Mar 19 2008

George W Bush on Iraq: Read it and weep



Lest you think that five years of bloodshed in Iraq, with perhaps a million dead and 4 million more displaced from their homes, has given The Decider any pause, today he said the war is “noble, necessary, and just.”  Some pertinent excerpts from his speech today at the Pentagon on the first day of Year 6 in Iraq.

The battle in Iraq has been longer and harder and more costly than we anticipated — but it is a fight we must win….

Defeating this enemy in Iraq will make it less likely that we’ll face the enemy here at home…

There’s still hard work to be done in Iraq. The gains we have made are fragile and reversible…

The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around — it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror…

The challenge in the period ahead is to consolidate the gains we have made and seal the extremists’ defeat. We have learned through hard experience what happens when we pull our forces back too fast … General Petraeus has warned that too fast a drawdown could result in such an unraveling — with al Qaeda and insurgents and militia extremists regaining lost ground and increasing violence.

Men and women of the Armed Forces: Having come so far, and achieved so much, we’re not going to let this to happen…

Any further drawdown will be based on conditions on the ground and the recommendations of our commanders — and they must not jeopardize the hard-fought gains our troops and civilians have made over the past year.

The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable …  

More than 4,400 men and women have given their lives in the war on terror. We’ll pray for their families. We’ll always honor their memory.

The best way we can honor them is by making sure that their sacrifice was not in vain. Five years ago tonight, I promised the American people that in the struggle ahead “we will accept no outcome but victory.” Today, standing before men and women who helped liberate a nation, I reaffirm the commitment. The battle in Iraq is noble, it is necessary, and it is just. And with your courage, the battle in Iraq will end in victory.

In short, we are “winning”, whatever that means — and the way to honor those who have died is for even more to die.

Friday is Iraq Moratorium #7.

You know what to do.

4 comments

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  1. What will you do on Friday?  Please share your plans.

    I’ll be at a vigil in Milwaukee.

  2. Bush also tried again to connect Iraq with September 11, with a new twist:  If we leave Iraq, we’ll be open to another 9/11:

    If we were to allow our enemies to prevail in Iraq, the violence that is now declining would accelerate — and Iraq would descend into chaos. Al Qaeda would regain its lost sanctuaries and establish new ones — fomenting violence and terror that could spread beyond Iraq’s borders, with serious consequences for the world’s economy.

    Out of such chaos in Iraq, the terrorist movement could emerge emboldened — with new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to dominate the region and harm America. An emboldened al Qaeda with access to Iraq’s oil resources could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations. Iran would be emboldened as well — with a renewed determination to develop nuclear weapons and impose its brand of hegemony across the Middle East. Our enemies would see an America — an American failure in Iraq as evidence of weakness and a lack of resolve.

    To allow this to happen would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and make it more likely that America would suffer another attack like the one we experienced that day — a day in which 19 armed men with box cutters killed nearly 3,000 people in our — on our soil; a day after which in the following of that attack more than one million Americans lost work, lost their jobs. The terrorists intend even greater harm to our country. And we have no greater responsibility than to defeat our enemies across the world so that they cannot carry out such an attack.

  3. means beating down a third world country so thoroughly that it can no longer feed, clothe, and house its inhabitants, it can no longer mount an effective resistance, and a collaborating class is put into power in the puppet government so that the empire can exploit the defeated country unimpeded.

    It means keeping the citizens of the empire so ignorant and frightened that they will consent to a permanent state of war.

    This has happened for so long and so continuously, I have to marvel that otherwise intelligent and well-informed people still have hope that the State will somehow reform itself through party politics.

    For me, the State is only a vehicle for conquest. It is haggled over by two factions that use it for much the same purpose, who use the patriotic lie in their stump speeches to a desperate and gullible populace.

    If people want to stop going in circles, they have to get off the merry-go-round.

    If they can’t face the fact that the solution lies with themselves and not the party machines, then they should keep repeating whatever mantra the parties are selling this year and go back to sleep.

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    I will be at the Inner Harbor of Baltimore with the Women in Black this Friday, at the corner of Pratt and Light Streets, noon to 1 p.m., in a vigil for peace.

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