Posting Light Until Mid February

Work pressure is going to keep posting light until mid-February.

The liberal sneering at the American failure to find WMD stockpiles in Iraq is like making fun of a man who, having been tested for diabetes, receives a negative result but is told that what he really has is cancer. The US rightly feared that rogue states were developing weapons of mass destruction but did not have the breadth of imagination to conceive of the extraordinary web of cooperation between Pakistan, North Korea, European arms dealers and the Arabian states, who contributing according to their abilities, solved the problem of the atomic bomb. We went looking for an Iraqi bomb and found an international one.

The race to prevent rogue nations from acquiring WMDs has already been lost, and the race to keep them from falling into private hands is all but. The most horrifying thing about David Kay's report is his finding that Saddam's weapons were never under his control at all, but in the actual keeping of his minions, who misled him at every turn. The componentry may now be in Syria, where, if Iraq is any guide, they are under even looser custody. If the Saudis have made no secret of their desire to buy nuclear weapons, it is only because they know that these are for sale. It is safe to predict that the next mass attack on America will involve fission weapon of Pakistani design with a 40Kt yield, charged with uranium purified by Malaysian manufactured centrifuges from a design originally developed by Urenco in the Netherlands and probably paid for by Saudi Arabia. The World Bomb.

Recent incidents have also underscored the magnitude of the intelligence gaps. On a matter of vital national urgency the intelligence professionals had no inkling of the scale of the threat, and could not thwart it. Donald Rumsfeld warned us there would be times like this.

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

And we didn't know. But we know now and should never forget the reason why. The mainstream press often forgets that the cure for gaps in intelligence is not more introspection but active reconnaissance. The key value of the Global War on Terror lies not so much in the immediate damage it does to the enemy but in the information that comes to light as a result of continuous contact with the foe. The world would never have known about the extent of WMD proliferation had America listened to the United Nations and the leftist lobby. In many ways, the most dangerous place to be is where the liberals think to find illusory safety -- out of contact with the enemy, where he is proof from our blows and we cannot sense the dagger poised to strike. The safest place to be is where knowledge and action are one. Here's Secretary Rumsfeld again:

I think what you'll find,
I think what you'll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.
And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.