Beck To Differ: No, Glenn, liberals were never right on Iraq

by: daniel clark | published: 07 10, 2014

Since Glenn Beck’s June 17th broadcast, liberals have seized on his “admission” that they were right about Iraq. It’s not really an admission, though, if it’s something that he wants to believe anyway.

Beck supported the Iraq War when he was a conservative, which he hasn’t been for quite some time. The new Glenn Beck has contracted Bush Derangement Syndrome, says we should’ve listened to Ron Paul, indulges in paranoid drone fantasies, says our response to terrorism should be to turn inward and love each other, and charges that The Star-Spangled Banner is warmongering propaganda.

As he alienates his conservative listeners, Beck seeks to forge a political realignment by reaching out to the Left. The new dichotomy he presents has “progressives from both parties” on one side, opposed by libertarians, and however many pro-Constitution liberals he imagines exist. Coming from that point of view, for him to “admit” that liberals were right about Iraq is kind of like Pat Buchanan “admitting” that George W. Bush is an Israeli puppet.

Beck credits liberals for saying that “we couldn’t force freedom on people,” but the premise of that criticism is wrong, in that it equates freedom with oppression. It was the terrorists who used force to deter Iraqi citizens from the polls. The Iraqis risked their lives to defy those threats on their own, and not because Americans were applying a superior force to compel them to vote.

Whether or not the Iraqis embrace freedom doesn’t answer the question of whether we should have invaded in the first place. Our objective was to remove Saddam Hussein. The idea of establishing Iraq as a bulwark of republicanism came afterward. For liberals to be right about the war, they must also have been right about Saddam and his regime, but were they?

Liberals said that al-Qaeda would never associate with Saddam, but now we know that Saddam’s Iraqi Intelligence Service met repeatedly with al-Qaeda. We know that he funded organizations closely related to al-Qaeda, that his embassy in Manila collaborated with Filipino al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf, and that he once offered sanctuary to Osama bin Laden.

They doubted such an alliance because they said Saddam was a secularist, and therefore an enemy to radical Islam. You know, Saddam, who declared the 1991 Gulf War to be a “Holy War,” and proved he was alive by broadcasting video of himself bowing on his prayer rug – Saddam, who added the words “Allahu Akbar” to the Iraqi flag in his handwriting, and claimed to have printed a copy of the Quran in his own blood – Saddam, who planned a wave of terror attacks he codenamed “Blessed July,” in which small groups of elite, Iraqi-trained terrorists would be deployed to Kurdistan, Iran and London, that last group being instructed to direct “martyrdom operations” throughout Europe. That Saddam.

They said Bush went to war so he could steal Iraq’s oil. They portrayed Saddam’s military as practically invincible. They accused Bush of planning to bring back the draft. They offended our allies by repeatedly insisting that we had none. They said we should have let containment work, even as Saddam was undermining sanctions through the UN’s Oil for Food program.

They said it was an illegal, undeclared war, when in reality, the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq – which was informally known as the Iraq War Resolution – had passed with much fanfare. They accused Bush of a “rush to war,” even after he gave Saddam 14 months’ warning, allowed him countless opportunities to cooperate with the weapons inspectors, and offered to let him go into exile rather than be forcibly deposed.

Liberals scream “Bush lied,” just because we’ve found fewer of Saddam’s chemical weapons than we’d expected to. They, on the other hand, have been completely and dramatically wrong about everything, for the predictable reason that they assumed the worst about our side, while being charitable in their assumptions about the enemy.

The media rhetorically ask whether the invasion was worth it, all the while concealing just what “it” is. As they’ve pretended to debate the merits of the war in recent months, they’ve made remarkably little mention of Saddam Hussein. That’s not accidental. If people were reminded about all of Saddam’s provocations, the necessity of his removal would be as obvious now as it was then. How fortunate it is for the liberals, then, that they’ve been relieved of any expectation that they face the truth about Iraq, now that Glenn Beck has “admitted” they were right.

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