White House Starts PR Offensive on Iraq

The White House has escalated the war over the War in Iraq with a new public relations offensive. It will run for three-weeks, culminating with Mr. Bush’s September 19 address to the UN. The offensive will lay out all the pretexts/reasons for the war and for persisting in fighting it. There is an old political saying, though, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Addressing the American Legion (a veterans’ group) in Utah (the reddest of the red states), Mr. Bush tried to tie the disparate groups of Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and Iraqi Ba’athists into a common front of totalitarians. “Despite their differences, these groups form the outline of a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology,” he said. This is, of course, nonsense. Sharing a common enemy (in this case, Mr. Bush’s version of freedom) doesn’t make these part of a single movement any more than resisting Hitler made Churchill and Roosevelt Stalinists. The president is still trying to convince the world that the Al-Qaeda murders five years ago justify the occupation of Iraq.

Earlier this week, Secretary of Defense Field Marshal Donald von Rumsfeld likened critics of the war to the appeasement crowd of Neville Chamberlain, stating, “any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.” Neville Chamberlain had a great many short-comings, but he never sold arms to Hitler. Field Marshal von Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983, opened arms sales to Saddam Hussein worth $1.5 billion over five years. The visit came a month after the dictator used poisoned gas against Iran for the first time. The field marshal's moral and intellectual confusion is astounding. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC agrees, and then some.

Of course, the offensive began with Vice President Cheney’s speech to the officers of U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska. He told the assembled troops, “Five years ago Iraq and Afghanistan were both in the grips of violent, merciless regimes. Now they have democratically-elected governments, the dictators are gone, and 50 million people are awakening to a future of hope and freedom.” He’s right about the violent, merciless regimes, but that’s it. The Iraqi Civil War is killing over 3,000 a month, the Taliban is making a big comeback in Afghanistan, and the elected governments of those two countries don’t even control all of their capital cities.

From now until election day, the Busheviks are going to harp on terrorism because it is the only issue they have over the Democrats. They have botched everything else, the Midas touch in reverse. And if they are so tough on terror, where is Usama bin Laden?

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home