THE IMMINENT THREAT OF DR. NO

Well, well, well – it seems the past has come back to haunt Ho-Ho again. Back in 1995, he wrote an impassioned letter to President Clinton calling for UNILATERAL action in Bosnia. Yes, unilateral was the exact word he used. Mr. “Unilateral-action-is-bad” was looking for that very same thing in Bosnia.

“Since it is clearly no longer possible to take action in conjunction with NATO and the United Nations, I have reluctantly concluded that we must take unilateral action.”

Did Dr. No just say that if we can’t get the UN on board, we must act unilaterally? Now that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well, not exactly, you see, in Iraq we didn’t act unilaterally, there were a few other countries involved there, i.e., UK, Australia, Poland, etc. Well, whatever, let’s get a comment from the Dean campaign:

“Dean's support for the war in Bosnia is one of several examples he uses to differentiate himself from Democrats who oppose virtually all international intervention. His advisers say his stance has remained consistent over the years: A humanitarian crisis of the scale that occurred in Bosnia should trigger an armed intervention. So, too, would an attack or imminent attack on the United States.

The word "imminent" is key to differentiating Dean's policy from the president's decision to invade Iraq, said Jeremy Ben-Ami, policy director for Dean's campaign.

Bush "sold the war on the basis of an imminent threat to U.S. security, and that has now been shown to be false," Ben-Ami said. Since the threat from Iraq was not imminent, the administration could not properly justify the war, he said.”

Ah, the old “imminent threat” canard. Even the USA Today, hardly a member of BUSHCO, said President Bush never said there was an imminent threat and had the key quote from the 2003 State of the Union address.

But, let’s get beyond that. The Dean campaign said it’s ok to go it alone if the threat is imminent or there is a “humanitarian crisis of the scale that occurred in Bosnia”. What exactly does Dean-O think the mass graves, rape rooms, torture chambers, systematic destruction of the Marsh Arabs, re-education centers for children, gassing civilians, etc. constitute, a Church social? I would think that a humanitarian crisis on that scale should satisfy the Dean requirement for unilateral action. And if this question was posed to them, they would agree and say, “BUT, BUSHCO didn’t say we needed to go in for humanitarian reasons, he said they were a threat to us, so there!!”

It would be another classic case of the motives trumping the outcome, something the liberals have been stuck on since Vietnam. It doesn’t matter that something good is been done, it’s the motive that matters. Dean and his minions sleep well at night because even though the outcome is something Dean would support, he can rail against the Iraq war because the motives were “wrong”.

And he wants to be President.