| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"GDalton" |
| Date: |
04 Sep 2006 05:47:33 AM |
| Object: |
Bush fearmongering on Iraq loses its punch |
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/09/03/Columns/Bush_fearmongering_on.shtml
St. Petersburg Times
September 3, 2006
Bush fearmongering on Iraq loses its punch
By PHILIP GAILEY, Times Editor of Editorials
The war is going miserably in Iraq. And it's not going that well on
the home front, either. Public support for the war is collapsing, and
even some Republican hawks are beginning to distance themselves from
the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld quagmire in Iraq. But it turns out that
critics of the war are just confused. They still think it's about
weapons of mass destruction, regime change and democracy. They don't
understand that the administration's disastrous enterprise in Iraq is
a continuation of the last century's battles against Nazism, fascism
and communism.
It took President Bush, Vice President ***** Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to open our eyes last week. This time the
enemy is a "new type of fascism," Islamic extremism, and Iraq is
ground zero in the struggle against this new -ism. They chose friendly
audiences - the nation's two largest veterans organizations - to
explain this to Republican nervous nellies and cut-and-run Democrats
who, according to Rumsfeld, "still have not learned history lessons."
Thank goodness Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are students of history and
didn't listen to those foolish generals and diplomats who tried to
warn them about what they were getting into by invading Iraq.
Rumsfeld set the tone of this latest stay-the-course campaign by
suggesting to an American Legion audience in Salt Lake City that
critics of the administration's Iraq policy are suffering from the
same "moral and intellectual confusion about right and wrong" as those
who tried to appease Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime in the 1930s. Most of
the criticism of the administration Iraq policy, he said, is coming
from the "Blame America First" crowd, including journalists. Cheney,
working the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, had his own
variation of Rumsfeld's appeasement theme.
After Cheney and Rumsfeld finished working over the appeasers,
President Bush flew to Salt Lake City to tell Legionnaires that the
poor souls who advocate a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq "are
sincere and they're patriotic, but they could not be more wrong."
Bush said we would be fighting terrorists "in the streets of our own
cities" if we withdrew from Iraq without victory. He didn't accuse his
critics of appeasement, but the president suggested they fail to see
the war as part of the larger struggle against terrorists he called
the "successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other
totalitarians of the 20th century."
"The war we fight today is more than a military conflict," Bush said.
"It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century."
If Bush really believes the stakes in Iraq are as high as they were in
World War II, he should mobilize the nation and call for sacrifice. He
should institute a military draft and repeal tax cuts to pay for the
long and costly struggle against Islamic terrorists. And he should
replace Rumsfeld with a defense secretary who is competent in the
business of waging war.
With the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and a midterm election coming up,
the Bush gang is still trafficking in fear, which is about all they
have left. But polls show that a majority of Americans are on to their
game. The public no longer believes the invasion of Iraq has made us
safer or that it was related to the fight against terrorism. And they
no longer trust Republicans more than Democrats to keep the nation
safe. Even early supporters of the war now see Iraq for what it is - a
colossal foreign policy blunder.
Rumsfeld told the veterans they should "feel each day as you did on
Sept. 12, 2001." Maybe we would if the Bush administration had not
embarked a disastrous course in Iraq. Now we are divided at home and
hated abroad.
Bush has more than two years left in office. Can we be sure the worst
is behind us? The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team is becoming increasingly
desperate as Iraq continues its descent into hell, and I worry what
they have in mind for Iran. The world is a more dangerous place
because of the arrogance, ignorance and tragic incompetence of these
men.
-----------------------------
REPORTER: What did Iraq have to do with that?
PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?
REPORTER: The attack on the World Trade Center?
PRESIDENT: Nothing.
(White House press conference, August 21, 2006)
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