Speaking at yesterday's graduation of tomorrow's militiary leaders of the Army. President George W. Bush compared the new war on terror to be the "New Cold War" as Truman compared the period after WW2 with the Iron Curtain
"As President Truman put it towards the end of his presidency, 'When history says that my term of office saw the beginning of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we set the course that can win it.' His leadership paved the way for subsequent presidents from both political parties -- men like Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan -- to confront and eventually defeat the Soviet threat," Bush said
First off as an NCO I never belived in the doctrine of first strike, as the only option. If we attack all nations that we perceive to be a threat to our nation's stability, does this mean, Venzuela, Cuba, Iran, China, the new Russia authoratarian regime are all possible places for action by this admninistration, what about Pakistan the nuclear knowledge that Khan passed on top Libya, Iran, China etc have all opened doors to future terrorism, supposedly Osama Bin Ladin lives in the mountains of Pakistan, why haven't we invaded there to get the "most wanted man in the world, by all nations?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Today's WAPO article gives the highlights of the Presidents statements to the corp of cadets that graduated, the first class that joined after 9/11, was it the rah-rah speech to inspire them to lead troops into the fiasco in Iraq, or was it to lay the ground work for a new 30-50 year war, this nation can not afford at a cost of 3-4 billion a month, with all these tax cuts the Republicans have pushed thru in that past 5 years, at some point taxes must be raised to pay off this massive debt.
To burden our great great grancd children with approximately 30,000 dollars of debt so that President Bush can be remembered as a war President is just flat foolishness, I applaud him for the incursion into Afghanistan in 2001 after 9-11, I despise him and Rumsfeld and the PNAC group for encouraging this country to invade Iraq immediately after the Taliban fled, was it necessary? NO Saddam was contained, he had no WMD's he couldn't do anything in reality.
We are now down to the excuse he had to go because he used chemical weapons on the Kurds in 1988, so what Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney approved using chemical weapons and illegal drugs like PCP, LSD, scopalomine, peyote, etc in all 254 different substances. I think what Cheney and Rumsfeld did was worse than what Saddam did, who is going to invade America to get them? Are they also not guilty of war crimes? They did violate international law, that America was instrumental in writing called the Nuremberg Codes of 1947, why are they above the law?
They approved their crimes with Presidential blessing of President Ford in 1974 and 1975 while as the Chief of Staff of the White House and or the Secretary of Defense, why should they be given a free pass?
We as a nation should never use out military might to invade a country, just because we can, if a nation or it's citizens attack us, as in the group Al Qaeda sponsored by the Taliban from Afghanistan, then yes, use everything we have to take them out, but because we perceive a threat 5-10 years down the road, we should invade them now, that basically means many nations are at risk, with this type of doctrine, and do we as a nation want that? I don't think so, we have never used it in the past 225 years, this President is the one who decided it, not Congress, and not us the public, George W Bush made this decision, and in my opinion it's a bad one, and a road we do not want to go down as a nation.
In my opinion history will never portray George W Bush as a leader of the caliber of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, he will be remembered with the likes of Coolidge, Grant and Nixon.