Bush's 'Global War on Radicals' (ROBERT PARRY)

[laststeamtrain]

Bush's 'Global War on Radicals'

By Robert Parry
December 23, 2006

The United States will never win the “war on terror,” in part, because George W. Bush keeps applying elastic definitions to the enemy, most recently expanding the conflict into a war against Muslim “radicals and extremists.”

With almost no notice in Official Washington, Bush has inserted this new standard for judging who’s an enemy as he lays the groundwork for a wider conflict in the Middle East and a potentially endless world war against many of the planet’s one billion adherents to Islam.

Indeed, it could be argued that the “war on terror” has now morphed into the “war on radicals,” allowing Bush to add the likes of Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the leaders of Syria and Iran to his lengthening international enemies list.

Bush’s twists and turns in defining the enemy in the “war on terror” started more than five years ago, in the days immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Amid the nation’s anguish, Bush spoke in grandiloquent and quasi-religious terms, vowing to “rid the world of evil,” a patently absurd task that never received the ridicule it deserved.

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So, this “new kind of war” – as Bush’s supporters call it – will require not only the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers but will deform the U.S. government beyond recognition, ultimately making it an international pariah state disgraced by having forsaken its own ideals of justice and tolerance.

In the end, Bush’s vision of the future also means the United States must turn its back on the Founding Fathers, who were considered “radicals” and “extremists” in their own age because they rejected the “divine right of kings” and insisted that all people are created equal and are endowed with “unalienable rights.”

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/122206.html#When:03:30PM

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Omigod, I think I'd better move my hiding place back further

into the woods! War on radicals, indeed!

[Metta]

2. Good points. Thanks for posting.

Yeah, * has no intention of winning any war or even "winning" any war. He's just posing whatever he thinks might fly so that he can continue stealing our treasure for his base. He should be in jail. In Guantanamo.

I wonder where Pickles got the idea that "It's easy to manipulate peoples' feelings"?

[Vidar]

3. The war on terror begins with the monster in the White House.