Anti-war left full of hypocrisy

Before the war in Iraq, the Vice President of the United States made a very candid and truthful case regarding Saddam Hussein, stating "The suffering inside Iraq can come to an end when Saddam Hussein's regime is replaced, and I hope – and most of the world community hopes – that this regime based on terrorism and atrocities against his own people will be replaced. Over time, we hope to achieve that result."
Listening to war opponents and Bush-haters within the mainstream media and Democratic Party, the war on terrorism has become a "quagmire." According to them, there were 1) no WMD's, 2) no Iraq - al Qaeda link, and 3) Saddam Hussein therefore represented no threat to our security.
A variety of news anecdotes have served to refute the claims of the anti-war left, but they refuse to budge, instead clinging to the fantasy that even though members of al Qaeda were in our own country prior to 9/11, they were somehow careful enough to tiptoe around the Iraqi border during their infiltration westward so as to avoid any link with the Hussein regime.
Well, the New York Times disclosed on June 25 that
"Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990's were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family...."
Although the "independent" 9/11 commission, which just concluded its "findings" with the statement that it had found "no evidence" of cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, NewsMax, citing several sources, recently reported that Saddam Hussein predicted bin Laden's 9/11 attacks less than two months before they occurred.
If that wasn't enough, on June 18, Russian President Vladimir Putin informed reporters that "After the events of September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received information that the official services of the Saddam regime were preparing terrorist acts on the United States and beyond its borders."
And what about those WMD's? According to theWashington Times, Charles Deulfer, head of the CIA weapons team in Iraq, stated in a recent television interview that his inspectors had discovered as many as a dozen chemical-filled bombs, and this while insurgents actively sought chemical arms left over from the Hussein regime to use against coalition troops.
It was reported on May 17 that the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) had confirmed that a bomb which exploded near Baghdad International Airport contained the sarin nerve agent. Two weeks before, a Bush administration official reported the U.S. military had discovered mustard gas that was used as part of an improvised explosive device. The ISG and others believe the mustard gas shell could have been one of the 550 for which Saddam Hussein failed to account shortly before the war.
Finally, an indictment released by the U.S. Justice Department on November 4, 1998 (when Bill Clinton was president) stated that "Al Qaeda also forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."
Speaking of the Clinton administration, while issuing a resounding indictment of the Bush administration back in May, Al Gore raged that President Bush "has exposed Americans abroad and Americans in every town and city to a greater danger of attacks by terrorists because of his arrogance, willfulness, and bungling at stirring up hornets nests that pose no threat whatsoever to us."
Al Gore personifies the illogical morass of contradiction and hypocrisy into which the anti-war left has irreversibly sunk, because the Vice President referred to in the opening paragraph of this column isn't Dick Cheney. It was Al Gore.