Bush On Democracy...... Doctrine? Or Lame Attempt to Justify Aggression?

[ulTRAX]

I'm having a difficult time with Bush. On some level I think he's a classic megalomaniac who deluded himself that he's an instrument of his God... and other the other hand, that he cynically uses his faith to manipulate the masses. I have a hard time believing any true Christian would be out to lie and mislead as he did on the campaign trail.

So listening to Bush yesterday I was less interested in the literal meaning of what he was saying but the subtext. Was he actually committed to democracy and freedom? Or was this just a lame attempt to try to put a fig leaf of nobility over his naked aggression in Iraq? This would also help domestically to inoculate his base against any anti-war arguments or criticisms of his motives.

[Skidmore]

1. I'd take Door #2.

He's made up his mind to attack Iran. The drumbeats have already started in this past week or so, as has talk about leaving Iraq. He was emboldened by the lack of any opposition to Iraq and knows if he bullies a bit he can probably get by with more aggression and looting in other countries. Opposition better grow some cajones soon.

[ulTRAX]

6. I suspect Iran won't be invaded.

It has twice the population of Iraq and it's military hasn't been ground down with a decade of sanctions. The US is also hardly in a position to launch a new offensive. Such a war would end the chance of Iraqi Shi'ite working with the US. If we launched an invasion from Iraq we'd be in a battle on two fronts.

The US may risk a raid on a Iranian nuclear facility... or allow our proxies the Israelis do it. I wonder if the US would allow such a strike from US bases in Iraq? I think ultimately the saber rattling is just more of the good cop - bad cop game we're playing. Europe gets to play the good cop.

[ewagner]

2. Why hasn't the media learned?

This man speaks in code .....his words are sugar coated to the middle class but the hardcore neocons know EXACTLY what he means. It's definitely naked aggression he's talking about, all wrapped up in pretty words we can all love and agree upon: democracy, liberty and freedom.

Most of us here on DU have learned how this man uses language, or, as Lakoff says, "frames the debate". The Bush Administration uses language as skillfully as a surgeon uses a scapel.

I want to shout from the rooftop to anyone who will listen:

WAKE THE F*** UP!

BEWARE!!!!

[Lexingtonian]

3. more like the second of the two

Suggested translation to American: Okay, we've done the retake of Vietnam with only the Fall Of Saigon left to recapitulate- never mind, let's ignore that. We're moving on to getting even with the Iranian mullahs for the 1978-80 humiliation, then we're gonna pick another scab by more fighting via proxies with Castro in Latin America as we did in the Eighties.

As for the rhetoric, it's classical Western expansionism colonial cant. Every major American Indian leader was declared a 'tyrant' when he put a fight and tried to unify his fractious tribe(s), then war was waged on him in the name of 'freedom' for the fifth columnist factions. The same was done to native leaders and peoples in Africa, Asia, and South America. 'Freedom' invariably entailed a loss of property and rights and privileges and autonomy/sovereignty, and led to enslavement de jure or de facto- doing work in terribly oppressive conditions of which the profits all went overseas.

The constituency he concerns himself with lives in a time warp, lives in the past. There's no need to 'inoculate' them against anything except the way he falls on his face every time.

[Roland99]

4. W and Dostoevsky - George W. Bush is a man possessed

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4515

Midway through his inaugural address, when the president proclaimed "the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," I wondered if Bush or his speechwriters knew or cared how alien this ultra-revolutionary rhetoric would seem to conservatives of the old school – and soon had my answer:

"Because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it. By our efforts we have lit a fire as well, a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power; it burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world."

A fire in the mind – surely, I thought, Bush's speechwriters can't have inserted this phrase without knowing its literary origin. It is taken from Dostoevsky's novel, The Possessed, a story set in pre-revolutionary Russia in which the author chronicles the intrigues of the emerging revolutionary movement: one of the main characters is based on the infamous nihilist Sergei Nechaev, whose aim is to make a revolution of such destructive power that bourgeois society will be completely destroyed. Their strategy is to provoke a violent crackdown on all dissent – which will then spark an explosion of revolutionary violence. To this purpose the nihilist Peter Verkhovensky worms his way into the confidence of Lembke, a provincial governor, convincing him of the need to crush rebellious workers who are distributing revolutionary leaflets and generally agitating against the government. The result is an uprising of murderous anger, a volcanic eruption of nihilistic violence that consumes the provincial capital in a great fire. In the end, Governor Lembke stands amid the crowd watching his mansion go up in flames:



Makes me think more and more that Bush truly is a neocon and isn't just a tool of the neocons. Bush is Trotsky. He's just replaced communism with democracy.

[IndyPriest]

5. Both. I think he's a true believer, which gives him the right

to do whatever's "necessary" to achieve his goals. "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice."

I think the reason his language sounds so lame, to me, is that his definitions of "freedom" and "liberty" is certainly not mine.

[ulTRAX]

7. anyone who believes they are doing God's will.......

Anyone deluded enough to believe they are doing God's will probably thinks they have lots of latitude from on-high! LOL