Stupid is as Bush does

George Bush may be one of the few people still stupid enough to believe that the evil in the world comes from evil leaders and that hatred and violence goes away when these leaders are defeated. Lacking all qualities of leadership himself, he attributes mass movements to the will of one tyrant or another rather than to vastly larger forces. Of course he needs to believe that since he’s sold our children’s future to pay for a war that was supposed to illustrate his simplistic idea. It didn’t. Saddam is long out of office and the violence and anti-American hatred escalates daily.

In a televised address yesterday Bush insisted that “the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.” Apparently some Americans are still stupid enough to believe that.

“If we do not defeat these enemies now,” Mr. Bush said, “we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.”

According to The Times, the bellicose Mr. Bush spent roughly one-fifth of his 17-minute address making the case that the nation’s safety hinged on success in Iraq, even as he implicitly acknowledged there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 strikes.

He ranted on however, as though Saddam had such weapons and as though Saddam had attacked us rather than the amorphous, stateless and ubiquitous clusters of angry men. He filibusters on as if the religious passions of well over a billion people will change if we blow up a city or knock over a government or arrest a secular leader, inimical to Jihad.

Haven’t we had enough of the analogies to a war than ended 60 years ago – we are not fighting a country that is about to invade us or that can conquer us militarily. We are threatened by universal hatred and religious mania that does not need an army or generals or a nation.

Had we not invaded Iraq we would have retained the support of more moderate Islamic countries after 9/11, without which we have far less of a chance for peace and without our backbreaking involvement in Iraq, we would most likely have rid ourselves of Osama and made him face the scorn of Muslims everywhere.

Iraq was not a decision forced on Bush by circumstances, it was the result of an obsession that drove him to ignore Osama and ignore all the intelligence and the warnings Bush inherited from the Clinton administration. It was George whose administration held not one meeting on Terrorism before 9/11 and it's George now sitting on the white horse trying to look like a general when he should be riding out of town on a rail.