Bush on Iraq: The Song Remains The Same

Bush keeps trying new variations on the same old propaganda. The proboem is that we know more about this issue and he keeps pretending we don't. Dubya, we aren't that ignorant!
WaPo

President Bush's Oval Office speech last night was the culmination of two weeks of efforts to rally the nation behind his policies and presidency by summoning the memory of Sept. 11, 2001. Five years after that indelible day, however, this president's capacity to move the public is severely diminished.


There were echoes of the language and logic Bush invoked five years ago when he united a stricken nation looking to him for both comfort and leadership. But he was speaking to a different nation last night.


[...]In his speeches, Bush has advanced several arguments, starting with the proposition that the United States is engaged in a long-term ideological struggle between forces of freedom and Islamic radicals who want to destroy freedom. Although U.S. adversaries come from different backgrounds -- ranging from radical Sunnis in al-Qaeda to Shiite militants such as Hezbollah -- Bush has characterized the opposition as forming a single movement, "a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those that stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology."


Bush this week reiterated his four-year-old argument that Iraq is a central front in the broader struggle against Islamic terrorism. Premature withdrawal, he asserted, could make Iraq what Afghanistan was before the Sept. 11 attacks, an incubator for al-Qaeda. To support the point, he has noted not only the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq but, as on some earlier occasions, the words of al-Qaeda leaders themselves. In his speech last week to the Military Officers Association of America, Bush quoted Osama bin Laden as describing the war in Iraq as "a war of destiny between infidelity and Islam."


Daniel Benjamin, a U.S. counterterrorism official in the Clinton administration who has written extensively about the subject, said efforts to defeat the radical Islamist ideology have been undermined by the Iraq invasion.


"There is no acknowledgment that because we have inadvertently confirmed their claims -- that we seek to occupy Muslim lands, as we have in Iraq -- the ideology is spreading and undermining our efforts," Benjamin said.