Time will tell, I suppose, but it seems to me that President Bush has made yet another blunder, when he could have riden high on this weekend’s remembrance ceremonies.
Just a few days after the dedication of the World War II Memorial and the gathering of a tragically small number of remaining veterans of that war to save the world, our president has decided that equating that event with his little war in Iraq:
A day after the formation of an interim government in Iraq, President Bush said Wednesday that the effort to defeat terrorists in the Middle East is the epicenter of a global “clash of political visions” that echoes World War II and other epic 20th-Century struggles against totalitarianism in Europe.… Saying peace and democracy in Iraq are emerging at a satisfactory pace, Bush drew parallels with the course of events in Europe following World War II. During the first four years of the Cold War in the 1940s, Bush said, communists threatened civil wars in Turkey and Greece, Berlin was blockaded and the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon. Yet ultimately, he said, freedom has prevailed. By comparison, he said, “We are now about three years into the war against terrorism. . . . This is no time for impatience and self-defeating pessimism.”
Funny, I don’t remember Saddam Hussein invading everyone around him — Kuwait notwithstanding — nor did he have anything to do with the terrorists who attacked our country. And unlike World War II, our invading the country has made it less safe and a new haven for the enemy.
I don’t know what the answer is now in Iraq, since we’ve been given a huge mess that we didn’t need to create in the first place. But one thing I do know is that Bush will never stand in the pantheon with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. And I don’t think a lot of those heroic vets out there this weekend will think so, either.
