http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0904-26.htm
Published on Monday, September 4, 2006 by the St. Petersburg Times
(Florida)
Bush Fearmongering on Iraq Loses Its Punch
by Philip Gailey
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.
_________________________________________________________
Arachibutyrophobia
is a fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.
Harry
.
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