George W. Bush was forced into making some kind of token utterance about Iraq the other day, due to the quickly sinking support for his war there.
Did he admit his many mistakes and lies? Did he announce a bold new plan? Did he promise to bring the troops home soon?
No, no, and again, no.
(more:)
Instead he squinted up his face, in his most practiced phoney-cowboy style, and repeated the same tripe he's been selling from the start:
"Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror."
"These foreign terrorists violently oppose the rise of a free and democratic Iraq, because they know that when we replace despair and hatred with liberty and hope, they lose their recruiting grounds for terror," he argued.
"Our troops are fighting these terrorists in Iraq so you will not have to face them here at home."
There are so many filthy lies stacked up here that it's impossible to unpack them all in one diary. So let me focus on one simple thing.
This never occurred to me before, and I pass it on to you thanks to Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings.
Henley's reaction to Bush's statement above:
One more time: This is horseshit. First off, I hope that no Iraqis figure out that what the President is saying here is, "We decided to turn your country into a battleground because better you than us." I suppose there's a chance that they don't obsessively follow the public statements of the man whose troops are the supreme law in their country. Second off, how stupid does the President think we are? (Don't answer that.) He's turned Iraq into Jihad University. We will not kill every foreign fighter in Iraq. We will not kill every native-born Iraqi bent on revenge. Our Iraq strategy amounts to promiscuous use of insufficient antibiotics on a sinus infection - we're culling the lame terrorists and breeding a newer, stronger strain. Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Chchnya aren't enough for this Administration. They needed to create one more petrie dish of Islamist militancy. Thanks for nothing, Dubya.
I never thought of it quite that way -- that even if you take Bush at his word, here's what he's saying to the Iraqi people whose freedom he claims to care so deeply about:
"We don't want our people killed, on our soil, so you're going to have to get killed instead. We'll make your land into Armageddon, because spilling innocent Iraqi blood is FAR preferable to spilling American blood, even if we started the fight. What? You don't like it? Tough shit, I wasn't asking for your fucking opinion. Better that thousands of your innocent children should get blown to pieces than anything happen to an American, here on the American Homeland. Now be a good little brown person and die for us. Why, you ask? Your lives just aren't worth what ours are. Now fucking suck it up and GET KILLED."
Mind you, this is what he's saying to the Iraqis even IF YOU TAKE HIM AT HIS EXACT WORDS. I've gotten so used his pathological lying that I wasn't tracking how even his most generic pro-freedom propaganda is rotten and murderous to the core when analyzed.
Shorter Bush to Iraqis: You die, so we don't have to!