Five years ago, President Bush gave Saddam Hussein and his sons a 48-hour ultimatum: Leave Iraq or face the consequences of military conflict. The president told the American people on March 17, 2003, “This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq’s neighbors and against Iraq’s people. The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda.”

Today, the conventional wisdom is that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction and never provided terrorists a safe haven.

After reviewing 600,000 Iraqi documents seized since the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the Pentagon released a report last week saying it had “uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism.” An abstract in the appendices of the report describes the connection between Saddam and the al Qaeda network this way:

Captured Iraqi documents have uncovered evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. While these documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al Qaeda as long as Saddam could have these terrorist–operatives monitored closely. Because Saddam’s security organizations and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some ways, a “de facto” link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime.

Earlier in the report, we read about the safe haven Saddam provided for Ayman al-Zawahiri—the terrorist who later became bin Laden’s number two man:

Saddam’s interest in, and support for, non-Iraqi non-state actors was spread across a wide variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. For years, Saddam maintained training camps for foreign “fighters” drawn from these diverse groups. In some cases, particularly for Palestinians, Saddam was also a strong financial supporter. Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda’s stated goals and objectives.

While this 59-page report received widespread coverage in the major media last week, it was for all the wrong reasons. “Study Finds No Qaeda-Hussein Tie,” wrote the New York Times. The article went on to explain how the Bush administration used the Saddam-al Qaeda link as “rationale” for invading Iraq in 2003.

“Study Discounts Hussein, Al-Qaeda Link,” the Washington Postreportedbefore the study was even released. Based on sources “familiar” with the study, the Post said Saddam “had no direct connection to al-Qaeda.”

At the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes asked, “How can a study offering an unprecedented look into the closed regime of a brutal dictator, with over 1,600 pages of ‘strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism,’ in the words of its authors, receive a wave-of-the-hand dismissal from America’s most prestigious news outlets?” Answer:

All it took was a leak to a gullible reporter, one misleading line in the study’s executive summary, a boneheaded Pentagon press office, an incompetent White House, and widespread journalistic negligence.

We’ve come to expect dishonest reported from the left-wing media, but how do you explain the indifferent response to the report coming out of the White House? William Kristol explains in another Weekly Standard piece:

If you talk to people in the Bush administration, they know the truth about the report. They know that it makes the case convincingly for Saddam’s terror connections. But they’ll tell you (off the record) it’s too hard to try to set the record straight. Any reengagement on the case for war is a loser, they’ll say. Furthermore, once the first wave of coverage is bad, you can never catch up: You give the misleading stories more life and your opponents further chances to beat you up in the media. And as for trying to prevent misleading summaries and press leaks in the first place—that’s hopeless. Someone will tell the media you’re behaving like Scooter Libby, and God knows what might happen next.So, this week’s fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war will bring us countless news stories reexamining the case for war, with the White House essentially pleading nolo contendere.

Character Really Doesn’t Matter

The kerfuffle over Barack Obama’s longtime pastor ramped up to a new level this weekend. Ugly statements from Jeremiah Wright, the man who married the Obamas and baptized their children, surfaced, including this one in 2003, encouraging blacks to condemn the country:

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.

Wright has also said the U.S. “started the aids virus,” and that it invited the 9/11 terrorist attacks by supporting “state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans.” His church has given Louis Farrakhan a lifetime achievement award.

After trying to ignore the issue for a while, Obama’s campaign yesterday condemned the statements. Obama said that Wright was like “an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don’t agree with.”

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Senators Christopher Dodd and Charles Schumer whether they felt Obama’s association with Wright was a problem. Both of them not only said no, and that it was enough for Obama to distance himself from the statements, but they treated Wallace like an ignoramus for trying to make an issue of it.

Schumer said, essentially, These kinds of trivialities won’t matter this election. People are too concerned about the future of this country. They’re going to focus on the real issues. Both senators passed off Wallace’s line of questioning as a cheap “guilt by association” tactic. Schumer compared it to the endorsement of John McCain by John Hagee, an evangelical pastor who has been criticized for anti-Catholic statements. But this isn’t just someone who happens to be endorsing Obama, Wallace responded. This is the man who has provided him spiritual guidance for almost two decades. For as little as we know about Obama, this could be a valuable clue as to the character of this man. Surely you can’t dismiss this as completely irrelevant.

