If representative government were alive and well in America, President Bush would not have dared to give the speech he made Monday on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. In a blatantly partisan screed, the president ripped off a nation's mourning for the 9/11 victims in order to justify his totally unrelated and disastrous invasion of Iraq.
The president's shameless remarks on this solemn occasion were so rife with egregious distortions of fact and logic as to beg ridicule, let alone refutation by a free press, a sturdy political opposition party and an informed public. Sadly, those three essential pillars of a free society have been subverted by five years of willful presidential exploitation of our fears, mocking the Founding Fathers' historic dream of a government accountable to the public.
In urging us to join him at the barricades of what he calls "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation," Bush cynically conflates Hussein with that deposed dictator's sworn enemy, the religious fanatics of Al Qaeda, mere days after the Republican-run Senate Select Committee on Intelligence established yet again that the two were fundamentally at odds.
Hussein, the Senate committee announced Friday, "did not trust Al Qaeda or any other radical Islamist group and did not want to cooperate with them."
In fact, Hussein was exactly the kind of regional strongman the United States supported, trained and propped up throughout the Cold War. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then working for President Ronald Reagan, even infamously embraced Hussein in the '80s because his Iraq was considered a bulwark against fundamentalist revolutionary Iran.
Now we have all but handed post-Hussein Iraq to Shiite fundamentalists trained by and allied with the Iran of the ayatollahs. On Monday, the prime minister of "liberated" Iraq, who spent years in exile under the tutelage of Iran's ayatollahs, was back in Tehran concluding agreements on mutual security with the leader of that "rogue regime." How bizarre that Bush's invasion of Iraq, a country that did not have a functioning WMD program, has vastly increased the power of Iran, which, according to Bush, does. Sometimes, by accident, Bush gets it close to right. "Our nation is being tested in a way that we have not been since the start of the Cold War," he said. Unfortunately, it is his administration that is testing us with its relentless incompetence, attacks on our civil liberties and inability to acknowledge the bankruptcy of its policies. The more his deadly failures have become evident, the shriller the rhetoric and the more his administration digs in its heels.
Peel back the lies and hyperbole from Bush's speech and you are left with one pressing concern: If this "war on terror" is really so important to the worldwide battle for freedom, why have we allowed this democracy-mocking demagogue to lead us through it?
Because enough of us were stoopid enough to let him get in a position to hijack the presidency - twice - and the politicians either drank the kool-aid and love it or are too spineless and/or powerless to do anything about it. We also have a media that by and large abetted him.
The times, they are a-changin'.
November.
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