Update 6/10/08 - Horowitz and Ben Johnson say they are offering "$500 to any critic of the war who has written for a reputable publication and wants to challenge our thesis." Contact [email protected] to sign up.
- If anyone can refute the major points David Horowitz makes in the article below I would be glad to read those arguments. If no one can refute Horowitz's points, then the Democratic party has gotten away with snookering the nation, and most assuredly has no right to the White House, or the control of Congress. Herewith selections from Horowitz's article with my emphases: Starting in July 2003, just three months
into the war in Iraq, the Democratic National Committee ran a national
TV ad whose message was: “Read his lips: President Bush Deceives the
American People. This was the beginning of a five-year, unrelenting
campaign to persuade Americans and their allies that “Bush lied, people
died,” that the war was “unnecessary” and “Iraq was no threat.” In
other words, for five years, the leaders of the Democratic Party have
been telling Americans, America’s allies and America’s enemies that
their country was an aggressor nation, which had violated international
law, and was in effect the “bad guy” in the war with the Saddam Hussein
regime. The first principle of psychological
warfare campaigns is to destroy the moral character of the opposing
commander-in-chief and discredit his nation’s cause. Yet this is a
perfect summary of the campaign that has been waged for the length of
this war by the entire Democratic Party leadership, Joe Lieberman being
an honorable exception who was driven out of his party as a result. The one saving grace for Democrats would
be if their charges were true – if they were deceived into supporting
the war, and if they had turned against it only because they realized
their mistake. But this charge is demonstrably false. In fact, the claim that Bush lied in
order to dupe Democrats into supporting the war is itself the biggest
lie of the war. Every Democratic Senator who voted for the war had on
his or her desk before the vote a 100-page report, called “The National
Intelligence
. . . In the
last five years the Democratic Party has crossed the line from
criticism of war policy to fundamental sabotage of the war itself, a
position no American party has taken until now.
Estimate,” which summarized all America’s intelligence on
Iraq that was used to justify the war. We live in a democracy;
consequently, the opposition party has access to all our secrets.
Democrats sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which oversees all
of America’s intelligence agencies. If any Democrat on that committee,
including Senator John Kerry, had requested any intelligence
information Iraq, he or she would have had that information on his or
desk within 24 hours. The self-justifying claim that Bush lied to
hoodwink the Democrats is a fraudulent charge with no basis in reality.
The Democrats changed their views on the
war for one reason and one reason alone: In June 2003, a far-left
Democrat named Howard Dean was poised to win the Democratic Party
presidential nomination by running on the claim that America was the
bad guy in the war in Iraq, and he would get us out. The charge that Iraq was no threat is
another false claim of the Democratic attack on America’s war to defend
itself. Typical of Democratic Party leaders, former vice president Al
Gore now says that “Iraq posed no threat” because it was a “fragile and
unstable” nation. But if this were true, the same argument would apply
to Afghanistan on September 10, 2001. Afghanistan is half the size of
Iraq and a much poorer and unstable nation; it has no oil and its
government did not invade two countries and use chemical weapons on its
own citizens as Saddam did. Yet by providing a safe harbor to
terrorists, Afghanistan made possible the murder of 3,000 Americans in
half an hour and allowed Osama bin Laden to do what the Germans and the
Japanese failed to accomplish in six years of the Second World War:
kill Americans on the American soil. That’s why in February 2002, a
year before the war in Iraq, Al Gore was saying that “Iraq is a
virulent threat in a class by itself” and that President Bush should
“push the limit” to do what was necessary to deal with Saddam Hussein. But the most self-serving and deceptive
of the lies told by the Democratic leadership is this: you can support
the troops and not support the war. No you can’t. You can’t tell a
19-year old, who is risking his young life in Fallujah and who is
surrounded by terrorists who want to kill him, that he shouldn’t be
there in the first place; that he’s with the “bad guys” – the
aggressors, the occupiers, who have no moral right to be Iraq. You
can’t do that and not undermine his morale, encourage his
enemies, deprive him of allies and put him in danger. And that is
exactly what the Democrats have done – and all the Democrats have done
– in five years of America’s war to deny the terrorists victory in
Iraq. Such a party is unfit to lead this nation in war. To place it in
a position to do so would be to invite a tragedy of epic proportions. David Horowitz is the author with Ben Johnson of Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined the War on Terror Before and After 9/11, just published by Spence Publishing.