We'll Know Them When We

We'll Know Them When We See Them - Yesterday on CNN I saw Nancy Pelosi's harsh visage scowling at me through the TV screen like an avenging comparative women's lit professor. Like most of the left, she was trying to make as much mileage out of the Dems' official reading of the Kay Report as possible. Here's her statement, via Sharkblog (who dissects her statement with extreme prejudice):

"As the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, I have seen no evidence or intelligence that suggests that Iraq indeed poses an imminent threat to our nation. If the Administration has that information, they have not shared it with the Congress.

"If we invade Iraq, we will show our military power. If we can eliminate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction without invading, we will show our strength."

I'd love to ask a Democrat - any pro-Hussein, pro-dictatorship anti-war Democrat - what they mean by "imminent".

Given that intelligence is so crushingly imprecise (especially against an enemy with a closed society that is actively trying to obfuscate your intelligence efforts), how do you determine "imminence?"

• We didn't know Pearl Harbor was "imminent" until the first bombs fell. Literally - even after a group of Minnesota Navy Reservists on the USS Ward sank a Japanese midget submarine off the mouth of the harbor, and after a radar station detected the incoming raid, no alert was called. We didn't know what was "imminent".
• We didn't know the invasion of South Korea was "imminent" until North Korean tanks and artillery immolated the ROK and American front lines by complete surprise.
• We didn't know the Tet Offensive was "imminent" until bombs started going off around Saigon.
• The Israelis didn't know the Yom Kippur war was "imminent" until Egyptian and Syrian artillery began plowing holes in their positions
• The Japanese didn't know the Om Shinrikyu nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway was "imminent" until people started falling over sick and dead.
• We had no idea that 9/11 was "imminent" until the first 911 calls reported a crash and fire in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

One of the things that drove me from liberalism 20 years ago was the Democrat party's complete frivolity at foreign policy. Even as a committed liberal, I was a student of military history and the history of diplomacy - and even when I fulminated with anti-capitalist rage, I was astounded by the foreign policy and military history ignorance of my fellow liberals. It's only gotten worse.

So, a note to Nancy Pelosi, and anyone who thinks that the Democrats can be trusted with foreign policy - the only way we'll know when a WMD attack is "imminent" is when people start keeling over from sarin exposure, streaming into emergency rooms with Anthrax - or when a radioactive dustcloud from a "dirty bomb" erupts over some American city.

This episode of Day By Day seemed grimly appropriate:

So, Democrat readers (and I know you're out there): what's the difference between Jan, in the strip, and Nancy Pelosi?

Posted by Mitch at October 4, 2003 07:51 AM