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I posted this on DU last week:
In recent comments to the American Legion, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared the more the nearly 2/3 of Americans who oppose the U.S. occupation of Iraq to those who appeased Hitler before World War 2. If you look at reality, however, it is neoconservatives like Bush, Cheney, Lieberman and Rumsfeld that are truly appeasing the terrorists with their policies.
First, they ignored all the warnings about the dangers of Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11 to focus on the Star Wars boondoggle, while also having the FBI shift its focus from counter-terrorism to fighting pornography and drug-trafficking. Meanwhile, a Clinton-era plan to disrupt terrorist financing around the globe was killed soon after Team Bush took office, and the massive bipartisan Hart-Rudman report on terrorism collected dust in Condi Rice’s office.
Then, when terrorists struck our country on 9/11, we were told it was because Osama bin Laden hated the presence of US soldiers on the Arabian Peninsula, the most sacred Muslim holy land. In the months following 9/11, the Bush White House quietly cut and ran from Saudi Arabia, moving our troops out in compliance with Osama's decade-long dream.
To follow up on their Middle East appeasement, Team Bush later announced they were hightailing it out of the DMZ in South Korea not long after the loony leader of North Korea started rattling his saber about nuclear weapons. From Truman and Eisenhower, through Reagan and Clinton, every president had maintained a troop presence in this demilitarized zone until Kim Jong-Il had his wishes granted by George W. Bush.
Speaking of wishes, one of bin Laden’s greatest wishes was the overthrow of secular Muslim Saddam Hussein as leader of Iraq, and George Bush also fulfilled that one. It was just icing on the cake for Osama when Bush ordered the UN inspectors out of Iraq and invaded on the pretext of the urgent threat of WMD, shattering our nation’s international credibility and prestige. Not to mention, costing us over 2,600 lives and $300 billion, to date. The invasion and occupation has also proven to be a recruiting boon for Al-Qaeda.
Then, when one lone ambassador questioned the White House’s fabricated WMD claims, the response of Team Bush was to out the ambassador’s wife as a CIA spy, destroying her career as an agent tracking WMD, and also obliterating the usefulness of her CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings.
To make it a double whammy of agent outings, when they had to justify raising the terror alert during the 2004 Democratic convention, the Bush Administration served up the name Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan as justification. It turns out that Mr. Khan was a double agent working with Pakistan and Britain, whose cover was now blown.
With our current policy of submission to the demands of terrorists, it is no wonder that for the last three years the number of acts of terrorism around the globe has grown exponentially, shattering previous records.
And, the appeasement continues to this day, as not long before the recent liquid explosives on airplanes scare, it was the Bush Administration that tried to cut funding for detecting those very types of explosives. Combine that with our port security still being dangerously under funded, budget cutbacks at the prestigious CDC, first responders also suffering drastic cuts, loose nukes unaccounted for around the world, and so much more, I believe it is time to stop our policy of supplication to Al-Qaeda.
While Rumsfeld spoke of Europeans appeasing Hitler and Mussolini, it might be better if we turned an eye to our shores during that time, when many of that era’s Republicans, conservatives and business elites advocated alliance with the Nazis and the fascists. Some, like George Bush’s grandfather Prescott, went so far as to do extensive business with Hitler for years, even after Nazi Germany declared war on our country. Then, George H. W. Bush just followed his father by starting a business relationship with the bin Laden family, a relationship continued by George W. Bush.
We can talk about Don Rumsfeld’s delusional comments about the confused majority of Americans who want to appease terrorists, but the reality is that the rubber-stamp Republican Congress is just following the long standing Republican policy of appeasing tyrants and terrorists, from Hitler to Osama bin Laden. It is fitting that Stephen Colbert said, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” when speaking to President Bush.
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