But dismiss it they did, and their apparent response to anyone unwilling to do the same is smug condescension.

“Character doesn’t matter” has become orthodox doctrine among liberals, at least toward other liberals. Almost a decade ago, much of America rose up in indignant defense of a president exposed in sexual misconduct within the White House because it “didn’t have anything to do with whether or not he could do his job.” Today that thinking dismisses even the possibility that the disturbing views of the head of the church a politician has chosen to associate himself with are worth considering.

Behind the Fed’s Unprecedented Move

The U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to provide emergency assistance to Bear Stearns underscores a long-building concern that one failure could spread across the entire financial system.

Regulators are facing an unprecedented and widespread deterioration in many markets. Last summer, the value of risky and exotic securities plummeted in value. Now, even top-rated securities once deemed as safe as Treasuries have hit the skids. Financial firms have written down more than $150 billion of their assets. Some analysts are predicting that losses in various credit markets will reach $600 billion.

For more on the domino theory, go here.

The Daily Mailsays the Bear Stearns announcement caused “panic in the financial markets.” The crisis at the Wall Street giant is raising fears of a new round of turbulence among banks when financial markets reopen on Monday.

Jeremy Tigue, head of global equities at F&C Investments, said: “The question on many analysts’ minds is whether Bear Stearns will become the US Northern Rock.”The worry is that the problems at Bear Stearns will make financial institutions even more reluctant to lend money. This pushes up the cost of loans and mortgages for consumers too.The world’s banks have already suffered more than £100billion of losses because of the financial crisis, and many economists fear this is the tip of the iceberg.What started out as a problem confined to America’s “trailer park” mortgage customers has spread across the whole of its housing market and hit banks from London to China.

For his part, President Bush is unwilling to concede that the U.S. has slipped into a dangerous recession. The Washington Post said this about his speech on Friday:

As President Bush tried to calm the nation’s economic anxiety Friday, he resisted again any suggestion that the country has fallen into recession. “A tough time,” he allowed. “A rough patch,” he agreed. But he has seen tough times and rough patches before, he noted, and “every time, this economy has bounced back better and stronger than before.”

We have a much dimmer view of America’s chances of bouncing back from this “rough patch.”

Israel’s Premise of Misguided Values

The premise on which Israel confronts its Palestinian enemies is all wrong, says Professor Edward Glick in the Washington Times. “In spite of repeated assassinations, barrages and incursions, the terrorists continue to lob rockets and missiles into Israel at will. The principal reason, in their view and in mine, is Israel’s paralytic fear of negative world opinion and of inflicting enemy civilian casualties.”

Years of persecution and pressure from the international community and the mainstream press have demolished the value system of Israel’s leaders. Today, despite being in a life-and-death struggle against a potent enemy, leaders of the Jewish state value (fear) world opinion and the safety of civilian casualties over the values of their own people, national safety and even Jewish statehood. It’s a suicidal mentality. Glick continues:

If the Jewish state does not conquer its fears and inflict more, not less, collateral damage in the places from which the terror emanates, it will surely die. Those who wish and work for Israel’s destruction do not shrink from killing innocent civilians. So they are unimpressed by Israel’s failed policy of limiting and apologizing for such casualties, and then begging for forgiveness from a world that masks its politically incorrect anti-Semitism with politically correct anti-Zionism.

The misguided and illogical value system underpinning Israel’s political and military policy is further condemned by history.

Israel’s enemies remember, even if Israel’s leaders do not, that Germany, Italy and Japan surrendered in 1945 only because Allied might overwhelmed them and made them lose their will to fight and to be led by political and military losers. Israel’s enemies remember, even if Israel’s political and military leaders do not, that the Axis Powers were defeated only because the Allied Powers applied slow, sustained and superior force over a number of very bloody years. And Israel’s enemies remember, even if Israel’s political and military leaders do not, that avoiding enemy civilian casualties was never a serious issue for America’s Franklin Roosevelt, Russia’s Joseph Stalin or Britain’s Winston Churchill.

