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Contributors
Cliff Kincaid- Contributor
Cliff Kincaid, serves as editor of the Accuracy
in Media (AIM)
Report. A veteran journalist and media critic, Cliff has
appeared on the Fox News programs Hannity & Colmes and
The O'Reilly Factor, where he debated O'Reilly on global
warming, the death penalty,
and the homosexual agenda. He was a guest co-host on CNN's Crossfire
(filling in for Pat Buchanan) in the 1980s, where he confronted
the then-Libyan Ambassador to the U.N. with evidence of Libyan
involvement in international terrorism. Through his America's
Survival, Inc., organization (www.usasurvival.org), he has been
an advocate on behalf of the families of victims of terrorism
and has published reports and held conferences critical of the
United Nations. His articles have appeared in the Washington
Post, Washington Times, Chronicles, Human Events, Insight, and
other publications. He served on the staff of Human Events for
several years and was an editorial writer and newsletter editor
for former National Security Council staffer Oliver North at
his Freedom Alliance educational foundation. He has written or
co-authored nine books on media and cultural affairs and foreign
policy issues. Cliff is married and has three sons.[go to
Kincaid index]
 O'Reilly
Versus Michael Moore
Bill
misses his chance...
[Cliff Kincaid] 7/29/04
A much-anticipated
debate between Bill O’Reilly and Michael
Moore ended in Moore’s favor on Tuesday night when he got
O’Reilly to say that going to war in Iraq over weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) was “a mistake.” O’Reilly
seemed pleased with the exchange but it demonstrates how supporters
of the war have ceded too much ground to critics who want Bush
voted out of the office because “he lied.”
O’Reilly’s performance had the unfortunate effect
of validating John Kerry’s question to a Senate committee
about the war in Vietnam, “How do you ask a man to be the
last man to die for a mistake?” If the main reason for
going to war in Iraq was based on a mistake, how indeed do you
justify the sacrifice of hundreds dead and thousands wounded?
O’Reilly said it was worthwhile to liberate a country from
a dictator. But there are plenty of dictatorships around the
world and hundreds of millions of oppressed people. The U.S.
cannot and should not try to liberate all of them. But the U.S.
should act when there is a national security threat to the American
people. O’Reilly should have taken note of the evidence
which continues to demonstrate that it would have been foolish,
especially after 9/11, to have ignored Saddam’s threat
to America and the world.
In the exchange,
Moore pressed O’Reilly on what he would
tell the parents of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq: “And
there was no threat, was there?” O’Reilly replied, “It
was a mistake.” When Moore countered, “I don’t
think that is good enough,” O’Reilly agreed, saying, “I
don’t think its good enough either for those parents.”
O’Reilly’s response is not good enough. It is demoralizing
to these families—and our troops—to call the war “a
mistake” under any circumstances. The “mistake” is
in thinking that because stockpiles of weapons have yet to be
discovered, the Iraqi regime wasn’t a national security
threat to the U.S. O’Reilly neglected to mention that reports
from the Senate Intelligence Committee and a British investigative
panel have confirmed that there was reason to believe that Saddam
was seeking uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapons program.
Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s claims to the contrary
have been completely discredited.
It’s not as if Saddam’s pursuit of the nuclear
bomb was anything new. Iraq had long pursued nuclear weapons.
The construction of the Osirak reactor, bombed by Israel, was
part of that program. In 1991, as noted by the Washington
Post,
freshly seized Iraqi documents disclosed the existence of a “crash
program” by Iraq to build a nuclear bomb. However, the
CIA knew nothing about it.
Writing in the Guardian,
William Shawcross points out that Charles Duelfer, the new
head of Washington’s Iraq Survey Group
(ISG), says the evidence gathered since the war shows that Iraq
was “preserving and expanding its knowledge to design and
develop nuclear weapons.”
While Saddam may not
have had “stockpiles” of weapons
at the time of the war in March 2003, Shawcross argues that, “to
assert that there was therefore no WMD threat is to trivialize
the issue.” He explains, “Intelligence has to look
at form. Saddam’s history over the past 14 years was one
of attempting to obtain and conceal WMD.” He added, “Given
all we knew of Saddam by 2003, the conclusion had to be that
he still possessed a residual WMD capability and was determined
to restore his original capacities—but it was not possible
to determine how far he had got.”
Regarding the WMD,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair says, “I
have to accept that we haven’t found them, that we may
not find them ... We don’t know what has happened to them.
They could have been removed. They could have been hidden. They
could have been destroyed.” Blair’s statement is
factually correct. It would be unwise to compound one alleged
intelligence failure with another by coming to the premature
conclusion that the WMD will never be found or never existed.
During a recent interview
on Cal Thomas’s Fox News Channel
program, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pointed out that, “A
great many people have been rushing around trying to prove the
negative. The conventional wisdom has concluded that the negative
has been proved, that is to say, that there were not stocks of
weapons of mass destruction. I think it’s hard to conclude
that. We keep finding that there are things we didn’t know.
We may very well find, as we go forward, that there are things
that we don’t know today.” Another ISG report is
due in September. CRO
copyright
2004 Accuracy in Media
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