Tuesday, August 30, 2005
The latest reason for troops in Iraq: So far: - Iraq has chemical and biological WMD
- Iraq will have nukes in short order
- Iraq working with al Qaeda
- Iraq connected to 9/11
- Iraq a destabilizing force in the region
- Saddam a ruthless dictator
- A free Iraq will be the first step in reforming the Middle East
- "He tried to kill my dad."
- A democratic Iraq will be in inspiration to other Arab nations
- We owe it to the troops that have already died
Now this (via SFGate.com): (excerpts, emp add) Bush: U.S. Must Protect Iraq From Terror
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
President Bush on Tuesday answered growing anti-war protests with a fresh reason for American troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country's vast oil fields that he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.
"We will defeat the terrorists," Bush said. "We will build a free Iraq that will fight terrorists instead of giving them aid and sanctuary."
Bush said the Iraqi oil industry, already suffering from sabotage and lost revenues, must not fall under the control of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida forces in Iraq led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks," Bush said. "They'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions. They could recruit more terrorists by claiming a historic victory over the United States and our coalition." This is getting ridiculous. Apparently, in response to the public concern about high gasoline/oil prices, Bush is using that as a talking point to garner support for the war. Who is going to buy that argument? Bush has been peculiarly off-message recently (witness the lackadaisical response to the New Orleans disaster). Could it be that Bush's "magic" - with those who make up the Cult of Bush - has finally faded?
posted by Quiddity at 8/30/2005 09:58:00 PM
4 comments
And who will buy oil from Osama Inc. (formerly known as Iraq)? What difference would there be between subsidizing terrorism at the source or trough the middleman Saudi Arabia? But would a Prime Minister of Iraq Osama (Sunni) not guarantee a counterweight to Iran (Shia) and be more inclined to do deals with a fundamentalist America instead of godless Russia or China? And as head of state he might be a bit more corruptible.
The whole thing is so ridiculous, whom is Bush going to fool (too many, I know)?
HB
Bush's magic wearing off on his cult? You need to get out more. The worse things get, the MORE they believe--and demand that everyone else believe, too. Protecting the oil fields came out as the reason du jour yesterday. By this evening, I will have a half dozen emails in my inbox from my right-wing friends explaining that this was the goal all along--Saddam was going to hand the oil fields over to Bin Laden, so we had to intervene.
For the Bush true believers, there is no distortion of logic too extreme that they cannot accomodate it. Even if today's reason is exactly the opposite of yesterday's reason, it's no problem for them. They simply forget yesterday.
Derelict
Thanx for catching this. I'm going to post this all over the AOL message boards and see what the Bushevik reaction is.
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/18600
The Man Who Ate His Fingers - A Story about the Stupidity of War and The Idiots Who Glorify It
A powerful and graphic anti-war story narrated by a syndicated newspaper columnist about a homeless Gulf War vet who decides to eat a finger a day to speak out about war and to force President Bush to bring home the troops.
“He had seen a photograph on an Internet site of an eight-year-old Iraqi boy named Ali, whose fingers had all been blown off when he picked up a brightly colored unexploded canister from a cluster bomb. Sam wondered how it would be to go through life without fingers, to be unable to write or to hold and read a book. As he thought about the boy and the pain he must have felt, Sam conceived what it was he could do to stop the war.
“Sam proposed to fast for two weeks, except that he was going to chew off one of his fingers each morning for five days, take the weekend off, and continue the next week for five more days until they were all gone. He would stop if President Bush agreed to immediately bring home the troops. Knowing that concession was unlikely, all Sam asked of me was to write a daily column about what he was doing and why, publish a photograph to prove his progress and help keep his location secret from the authorities. He feared being arrested as a mental case and he was determined to finish once he had started. We talked all afternoon. I concluded that I couldn’t help Sam maim himself, but I did agree to tell his story.”
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