at http://republicansforimpeachment.com/
Bush falling into his “everyone is an appeaser but me” mode at the Knesset, keeping up the little fiction that serves as the emperor’s clothes. Cranking up the “some believe” attack that comes out every election in order to question everyone’s patriotism, Bush said:
Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.
Bush never says who that “some” is who says this, because the “some” is only him, after he just said it. But it sounds like his opponents want to have group therapy with terrorists. That’s how it works
It’s a standard tactic of this administration, used by Cheney, and back-when by Rumsfeld, on down the line. The playbook is Hermann Goering who said at the Nuremburg trials:
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Question: Who thanked God for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003? Foreign policy experts around the world who knew Bush’s bold action would nip terrorism in the bud, even though the invasion was unpopular? Nope. Bin Laden’s number two man Al Zawahari, who after Al Qaeda turned-tail in Afghanistan and were holed-up in the Pakistani mountains said:
We thank God for appeasing us with the dilemma in Iraq after Afghanistan. The Americans are facing a delicate situation in both countries. If they withdraw they will lose everything and if they stay, they will continue to bleed to death.
Let’s see if the Neo-con authoritarians can wrap their heads around this. You can have two bad guys, but it’s smarter to fight them one after the other instead of both at the same time. It’s called a strategic error, and Hitler did the same thing when he invaded Russia before he had the allies licked. That’s when it was all over for him.
Now Bush isn’t exactly Hitler, or else I wouldn’t be able to write this without a few teeth getting pulled out in a torture chamber somewhere, but the military error is the same. Even granting that Saddam had to go, sooner or later, why take the heat off bin Laden and Al Qaeda just as Special Forces was about to grant them martyrdom? And blur the clear moral issue of the attack on innocent civilians on 9/11, with questions about whether or not America wanted to steal Iraq’s oil? Now things are going badly in both places, Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the Pakistani border areas where the Taliban has had a chance to regroup. Why didn’t Bush finish one job before starting another? Can you say “bungling the war on terror?”
Even if we grant there’s lots of room for debate over Iraq, there is little room to deny that the timing of the invasion was exactly what pulled bin Laden’s chestnuts out of the fire, and sent him lots and lots of recruits.
Gary Berntsen, the top commander on the ground at Tora Bora, and author of “Jawbreaker”, was begging for a battalion of US Army Rangers to cut-off bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan, which fell on deaf ears at the White House. Now remind me again, who’s the appeaser?
