Five Years Since Saddam's Seizure (Obama inherits a safer world from Bush)

Five years ago this week, something remarkable happened, which has been conveniently forgotten: On December 13, 2003, one of history’s worst dictators, Saddam Hussein, was captured by U.S. troops.

America awakened to the news on Sunday, December 14, as a grateful President George W. Bush readied for church. In fact, the secular left had become so ferocious, so emotional, and so uncharitable that Bush decided to skip church to avoid images of going to a house of worship just after Saddam’s capture. His staff feared a New York Times editorial with a title to the effect, “Bush Thanks Jesus After Saddam’s Capture.”

Saddam Hussein, who had asked his men to fight the “mother of all battles” against Americans, had dug a hole near a farmhouse and hid. During the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam set up lines of fire to keep frightened troops from retreating against the mightiest military in history. Army deserters were penalized with ear amputations. Saddam asked Arab brothers to be suicide bombers. Now, when it was his turn to fight, the Butcher of Baghdad hoisted his arms in the air, not reaching for the pistol in his holster.

Colonel James Hickey said U.S. Special Forces were seconds from pitching a grenade into Saddam’s hole but stopped when the despot held up his hands and said in English: “I am Saddam Hussein, I am the president of Iraq and I want to negotiate.” They replied sarcastically, “President Bush sends his regards,” and led Saddam away.

The press conference formally announcing the capture was a moving moment. “Ladies and gentlemen,” announced an emotional L. Paul Bremer III, administrator of Iraq’s governing coalition, “We got him.” The room became positively electric when video of a bedraggled Saddam appeared. The Iraqi reporters couldn’t control their emotions; they wailed and wept tears of joy.

Dr. Adnan Pachachi, acting president of Iraq’s Governing Council, declared a national holiday. His council’s official statement read: “We thank God the tyrant has been arrested.” An Iraqi reporter followed Pachachi by thanking “the brother Americans” in the name of Allah. Another Iraqi reporter was so overwhelmed that he couldn’t formulate a question.

The Iraqi press, made up of hundreds of emergent newspapers in the wake of Saddam’s fall—the first fruits of freedom in 35 years—now fully demonstrated to the world that newfound liberty. Iraqi writer Abd Al-Hamid Al-Sa’ih called Saddam’s seizure the “mother of all arrests,” writing: “His friends believed that he would resist like the knights until the last poisonous bullet in his conscience. But nothing of this sort happened.”

Iraqi and Arab writers alike focused on Saddam’s surrender, calling the “beast” and “Prince of Darkness” a coward, a “hyena with no teeth,” noting that his sons and even grandson fought more valiantly. The leading independent Iraqi daily Al-Zaman editorialized, “The fall of Saddam is complete and the Sun has returned to shine on Iraq.” Abd Al-Bassit Al-Naqqash, the editor-in-chief of the daily Al-‘Ahd Al-Jadid, wrote an editorial called, “The Blessed Editorial,” where he asserted: “This is the clearest and most beautiful morning in my country, Mesopotamia.”

Amazingly, though, not everyone was happy. Howard Dean, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, and a rallying point for hatred of George Bush, was characteristically displeased. “The capture of Saddam has not made America safer,” Dean snarled.

That reaction turned out to be quite significant. Howard Dean’s insatiable displeasure symbolized what lay ahead for Bush.

Unfortunately, 2005 and 2006 were bloody years for U.S. troops reconstructing Iraq—prior to the remarkable turnaround in 2007. To Bush’s permanent detriment, the media that went wild with every nugget of bad news in 2005-06 did not counterbalance its coverage with the flow of excellent news from 2007-08. Further, because of unrelenting attacks by vicious opponents, and, more so, because of his maddening inability to effectively respond and communicate his vision, President Bush’s popularity took a freefall from which it never recovered.

The seizure of Saddam in December 2003 illustrates this in a nutshell: A genuinely fair, unbiased media, as well as genuine, honest critics, should have hailed the wondrous capture—and Saddam’s subsequent execution and removal from the land of the living. For his part, President Bush should have served up this reminder repeatedly as the liberal media and critics did not. The president’s communications team—assuming one ever existed—should have constantly promoted images like this (another was the fall of Saddam’s statue in April 2003) as the visual equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They did not, and their president’s support crumbled like that wall.

