Day: June 24, 2005

There was nothing off the cuff or accidental about Karl Rove’s statement Wednesday night in which he smeared liberals as being supporters of terrorists because they do not support the war in Iraq.

The comments were intended to light the firestorm that has ensued. Rove knew how the reaction would play out: Liberals would be outraged, conservatives would smirk with satisfaction and the media would report it all pretending it doesn’t know a lie from the truth.

Rove also knew that there is an embedded false element to his bombast (of course) that could cause his whole statement to blow back in his face, in the unlikely even the media – or, God knows, the Democrats – were to notice it.

It is very simple: Liberals weren’t the only ones who opposed the war. In fact, many very well known Republicans oppopsed the war. Some even supsect the elder President Bush believed that taking out Saddam was ill advised. Speaking ostensibly for himself, Bush’s friend and factotum Brent Scrowcroft said as much publicly before the invasion.

Here is a quick round-up of the antiwar conservatives whom Karl Rove, speaking for President George W. Bush, smeared by inference with his invective against Americans who opposed the war in Iraq:

Pat Buchanan, writing in American Cause on Wednesday (June 22, 2005): “From President Bush’s Axis of Evil speech in January 2002 to the invasion in March 2003, some of us argued vehemently and ceaselessly against going to war. We saw no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9-11. We saw no threat from a nation unable even to shoot down a single U.S. plane during 40,000 sorties in the previous decade. We warned that an occupation of Iraq would create our own Lebanon. And so it has.”

William F. Buckley, writing in the New York Times on June 29, 2004,the “godfather of the conservative movement, said, “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”

Bob Novak stated his position against the war several times on CNN’s Crossfire.

Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser under Presidents Gerald Ford and George Bush Sr., said “Don’t attack Saddam. An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counter terrorist campaign we have undertaken.”

Rep. John J. Duncan, (R-TN), speaking on the floor of the House of Represenatives on May 19, 2005: “There never was anything conservative about the war in Iraq. I said from the start that it would mean massive foreign aid, huge deficit spending, and that it was not far to place almost all the entire burden of enforcing U.N. resolutions on our taxpayers and our military. Conservatives have traditionally been the biggest critics of the U.N., and the worst part of all, of course, is all the deaths.All to bring do not an evil man, but one whose military budget was 2/10ths of 1 percent of ours and who was no threat to us whatsoever.”

Dick Armey, former Majority Leader (R-TX) in the House of Representatives, quoted in the New York Times on August 9, 2002, said: “I don’t believe that America will justifiably make an unprovoked attack on another nation. It would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation.”

Charley Reese, according Rep. Duncan, a staunch conservative… wrote that a U.S. attack on Iraq: “is a prescription for the decline and fall of the American empire. Overextension � urged on by a bunch of rabid intellectuals who wouldn’t know one end of a gun from another � has doomed many an empire. Just let the United States try to occupy the Middle East, which will be the practical result of a war against Iraq, and Americans will be bled dry by the costs in both blood and treasure.”

Paul Craig Roberts, according Rep. Duncan, who was one of the highest-ranking Treasury Department officials under President Reagan and now a nationally-syndicated conservative columnist, wrote: “an invasion of Iraq is likely the most thoughtless action in modern history.”

James Webb, according Rep. Duncan, a hero in Vietnam and President Reagan’s Secretary of the Navy, wrote: “The issue before us is not whether the United States should end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared to occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years.”

Tom Pauken, a Vietnam veteran who served as a Reagan Administration official and the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, in a speech at the Foreign Policy Conference in Chicago,in the spring of 2005: “Have we seriously considered the human and material costs to our nation of the pursuit of a foreign policy that seeks to impose our values on the rest of the world? Have we really understood the long term consequences of the abandonment of our traditional view that American foreign policy should be guided by what is in our national interest..?”

Justin Raimondo, an anti-war conservative, who edits the site Antiwar.com, wrote on March 22, 2003, that he had been included in a derisive article about antiwar conservatives written by President Bush’s former bitch-boy, David Frum, an uber patriotic American who is Canadian, that was published on March 19, 2003, in the National Review Online (the article has been removed from the server):

[Frum wrote,] “You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, and Taki Theodoracopulos.”

We are guilty, says Frum, of nothing less than sedition:

“They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.”