Did You Oppose the

  
   

  

Right Hook
JJ McCullough, OP Columnist

 

People naturally have short memories, but when it comes
to political matters if often seems like the public’s memory
is even shorter than usual. Because politics, like law, relies
so heavily on past precedent to create policies for the
future, blatant historical revisionism frequently becomes an
attractive partisan tool for the political demagogues of the
world.

The Iraq war is not going well at present—at this point
one hardly needs to be a liberal to say so. As the war con-
tinues to evolve into a greater partisan liability for
President Bush, people inevitably want to re-examine the
original pretexts for the 2003 invasion itself. It’s here where
the liberals spring to attention.

The left knows if their particular narrative about the
wat’s origins can become the universally accepted history,
then the war itself will forever be defined as a failure, with
liberal viewpoints in the right. The plan worked remarkably
well during the Vietnam years. Today, when people re-tell
the stories of that war, the heroes are almost inevitably the
protestors and detractors who opposed it, the villains
always the Republican president and his advisors who

opinions /

War? Can you remember why?

waged it.

As the left tries to entrench its own history of the Iraq
war, there has lately been a far amount of re-exploration of
the WMD issue in many media outlets. The purported
existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, as we all
know, served as a major justification for the American
invasion in 2003. The failure to find any such weapons in
the aftermath thus presents the Bush administration’s clear-
est failure to date. As such, the left has predictably seized
upon this embarrassment, and warped it through a variety
of revisionist tactics so they can best exploit the existing
public outrage over the matter.

The trendy left-wing position is now to argue that
“everyone knew” Saddam never had the weapons, and thus
retroactively justify their own opposition to the war on
those grounds. It could be a very effective strategy if suc-
cessful. After all, the history books will not record
President Bush very favorably if the conventional wisdom
depicts him as the architect of the great WMD lie of 703.

The problem, however, is that “everyone” did not
know. Though the matter may seem cut-and-dry now, the
fact remains that prior to the Iraq war itself the existence
of some degree of Iragi WMD arsenal was largely taken
for granted. Politicians of every ideological stripe from
every nation in the world were largely in agreement that
the Saddam possessed certain deadly, banned weapons. I
could quote dozens of liberal politicians, from Gerhard
Schroder in Germany to Hillary Clinton in the US, but the
words of our own foreign minister, Bill Graham, perhaps
summed it up best when, during a March 2003 session of
parliament, he declared that “Saddam Hussein has acquired
weapons of mass destruction. This is clearly what started
this and what brought us to where we are.”

The argument regarding the war at the diplomatic level
was thus not whether or not such weapons existed (with a

reply in the positive authorizing war), but rather what the
response /o the existence should be. The answer given by the
Chretien government of the day (and a handful of other
European regimes) was that we should do nothing, save
for perhaps an indefinite continuation of UN inspections.

I debated the merits of the Iraq war extensively during
the run-up to the invasion- including in these very pages—
and I remember well the rhetoric that much of the left was
using at the time in regards to the WMD issue. Far from
denying the existence of such weapons, their line tended to
be varying degrees of “so what.” So what if Iraq has
WMDs, they argued, doesn’t America herself posses far
worse? Are not the WMDs of Israel and Pakistan far more
dangerous? Didn’t the Reagan administration give the
WMDs to Saddam in the first place? Do we really want to
see biological weapons used by Hussein? And so on and so
forth. Some cranks even speculated that Bush himself has
probably planted the WMDs in Iraq ahead of time so they
could be found easily and justify the mission—an absurd
conspiracy to be sure, but even this one assumes there still
were WMDs in Iraq.

The fact remains that in the run-up to the 2003 inva-
sion left-wing critics opposed the war on a variety of other
grounds, with arguments that were far more hysterical and
paranoid than the moderate line they are taking today. Back
in the spring of that year conservatives were subjected to a
number of fearful tales about Bush’s oil war, American
imperialism, and the evil neo-con agenda of global domi-
nation. There were no rational critiques, no calm analyses,
and no constructive alternatives, just shallow anti-
Americanism, deranged conspiracy theories, and far-left
demagoguery.

Looking at the situation in Iraq today, critics will
scream, “TI told you so.” In reality, they told us nothing.

 

Is it Hot in Here...

Left Overs

lain Reeve, OP Fella

 

 

I have this little theory. I think that scientists secretly get
together, in a bunker or castle or something, and organize
messages of certain doom. I think they bash their substan-
tial noggins together and suss out what kind of gibber-
speak they’re going to use to justify the latest nature boo-
gie-man that is ensuring the end of all humanity. They then
make up a schedule of when they will release these mes- -
sages of doom to ensure that we get a new one on a fairly
regular basis.

And why do they do this? Because scientists are evil,
vindictive, little people trying to get revenge on humanity

for making fun of them in grade ten. They do this by mak-
ing us think we are all doomed. Which we totally aren’t!
Right?

Ok, as nice as it would be if scientists were just screw-
ing with us, chances are they didn’t go to school for like 12
years for nothing. No, as it turns out, scientists are really
smart and what they have to tell us should be taken more
as motherly advice than as motherly nagging.

Last week a pair of stories from the scientific commu-
nity got me a little hot under the collar—insert comic
drum hit here. “Mankind is changing the climate.” These
were blunt words from one Professor Sir David King, a
man so distinguished he is a doctor and a knight. The
good Sir Dr. was the head of a study which, taking sam-
ples in the American Rockies, found that the past year’s
increase in atmospheric CO2 levels has been the largest on
record. This adds to evidence that levels of build up are
not decreasing; they are in fact increasing at an alarming
rate. This shows that the international emissions regime is
still failing to keep up with the reality of the problem.

As good as the Lancelot PhD was at making us feel the
end is nigh, us Canadians are not so bad at forecasting the
end of all things sacred either. Veteran Doomologists at
Environment Canada confirmed what anyone east of
Hope and north of Squamish already knew—this was the
hottest winter our fair nation has ever seen. Temperatures
averaged 3.9 degrees centigrade above the average, making

this not just the warmest winter, but, on average, the
warmest season ever. In a stable condition, this sort of
irregularity should happen every 100 years or so. But con-
sidering that, with the exception of the springs of 2002
and 2004, our temperatures have been above average for
eight years running there is a clear message: the Great
White North may be showing a little more green in the not
so distant future.

Sure, I’m beating a dead horse. We all know the envi-
ronment is in trouble, at least to some degree. But, as with
most things, we seem totally put off by the idea of doing
anything about it. I would be very happy to see one—
JUST ONE—piece of environmentally friendly legislation
in this country, anything where this type of information is
priority number one.

Now, I’m not the type of guy to put all faith in the
authority of science, but it’s hard to ignore a consistent
drone of bad news over a decade or three. But maybe that
is the problem; maybe the consistency of the doom stories
has caused people to change the channel, turn the page,
and practice their night moves. Perhaps what the suppos-
edly disengaged scientific community should do, instead of
just throwing out the doom prophecies and letting us read
or ignore them, is give us a damn solution. What we need
are some political scientists who are actually scientists;
instead, we have politicians who can ignore science and sci-
entists who can ignore the “how” of fixing problems.

Continued: P.8