There is something truly pathetic about President George W. Bush's speech to the Coast Guard cadets yesterday. Desperate to convince Americans they are in enough danger to warrant bloody slaughter in Iraq, he weaves new sound-bites out of old non-events to conjure an al-Qaeda threat only stoppable in Iraq.
Acknowledging the oddity of the absence of attacks in America since 9/11, he attributes that absence to God's blessing and the capacity of the US government to be "right 100 per cent of the time" in its round the clock struggle to defend the country. Cowpies. In October 2006, 20 of 22 government attempts to evade security by bringing weapons on board airplanes at Newark Airport succeeded. In Blacksburg, Virginia we could all see how easy it is to kill Americans in the homeland. We're not being attacked primarily because our enemies have all the targets they need in Iraq and are in any event focused on changing regimes in the Muslim world, not in America.
Comparing Bush's speech to the Cadets in 2007 to the speech he gave there in 2003, the difference is obvious. In 2003 he described al-Qaeda's remnants as being hunted down in a few dark corners of the world. In 2007 he described al-Qaeda as a raging storm, building Iraq as a gigantic base of operations. America, he said, "living in the eye of a storm. All around us, dangerous winds are swirling, and these winds could reach our shores at any moment." Beware of Hurricane Osama! What a sensational story, for the press and for the President--the storm of the century that is always about to hit, and never goes away!
At least President Bush described al-Qaeda terrorists as "a thinking enemy." Indeed they are. They thought the US would overreact to 9/11 with a wonderfully disruptive and hopeless war in the Middle East to "bleed America" and they were absolutely right. Now they and the President are, as Bin-Laden has said, partners. They are both engaged a jihad/crusade that is al-Qaeda's best source of political support. While Bin-Laden and al-Zawahiri have the War in Iraq to make their nutty propaganda about war with the infidels seem right on the money to hundreds of millions of Muslims, the President has the War on Terror and Hurricane Osama as his only reliable techniques for distracting the country from the catastrophic consequences of his failed presidency.
