Invoking the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 five times, President Bush took to the airwaves Tuesday night in an attempt to bolster sagging support for the war in Iraq.
Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and Bush made the plans to invade Iraq long before then. So his entire talk was based on deception and lies.
Of course there’s no exit plan. They don’t want on leave because they covet the geopolitical dominance and the oil. But, like Vietnam, the U.S. will be defeated by a homegrown insurgency and driven out. If your city was invaded by a brutal foreign occupier, you’d fight back with everything you had too. This isn’t rocket science.
Pat Buchanan will be shown to have been prescient when, right before the war started, he said “This is the end of American Empire.”
But the cost will be a destabilzed Middle East, a world that widely mistrusts if not loathes the U.S., and thousands and thousands dead, maimed and crippled. Bush is simply an extreme example of, not an aberration from, an American foreign policy that for decades has invaded whenever and wherever it wanted.
And what was the Democratic response? Almost as uncomprehending as Dubya’s, that the U.S. needs to succeed in Iraq by some unspecified means. Dumb and dumber.
I caught House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate leader Harry Reid in separate appearances on TV, both saying the identical thing: we “need a strategy for success in Iraq.”
What is called for is a little application of the Hippocratic Oath – “First, do no harm”. And there’s only one way to “do no more harm” and that’s to get the hell out. Now.
Otherwise it’s like asking Jack the Ripper to perform surgery on his victims to help save their lives, and saying that it’s his responsibility to do so since he’s the one responsible for the damage. Which is precisely the argument being advanced by the Democrats.
None of this had to happen. The nationwide antiwar demonstrations on Sept. 24 could be significant and huge. Let’s make it so.