In the end, the leader who benefits the most is Barack Obama. He will reap the huge plus of an Iraq without Saddam, much like the first George Bush handed to another Democratic presidential successor an oil-rich Kuwait without Saddam. Not only is Saddam guaranteed to never return but—also once unthinkable—his criminally insane would-be successors, sons Uday and Qusay, are gone forever, as are the world’s onetime most-wanted terrorists harbored in Iraq: Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, and Al-Zarqawi, to name a few. All are dead for one reason alone: George W. Bush invaded Iraq.

And now, we can sit back in amusement and amazement at the spectacle of Barack Obama—with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state—pursuing the same plan in Iraq as George W. Bush, with the screaming left not uttering a peep of protest.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins, 2006) and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

Stand By......

Got this from a friend at work; not sure how old it is, but the concepts are current....very interesting, sobering, and worth passing to your loved ones...don’t be alarmed; be vigilant! Read especially the part about having a family game plan; we need to do the same thing here!

Juval Aviv was the Israeli Agent upon whom the movie ‘Munich’ was based. He was Golda Meir’s bodyguard—she appointed him to track down and bring to justice the Palestinian terrorists who took the Israeli athletes hostage and killed them during the Munich Olympic Games. (Aviv’s bio is noted at end.)

He predicted the London subway bombing on the Bill O’Reilly show on Fox News stating publicly that it would happen within a week. At the time, O’Reilly laughed and mocked him saying that in a week he wanted him back on the show. But, unfortunately, within a week the terrorist attack had occurred.

Now for his future predictions. He predicts the next terrorist attack on the U.S. will occur within the next few months. Forget hijacking airplanes, because he says terrorists will NEVER try and hijack a plane again as they know the people onboard will never go down quietly again. Aviv believes our airport security is a joke—that we have been reactionary rather than proactive in developing strategies that are truly effective. For example:

1) Our airport technology is outdated. We look for metal, and the new explosives are made of plastic.

2) He talked about how some idiot tried to light his shoe on fire. Because of that, now everyone has to take off their shoes. A group of idiots tried to bring aboard liquid explosives. Now we can’t bring liquids on board. He says he’s waiting for some suicidal maniac to pour liquid explosive on his underwear; at which point, security will have us all traveling naked! Every strategy we have is ‘reactionary. ‘

3) We only focus on security when people are heading to the gates. Aviv says that if a terrorist attack targets airports in the future, they will target busy times on the front end of the airport when/where people are checking in. It would be easy for someone to take two suitcases of explosives, walk up to a busy check-in line, ask a person next to them to watch their bags for a minute while they go to the restroom, and then detonate the bags BEFORE security even gets involved. In Israel , security checks bags BEFORE people can even ENTER the airport.

Aviv says the next terrorist attack here in America is imminent and will involve suicide bombers and non-suicide bombers in places where large groups of people congregate. (I. E., Disneyland, Las Vegas casinos, big cities (New York, San Francis-co, Chicago, etc.) and that it will also include shopping malls, subways in rush hour, train stations, etc., as well as rural America this time (Wyoming, Montana, etc.).

The attack will be characterized by simultaneous detonations around the country (terrorists like big impact), involving at least 5-8 cities, including rural areas. Aviv says terrorists won’t need to use suicide bombers in many of the larger cities, because at places like the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, they can simply valet park a car loaded with explosives and walk away.

Aviv says all of the above is well known in intelligence circles, but that our U. S.. government does not want to ‘alarm American citizens’ with the facts.

The world is quickly going to become ‘a different place,’ and issue like ‘global warming’ and political correctness will become totally irrelevant.

On an encouraging note, he says the terrorists who want to destroy America will not use sophisticated weapons. They like to use suicide as a front-line approach. It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s effective; and they have an infinite abundance of young militants more than willing to ‘meet their destiny.’

He also says the next level of terrorists, over which America should be most concerned, will not be coming from abroad. But will be, instead, ‘homegrown’ - having attended and been educated in our own schools and universities right here in the U. S. He says to look for ‘students’ who frequently travel back and forth to the Middle East . These young terrorists will be most dangerous because they will know our language and will fully understand the habits of Americans; but that we Americans won’t know/understand a thing about them.

