The Little Brown Reader: Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq

November 05, 2003

Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq

Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.

He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:

Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?

The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".

Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation

The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.

Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”

Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”

Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”

Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.

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Read the full commentary

Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%

Posted by Lance Brown at November 5, 2003 06:46 PM | TrackBack

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