As long as Israeli leaders value world opinion over the value the Jewish people place on their own lives and statehood, peace and safety will forever elude the nation. More importantly, in addition to neglecting the values of their own citizenry, Israel’s leadership is failing to value, to any extent, the Rock of Israel. More than anything or anyone, Israel’s survival depends on the Being responsible for not just the Jewish state, but the Jewish identity.

Democracy, Iran-Style

Conservatives in Iran held on to a 70-percent parliamentary majority after elections in Iran. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

“We like Ahmadinejad [despite] all the problems. Prices have gone up, but I will vote for him again. He understands people,” says Mrs. Rahimikia, who has raised two children alone since her husband was “martyred” in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. “Though people are against him, he is one of us,” adds Rihimikia. “We don’t have high expectations from him, but he is fighting and that is good enough for us.” …Out of 30 seats in Tehran, early results showed the 14 highest vote getters were the conservatives who call themselves “principlists” for their adherence to the principles of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The reformists called their showing a “victory,” considering the government disqualified hundreds of their candidates from running and undertook other tactics to ensure the conservatives’ success. One reformist paper called the reformists “strong” and unity among conservatives “fragile.”

Such sentiments—which are shared by many Western policy makers—have percolated for years in Iran. The hardliners always find ways to keep a lid on them.

The New Colonialists

The new Economist issue contains a special report, “The New Colonialists,” which evaluates the extraordinary ramifications of China’s astounding hunger for natural resources. It speaks, for one, of the extent of Chinese investment worldwide:

The Chinese authorities, it seems, are so anxious to obtain enough minerals to sustain their country’s remarkable economic growth that they are willing to invest billions in a dirt-poor and war-torn place like Congo—billions more, in fact, than Western governments and investors combined are putting in.And Congo is not the only beneficiary of China’s hunger for natural resources. From Canada to Indonesia to Kazakhstan, Chinese firms are gobbling up oil, gas, coal and metals, or paying for the right to explore for them, or buying up firms that produce them. … African and Latin American economies are growing at their fastest pace in decades, thanks in large part to heavy Chinese demand for their resources.China’s burgeoning consumption has helped push the price of all manner of fuels, metals and grains to new peaks over the past year. Even the price of shipping raw materials recently reached a record. Analysts see little prospect of an end to the boom ….

China has about one fifth of the global population. Its emergence as a consumerist-oriented, neo-colonialist power has tremendous implications. Among them:

Diplomats and pundits, for their part, fear that the West is “losing” Africa and other resource-rich regions. China’s sudden prominence, according to this view, will reduce the clout of America, Europe and other rich democracies in the developing world. China will befriend ostracised regimes and encourage them to defy international norms. Corruption, economic mismanagement, repression and instability will proliferate. If this baleful influence spreads too widely, say the critics, the “Washington consensus” of economic liberalism and democracy will find itself in competition with a “Beijing consensus” of state-led development and despotism.

A ripple effect that this report doesn’t consider is how China’s moves could awaken another power with a long history of colonialism, particularly in Africa, creating a monumental competition. The Trumpet discussed this question in our March 2006 special report, “The Coming Global Resource War.”

Living in Denial

Author Heidi Holland gained a rare 2½-hour interview with Robert Mugabe, the despot of Zimbabwe. The Washington Postdescribed Mugabe’s perspective as similar to a wall-size banner hanging outside his office declaring “Mugabe is Right”: odd, boastful, unrepentant.

Of Zimbabwe’s 100,000 percent hyperinflation, Mugabe insisted Zimbabwe was “a hundred times better” than other African nations. “Outside South Africa, what country is like Zimbabwe?” Mugabe said. “[W]hat is lacking now are goods on the shelves, perhaps. That’s all. But the infrastructure is there. We have our mines, you see. We have our enterprises.”

Elsewhere on the Web

The Trumpet has followed this trend closely in recent months, but if you would like to read more about the alarming rise in food prices, the New York Times has an excellent piece here.

And while grocery bills are on the rise, home prices are plummeting—especially in California.

And Finally …

A YouGov study found that 45 percent of the United Kingdom’s population doesn’t know what the Magna Carta is, England’s charter.