Aviv says that, as a people, Americans are unaware and uneducated about the terroristic threats we will, inevitably, face. America still has only a handful of Arabic and Farsi speaking people in our intelligence networks, and Aviv says it is critical that we change that fact - SOON.
So, what can America do to protect itself? From an intelligence perspective, Aviv says the U.S. needs to stop relying on satellites and technology for intelligence. We need to, instead, follow Israel’s, Ireland’s, and England’s hands-on examples of human intelligence, both from an infiltration perspective as well as to trust ‘aware’ citizens to help.

We need to engage and educate ourselves as citizens; however, our U. S. government continues to treat us, its citizens, ‘like babies.’ Our government thinks we ‘can’t handle the truth’ and is concerned that we’ll panic if we understand the realities of terrorism. Aviv says this is a deadly mistake.

Aviv recently created/executed a security test for our Congress, by placing an empty briefcase in five well-traveled spots in five major cities. The results? Not one person called 911 or sought a policeman to check it out. In fact, in Chicago , someone tried to steal the briefcase!

In comparison, Aviv says that citizens of Israel are so well ‘trained that an unattended bag or package would be reported in seconds by citizen(s) who know to publicly shout, ‘Unattended Bag.’ The area would be quickly & calmly cleared by the citizens themselves.. But, unfortunately, America hasn’t been yet ‘hurt enough’ by terrorism for their government to fully understand the need to educate its citizens or for the government to understand that it’s their citizens who are, inevitably, the best first-line of defense against terrorism.

Aviv also was concerned about the high number of children here in America who were in preschool and kindergarten after 9/11, who were ‘lost’ without parents being able to pick them up, and about ours schools that had no plan in place to best care for the students until parents could get there. (In New York City , this was days, in some cases!)

He stresses the importance of having a plan, that’s agreed upon within your family, to respond to in the event of a terroristic emergency. He urges parents to contact their children’s schools and demand that the schools, too, develop plans of actions, as they do in Israel .

Does your family know what to do if you can’t contact one another by phone? Where would you gather in an emergency? He says we should all have a plan that is easy enough for even our youngest children to remember and follow.

Aviv says that the U S. government has in force a plan that, in the event of another terrorist attack, will immediately cut-off EVERYONE’s ability to use cell phones, blackberries, etc., as this is the preferred communication source used by terrorists and is often the way that their bombs are detonated. How will you communicate with your loved ones in the event you cannot speak? You need to have a plan.

Aviv’s Bio as follows:

He holds an M.A. in Business from Tel Aviv University and is President and CEO of Interfor, Inc., an international corporate intelligence and investigations firm. Interfor, Inc. is now based in New York, with offices around the world. It was founded in 1979 and provides foreign and domestic intelligence services to legal, corporate, and financial communities around the world. Interfor, Inc. also conducts investigations into terrorism, and Mr. Aviv now serves as a special consultant to the U. S. Congress, and other policy makers, here within the U.. S. on issues of terrorism, fraud, and money laundering. Interfor’s services encompass white-collar crime investigations, asset search and recovery, corporate due diligence, litigation support, fraud investigations, internal compliance investigations, and security and vulnerability assessments. Since its inception, Interfor’s asset investigation services have recovered over $2 billion worldwide for its clients.

A leading authority on terrorist networks, Mr. Aviv served as lead investigator for Pan Am Airways into the Pan Am 103-Lockerbie terrorist bombing. He was featured in the recent film, Munich , as the leader of the Israeli team that tracked down the terrorists who kidnapped the Israeli Olympic team. Before founding Interfor, Mr. Aviv served as an officer in the Israel Defense Force (Major, retired) leading an elite Commando/Intelligence Unit, and was later selected by the Israeli Secret Service (Mossad) to participate in a number of intelligence special operations, serving in many countries in the late 1960s and 1970s.

While working as a consultant with El Al, Mr. Aviv surveyed the existing security measures in place and updated El Al’s security program, making El Al the safest airline in business today. Most recently, Mr.. Aviv wrote a book entitled, ‘Staying Safe: The Complete Guide to Protecting Yourself, Your Family, and Your Business.’ (2004, Harper Resource)

He has been a featured guest on ABC Nightline, FOX News, CNN, BBC Newsnight, ZDF (German National Television), and RAI (Italian National Television)- -and has been featured in numerous articles in major magazines and newspapers worldwide.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.