Levitt Letter Extra News

By Hal Lindsey
www.worldnetdaily.com

In early 2003, the liberal left united worldwide to ask itself the stunning question: “Whom do you believe? Saddam Hussein? Or George W. Bush?”

So blinding was the partisan hatred for George Bush that the answer was a resounding, “Saddam Hussein!” Demonstrators crowded the streets of Europe and Blue State America carrying signs screaming, “Bush Lied, People Died” and “Bush=Liar!”

The same question was asked by the United Nations — with the same result. The U.N. refused to support the invasion of Iraq and did all it could to lend aid and support to Saddam during the buildup to the war.

• The French passed on secret communiques to Saddam directly from the White House.
• The Russians were still helping Saddam prepare defenses as U.S. forces crossed the borders.
• The United Nations continued to stall to give Saddam as much time as possible to burn “Oil for Food” related documents.

Lenin is reputed to have referred to blind defenders and apologists for the Soviet Union in the Western democracies as “useful idiots.”

WorldNetDaily.com reported that one of Saddam’s former confidants — Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, aka “The Butcher of Basra” — said:

Saddam planned the whole thing. He hid the weapons of mass destruction, hoping the “many who opposed the war to begin with are rallying around Saddam saying we overthrew a sovereign leader based on a lie about WMD.” This is exactly what Saddam wanted and predicted.

The marchers and demonstrators did precisely what Saddam wanted so precisely that, three years later, American forces are still battling insurgents encouraged by millions of demonstrators — and American news reports — about the rightness of their cause in fighting “the evil George Bush.”

It is now evident to all but the blindest partisans that the intelligence was correct and that Saddam not only had weapons of mass destruction, but that he worked directly with al-Qaida.

A lot of Saddam’s useful idiots also offered their services to al-Qaida, providing Osama bin Laden with lots of pre-written and authenticated slogans about “liar Bush” and his “evil American intentions” and “the Bush oil company connections,” etc., blah, blah, blah.

When not handing the enemy public-relations sound bytes about America’s dishonesty, they are telling the enemy America tortures Islamic prisoners and flushes Qurans down the toilet.

As with Saddam, they share the same objective — the destruction of the Bush administration. That is where the “useful” part comes from. The “idiot” part comes from thinking that hurting Bush doesn’t hurt America. But then liberals rarely seem to consider that factor anyway.

But as the truth comes out in Saddam’s own words via tapes obtained by John Loftus, the usefulness of the “Bush lied” lobby will have expired.

Unfortunately for America, the damage remains. The insurgent-terrorist caused U.S. losses have buoyed hopes that America will be forced to withdraw — because of the “useful idiot”-fed anger of the American people — and leave Saddam to return to power.

The radical Islamic terrorist regimes rightly believe that this would damage America’s international reputation for decades to come. It would make it virtually impossible for American leaders to respond to future terrorist threats in an aggressive enough manner to prevent them.

The lessons learned in Vietnam about how to exploit American public opinion have been refined into a whole new form of warfare — a weapon both useful to our enemies and idiotic for our own strategic interests. Saddam found them very useful, indeed.

But what happens to an idiot when he is no longer useful? Unfortunately, when the useful part is over, the “idiot” part remains — waiting for the chance to become useful again. And with our liberal at-any-cost media, the idiots’ future usefulness is virtually guaranteed.

By Charles Krauthammer, www.washingtonpost.com

Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign-language film is “Paradise Now,” a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. Nominated for best picture is “Munich,” a sympathetic portrayal of yesterday’s fashion in barbarism: homicide terrorism. But until you see “Syriana,” nominated for best screenplay (and George Clooney, for best supporting actor) you have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.

The “Syriana” script has, of course, the classic liberal tropes such as this stage direction: “The Deputy National Security Advisor, MARILYN RICHARDS, 40’s, sculpted hair, with the soul of a seventy year-old white, Republican male, is in charge” (Page 21). Or this piece of over-the-top, Gordon Gekko Republican-speak, placed in the mouth of a Texas oilman: “Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm…. Corruption… is how we win” (Page 93).

But that’s run-of-the-mill Hollywood. The true distinction of “Syriana’s” script is the near-incomprehensible plot — a muddled mix of story lines about a corrupt Kazakh oil deal, a succession struggle in an oil-rich Arab kingdom, and a giant Texas oil company that pulls the strings at the CIA and, naturally, everywhere else — amid which, only two things are absolutely clear and coherent: the movie’s one political hero and one pure soul.

The political hero is the Arab prince who wants to end corruption, inequality and oppression in his country. As he tells his tribal elders, he intends to modernize his country by bringing the rule of law, market efficiency, women’s rights and democracy. What do you think happens to him? He, his beautiful wife and beautiful children are murdered, incinerated, by a remote-controlled missile, fired from CIA headquarters in Langley, no less — at the very moment that (this passes for subtle cross-cutting film editing) his evil younger brother, the corrupt rival to the throne and puppet of the oil company, is being hailed at a suitably garish “oilman of the year” celebration populated by fat and ugly Americans.

What is grotesque about this moment of plot clarity is that the overwhelmingly obvious critique of actual U.S. policy in the real Middle East today concerns America’s excess of Wilsonian idealism in trying to find and promote — against a tide of tyranny, intolerance and fanaticism — local leaders like the Good Prince.

Who in the greater Middle East is closest to the modernizing, democratizing paragon of “Syriana”? Without a doubt, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a man of exemplary — and quite nonfictional — personal integrity, physical courage and democratic temperament. Hundreds of brave American (and allied NATO) soldiers have died protecting him and the democratic system they established to allow him to govern.

On the very night the Oscars will be honoring “Syriana,” American soldiers will be fighting, some perhaps dying, in defense of precisely the kind of tolerant, modernizing Muslim leader that “Syriana” shows America slaughtering.

It gets worse. The most pernicious element in the movie is the character at the moral heart of the film: the beautiful, modest, caring, generous Pakistani who becomes a beautiful, modest, caring, generous… suicide bomber. In his final act, the Pure One, dressed in the purest white robes, takes his explosives-laden little motorboat headfirst into his target. It is a replay of the real-life boat that plunged into the USS Cole in 2000, killing 17 American sailors, except that in the “Syriana” version, the target is another symbol of American imperialism in the Persian Gulf: a newly opened liquefied natural gas terminal.

The explosion, which would have the force of a nuclear bomb, constitutes the moral high point of the movie, the moment of climactic cleansing, as the Pure One clad in white merges with the great white mass of the huge terminal wall, at which point the screen goes pure white. And reverently silent. In my naivete, I used to think that Hollywood had achieved its nadir with Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” a film that taught a generation of Americans that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and the FBI in collaboration with Lyndon Johnson. But at least it was for domestic consumption, an internal affair of only marginal interest to other countries.

“Syriana,” however, is meant for export, carrying the most vicious and pernicious mendacities about America to a receptive world. Most liberalism is angst- and guilt-ridden, seeing moral equivalence everywhere. “Syriana” is of a different species entirely — a pathological variety that burns with the certainty of its malign anti-Americanism. Osama bin Laden could not have scripted this film with more conviction.