In a message dated 9/1/2007 10:04:21 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Mario thank you so very much for
listing all the times Saddam saidthat quote I referred to, removing any
doubt that I was absolutelycorrect. Tom accused decorated war veterans
of being cowardly, and he and tinkered with Saddam's 1990 words to give
weight to his "argument." Had Tom used Cheney's 1994 interview
Click here: YouTube - Cheney '94: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire
C-SPAN <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I> or an essay by
George Sr. and Brent Scowcroft from 1998, those same veterans would
have merited heroic status for speaking out to save lives as they did in
2005. That Bush/Scowcroft essay oddly disappeared from Time magazine's
site but The memory Hole has it all, including a picture of the original
page: Click here: The Memory Hole >Reasons Not to Invade Iraq, by
George Bush Sr. <http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm>
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=========================== Here's how Tom baits, switches, and
stonewalls for those new here. He underestimates the intelligence of
those trying to follow these threads which, at times, do try one's
patience. 1. My major criticism of Tom's Dec. 2005 TriCity column was
that it called into question the patriotism of those Tom attaches the
phrase "cut and run" to.: "Kerry, Clark and company" and, in
Swift-Boat smear mode, questions their patriotism. That
"company" includes Congressman John Murtha and presumably former
Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, both decorated war veterans, and anyone
else who questions the neo-cons' approach to fighting terrorism.
Later in the same column, Tom's exact words and quotation marks:
Saddam Hussein, in a meeting with Valerie Plame's husband Joe
Wilson, told him that America wouldn't succeed in the Middle East
because we "wouldn't have the stomach to see 10,000 dead
American soldiers in the desert." He overestimated Democrats. 2.
As a minor side issue in checking sources, I couldn't find those exact
words in quotes: Tom wouldn't supply the source. I found Saddam's
words on page 105 of Wilson's book: If, on the other hand, the United
States reacted militarily to the Iraqi invasion [of Kuwait], Saddam
scoffed that we had neither the tenacity to remain engaged as long as it
would take to drive Iraq from Kuwait, nor the political will to sustain
the "spilling of the blood of ten thousand soldiers in the Arabian
desert." 3. BUT it was said 15 years ago about a different war. Tom
was writing about a war in which we had already unseated Saddam and
proved we had the guts. Quotation marks on a paraphrase is a minor
slip up. Not mentioning the 15 years difference is misleading in a
major fashion. Oh what weeping and wailing we would hear if we held
Bush to his not being interested in "nation building" only a few years
before trying to impose democracy in Iraq. 4. Main issue: Calling
decorated war veterans unpatriotic because they didn't support Bush's
war strategies. 5. Tom stonewalls to this day by raising the quotation
marks issue; he avoids discussing why he dishonored those war veterans
exercising their right to speak out which they presumably fought for and
earned.
