So Now We're Back to
"It's A Global Campaign"
It's back to "It's a Global Campaign," yet President Bush still hasn't learned how to lead the international community, with his attitude and actions, to understand why it's important to join forces to find a way to convince all people in the world that the murder of innocents will never be civilly acceptable.
Bush invoked 9/11 to begin his major speech on the "War on Terror." The names of myriad countries were invoked next. The ideology of the terrorists was discussed next - along with all the monikers to describe them. He tells us that we stand for democracy and peace. I am convinced of neither after seeing the way we've conducted ourselves in Iraq. Bush says terrorists had "set their sights on Iraq," but that's not tue. Bush brought them there with a rash and ineptly-planned war and a stupid dare to "bring them on." When Bush says that "evil men and ambition must be taken very seriously," I look at him and think about his own ambition and I take him very seriously. He tells us that Syria and Iran share the goal of the terrorists - and I can feel the neocons' influence and I can almost see them typing out their plans for the next unnecessary war and death for our sons and daughters.
Bush condemns Russia for not joining the folly in Iraq, and sends out an "I told ya so" to them after the Beslan tragedy. (What a way to win over the Russkies).
He claims that no act of the US inspired the terrorists' reaction. Complete victory is the only acceptable answer - that brings applause from the audience - yet no one in that audience knows what "complete victory" is supposed to look like.
Bush condemns the rich who prey upon the poor and turn them into terrorists. I look at the poor in America and wonder what will become of them under the Bush rule. (Has he been to the 'hood lately?)
I understand that terrorists murder people in schools and mosques and churches and cafes - and any fool can see that it's murder and that it's heinous. Bush accuses the enemy of using the pretense of aggrievement, when they are really desiring "imperial domination..." and I can easily see that the "enemy" feels exactly the same way about Bush. When Bush talks about the enemy "despising freedom," he loses his credibility with me. Bin Ladenists want the U.S. out of their territories, and it has everything to do with their own view of "freedom."
Bush wants and expects more sacrifice for his failing Iraq venture. He says the love of freedom is the mightiest force. He calls you a "self-defeating pessimist" if you disagree with his failing course. He asks you to blind yourself to reality and pretend we are succeeding. He doesn't talk about the fact that "spreading democracy" is not necessarily related to the fire-like spread of terror. (A terror, mind you, that he has fueled as the result of his course of action in Iraq.)
Bush says we must deny the future of terror-recruits by spreading hope across the Middle East. People, he says, must choose their own destiny. I look at what Bush did (and failed to do) in the aftermath of Katrina and I think of the faces of the poor who never have had an opportunity to choose their own destiny because they've been virtually left behind by Bush's domestic policy. How can Bush expect us to believe the grandiosity of his plot for the Middle East when he fails his own nation's poorest citizens?
Bush says he is responsible, while Commander in Chief, for disrupting three or more efforts to stop terrorist attacks in America. That's news to me. Let's hope someone will tell us more about that someday.
Bush has many right ideas about the evils of the methods employed by the Bin Ladenists - but his ideas about how to fight them (by attacking states - the old "support and harbor"/"enemy of civilization" warnings) are wrong and will continue to follow Iraq's failing course. Murder is never justified.
I was hoping to hear something different today.
Bush is only stumping for new partners to join him in his failing war, which follows a course that neocons plotted out long before 9/11/2001.
Yet, he offers nothing new to convince them.
I don't disagree that terror is murderous, but I am not persuaded, heartened, or convinced about the bleak future by the president whose neocon-soaked administration lied our nation into war in Iraq and was never held accountable - not one person - by the Commander in Chief.