Who's winning the "wah on terrah"?

Preznit Boneless Chickenhawk on the fifth September 11th observance since 2001:

The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.

Really?

It's an impossible task. The American people were told that the United States was going to war against Iraq to seize Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons, which never existed in the first place, and to be greeted as liberators, which lasted for about five minutes as a staged act for the cameras, in which American troops pulled down a statue of Saddam for cheering Iraqis waving suspiciously outdated Iraqi flags.

Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden is howling with laughter in a cave somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan, because Boneless Chickenhawk got our soldiers bogged down in a religious civil war instead of paying attention to the real threats to our transportation network and our people.

Bush forgot. Recall what he had to say about the deaths of over 3000 Americans, and his progress in pursuing their murderer, Osama bin Laden, just six months after September 11th, at a White House Press Conference in 2002:

I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him.

New York Times conservative columnist John Tierney:

As an act of war, the attack on Sept. 11 was a blunder by Al Qaeda, and not merely because of the counterattack that destroyed Al Qaeda’s training camps and ousted the Taliban. It also alienated former jihadist allies in the Arab world, and caused a rift within Al Qaeda. ...

Instead of declaring victory against terrorists after routing the Taliban and sending bin Laden into hiding, [the Bush administration] invaded Iraq, reinvigorating Al Qaeda with a new tool for recruiting. Instead of putting the terrorist risk in perspective, Bush (with the full cooperation of Democrats and the press) set an impossible standard for making America safe. ...

When you treat one attack from a disorganized band of fanatics as a menace to civilization, you’ve doomed yourself to defeat and caused more damage than they could. You can’t completely stop terrorism, but you can scare people into giving up liberties, wasting huge sums of money and sacrificing more lives than would be lost in a terrorist attack.

Take it from bin Laden, who bragged in 2004 that it was “easy to provoke and bait this administration.”

“All that we have to do,” he said, “is to send two mujahedeen to the farthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written Al Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses.”

I thought the slightly out-of-context Gandhi quote I posted yesterday might elicit more comment. I was reminded, however, of another Gandhi quote:

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.

I don't believe that a commitment to non-violence, and non-cooperation with evil, are irreconciliable. Murderers must be removed from the world, and murdering organizations must be dismantled. Killing more innocent people only makes more murderers, especially when done not in the name of fighting terrorists, but for empire. Bush has only created more terrorists -- which, of course, serves the interests of his patrons who seek perpetual war for perpetual profit.

Everyone should recall the outpouring of international support the United States received after September 11th, and how it was squandered by Bush when he stridently told the world he didn't need anyone's help in Afghanistan, and when he later rushed to war in Iraq on false pretenses to gain access to the oil fields for his friends in the business. Instead of turning the September 11th attacks into an opening for the United States to destroy terrorism by seeking international cooperation, Bush alienated the world by pre-emptively striking another nation to seize her resources, terrorizing and slaying tens of thousands of her citizens in the process, as well as thousands of Americans.

Who now has more blood on his hands? Bin Laden, or Bush? Hiding (as he always has) behind the American military bureaucracy doesn't exonerate Bush from his culpability for murder.

Besides squandering lives and treasure in Iraq, Bush still isn't addressing more pressing needs here in the United States. Sounds pretty much like a repeat of Vietnam.

Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
Till you spend half your life just covering up
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
To go and kill the yellow man
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "Son if it was up to me"
I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone
He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.

Related:

Right back atchya Dubya!

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