NEWS: Bush Thinks Iraq is Like WWII

OK, that's fucking hilarious.

Nuff Said!

(Though I hate insulting monkeys!)

The same Wesley Clark who voted Republican
until he changed parties a few months before
jumping into the Democratic primaries? The same
Wesley Clark who was criticized for being too
Republican by his fellow Democrats in the pri-
maries? The same Wesley Clark who consistently
flip-flopped on the war all through the primaries?
Come on..Wesley Clark served his country and
for that deserves credit..but on the current war
his credibility is a little..tarnished, wouldn't you say?

It's good to know that Bush is just as good at making analogies as he is at leading the country...

The worst thing about politics is how so many issues are forced into black & white distinctions, or at least through public perception and media coverage they are.

But I would expect a former four-star general to have a better grasp of war strategy then Presidential politics anyhow.

[Edited on Sep 01, 2005 by evolution]

It disturbs me that we have a USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier.

Pure insanity -

Additionally, he actually wrote a book about winning wars like Iraq. I would definitely liked to see him in office over Bush. He probably could have turned around the Iraq situation, as he knows what he is doing.

If a man who voted republican all his life decided to run against the republican president at the time, I feel that definitely reflects on his opinion of how Bush handled things.

George W. Bush is an incompentent, and inveterate putz.

The best thing that he can do for air quality in the US is to stop breathing it.

Yes, I hope we lose so that George Bush will be taugh a lesson. Stupid evil Republicans. blah blah blah

legionnaire said:

What Bush means is is that al-qaeda is motivated by an encompassing totalitarian ideology not unlike the Nazis and the communists were. The war in Iraq is a facet, a battle in that war.

I held back on responding responding to your glib and snarky news item, because the tone of your article is so unserious about a very serious issue. I didn't want to go through the effort of explaining what Bush meant, the nature of the terrorist enemy today and how he's a lot like the Nazis and communists of the past to someone who probably wasn't interested in actually understanding these sorts of issues or the nature of the enemy and what motivates him. But I found a post on a blog that pretty much makes my point, and provides new insight as to why the Left doesn't take the terrorist threat seriously today. The French Left in the 1930's didn't take Hitler seriously as a threat either. In fact, they thought he had a lot of legitimate grievances.

True Believers

Reader DL sends an excerpt from Paul Berman's recent Terror and Liberalism who "puts his liberal credentials on the line ... by critiquing the left while presenting a liberal rationale for the war on terror". Berman believes the Left should have arrived at a logical opposition to radical Islamism independently because:

... Islamism (is) a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and communism ... Berman delineates how all three movements descended from utopian visions (in the case of Islamism, the restoration of a pure seventh-century Islam) into irrational cults of death.

In a word the Left would logically be expected to oppose Osama Bin Laden because it represents everything Berman thinks the Left has fought against since it's inception. The question Berman tries to answer is why the precise opposite has happened. To get a handle on the problem he dissects the failure of the 1930s French Left to resolutely oppose Hitler. On pages 124-128 Berman says:

Blum and his supporters regarded Hitler and the Nazis with horror ... But mostly they remembered the First World War ... They grew thoughtful, therefore. They did not wish to reduce Germany in all its Teutonic complexity to black-and-white terms of good and evil. ... And, having analyzed the German scene in that manner, the anti-war Socialists concluded that Hitler and the Nazis, in railing against the great powers and the Treaty of Versailles, did make some legitimate arguments ... Why not look for ways to conciliate the outraged German people and, in that way, to conciliate the Nazis? ...

The anti-war Socialists of France did not think they were being cowardly or unprincipled in making those arguments. On the contrary, they ... regarded themselves as exceptionally brave and honest. They felt that courage and radicalism allowed them to peer beneath the surface of events and identify the deeper factors at work in international relations-the truest danger facing France. This danger, in their judgment, did not come from Hitler and the Nazis, not principally. The truest danger came from the warmongers and arms manufacturers of France itself ... who stood to benefit in material ways from a new war. ... But the political arguments rested on something deeper, too -- a philosophical belief; profound, large, and attractive ... that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable.

The belief underlying those anti-war arguments was, in short, an unyielding faith in universal rationality. ... And, stirred by that antique idea, the anti-war Socialists gazed across the Rhine and simply refused to believe ... in a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories, blood-curdling hatreds, medieval superstitions, and the lure of murder. At Auschwitz the SS said, "Here there is no why."

That grimly hilarious punchline was not exclusive to Auschwitz. Piers Brendon recalls in Dark Valley, his history of the 1930s, that the most common scrawl left by doomed Old Bolsheviks at Lubyanka prison were the words "What For?" But more poignant yet was the refusal of some Party members, exiled to Magadan, the worst camp of the Gulag, to smuggle news to their comrades of their fate. One said, 'at least now they still have hope in Communism. If I let them know the truth then they will have nothing'. Even in Magadan the Left's deepest need was to believe. Having abolished the God of their forefathers and finding themselves prostrate before the false god they fashioned for themselves, as between extinction and despair they chose extinction. But back to Berman.

... among the anti-war Socialists, a number of people, having voted with Petain, took the logical next step and, on patriotic an idealistic grounds, accepted positions in his new government, at Vichy. Some of those Socialists went a little further, too, and began to see a virtue in Petain's program for a new France and a new Europe-a program for strength and virility, a Europe ruled by a single-party state instead of by the corrupt cliques of bourgeois democracy, a Europe cleansed of the impurities of Judaism and of the Jews themselves, a Europe of the anti-liberal imagination. And, in that very remarkable fashion, a number of the anti-war Socialists of France came full circle. They had begun as defenders of liberal values and human rights, and they evolved into defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition, and mass murder. They were democratic leftists who, through the miraculous workings of the slippery slope and a naïve faith in the rationalism of all things, ended as fascists. Long ago, you say? Not so long ago.

[Edited on Sep 01, 2005 12:23PM]

Which side exactly are we analagous to in this WWII comparison?

Will the people of England string up Tony & Cherie by their ankles in Leicester Square?

good point

He's the opposite of Roosevelt. FDR was dead from the waist down.....

Ah ha, You said "Bush thinks"

I would just like to ask this question, how many of you all think that this country is headed for a cival war?

Hmmmmm.......

I wonder if he thinks of the New Orleans situation as "Waterworld."

Let's face it, the man has no fucking idea what he's doing, or what the will of the people is. I hope against hope that his bullshit response to the Katrina disaster marks the death knell of his political career. Bush's only interests in being president are (in order) vacationing while storms hit and the casualties mount in Iraq, placiting his House of Saud interests, increasing the debt of the federal budget, and making empty promises in his public appearances. I think nearly everyone here would agree with me that America hasn't had a president this corrupt since Nixon, and this useless since Coolidge. I truly cannot fathom how anyone can still support the man's politics.

And, you know, things are pretty bad when even Trent Lott is starting to point fingers...

Whatever happened to "of the people, for the people and by the people?"