As I posted yesterday, I was hoping to see how President Bush would relate World War II and Iraq. He did mention WWII in his speech to Air Force Academy graduates yesterday, but I’m still trying to understand the connection – except, of course, the obvious attempt to convince older voters that he’s in the mold of FDR. He’s probably thinks he’s laying the groundwork for overturning the 22nd amendment so he can be President-Forever.
He contended that peace and democracy in Iraq are emerging at a satisfactory pace by drawing 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.”
So how does this relate to invading a country that hadn’t declared war on us? And how does our Iraqi policy compare to the post WWII Marshall Plan or the fact that we failed to liberate all of Eastern Europe.
The New York Times’s story describes the applause he got during his speech as mostly “modest.” Boy if you can’t get a whoop and a holler out of Air Force cadets for your policy, how do expect the rest of us to get excited?
The Post story said Bush tried to strike “broad philosophical” themes.
Bush said that, in the current generation of terrorists, “we hear the echoes of other enemies at other times — that same swagger and demented logic of the fanatic.”
“Swagger and demented logic”? Probably could have been said by Osama himself.
Speaking of Swagger
