got distracted by the hot dog stand.