Bush: Fighting the PR War Here So He Doesn’t Have to Answer for the Disastrous One Over There
Arianna Huffington
Now that the dust kicked up by Bush’s big speech has settled, it’s becoming clear what the strategy is in the new Iraq offensive. Not the one in Iraq -- there’s obviously no new strategy there. I mean the Iraq offensive over here -- where Republican troops are being sent out armed with the exact same talking points, to be repeated endlessly in an attempt to protect Bush’s poll numbers.
The latest weapon? The absurd notion that we have to fight the terrorists over there, or we’ll just be fighting them here.
Rumsfeld softened the ground -- trotting out this meaningless meme on Fox News a week before Bush’s speech: “If you think about it, these folks are over there doing a superb job for our country. They're fighting terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here at home.”
And here’s how Bush broadcast it coast-to-coast Tuesday night, quoting the commander in charge of coalition operations: “We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us.”
This is utterly ludicrous. The vast majority of the insurgents are Sunni Baathists, who had little or no connection to Al Qaeda. It’s just another part of Bush’s ongoing attempt to link Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and 9/11 with his ever-shifting rationale for invading Iraq.
Juan Cole nailed it when he said:
This is monstrous and ridiculous at once. The people in Fallujah and Ramadi were not sitting around plotting terrorism three years ago. They had no plans to hit the United States. Terrorism isn't a fixed quantity. By unilaterally invading Iraq and then bollixing it up, Bush and Vines have created enormous amounts of terrorism, which they are now having trouble putting back in the bottle.
And, as Susan Rice points out here on the HuffPost, “If the Administration genuinely believes we must fight overseas to stay safe at home, we are in for perpetual war abroad. The only variable will be the front. Once we dispense with, or get driven out of Iraq, we will have to take the battle somewhere else.”
It’s too bad Bush and his political troops don’t put as much thought into effectively fighting the war on terror as they do into crafting smoke-and-mirror justifications for the mess they’ve gotten us into in Iraq.
Posted at 07:05 PM |
