About France, one of her most esteemed historians, Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889), wrote, “History with us has become a sort of permanent civil war. It teaches us to hate one another.”
If French dwell on their history too passionately, Americans seem to forget theirs too readily. The present uproar in American politics over the Iraq war is an illustration of how readily history gets shredded for partisan politics in the United States.
Following the grand jury indictment of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice—but “not about the (Iraq) war” as Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicated—Democrats in the Congress accuse the Bush administration for having lied to the American people in taking the country to war in Iraq.
Democrats contend if they knew what they know now about faulty intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), they would not have voted for the 2002 Congressional Resolution authorizing use of force against Iraq.
But what Democrats know now and more, as does the rest of the world, could only have been known by liberating Iraq from tyranny.
We now know the extent to which UN oil-for-food was corrupted by the Iraqi despot that would not have been known without the fall of Baghdad and, consequently, why some member-states, such as France, disclosed the intention to veto a second resolution authorizing enforcement of Security Council resolution 1441 passed unanimously in November 2002.
It has been repeatedly pointed out that intelligence on pre-war Iraq’s WMD was widely shared knowledge among Democrats and Republicans, and there was a consensus on these matters among permanent members of the Security Council.
The determination of the Bush administration to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom as part of the global war on terror was also backed by the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act voted by the Congress and signed into law by then president Bill Clinton.
The 2002 Congressional Resolution listed 23 “whereas” clauses, of which only two identify stockpiles of WMD as reasons for the necessary use of force, and 12 refer to continuing violation of Security Council resolutions by Saddam’s Iraq.
Diplomacy at the UN required emphasizing WMD, given the consensus on the matter, rather than the nature of Saddam’s regime and its gross violations of human rights.
The obvious question Democrats want to evade is: How serious were their votes in 1998 and 2002? Did they naively believe their votes were sufficient in themselves to deliver freedom to Iraqis while removing the threat to regional and global peace Saddam’s regime represented since at least the end of the Gulf War in 1991?
The public record of Democrats speaking about Iraqi threats prior to the 2000 election and in support of regime change is long and tedious to quote. Their accusations against President George Bush on the Iraq war increasingly appear as a shameless Stalinist technique of air-brushing history ahead of the 2006 mid-term elections.
Bush is presently hurting in public opinion for any number of reasons. This is part of the normal cycle of politics, and more so when any president—such as Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—steps forth to provide leadership in matters of great consequences as Bush is doing in the war against Islamist terror.
The decline in public support for Bush after a summer of hurricanes and losses in Iraq do not, however, automatically translate into increasing support for Democrats.
If it was only so simple then John Kerry would be occupying the White House and the angry left would have held a love-fest with Islamists in Ted Kennedy’s Boston.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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