9/11 has been a winning card for Bush, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s pulled it out once again:
Monday’s speech was the one where the president tied Israel’s fight against the armed Lebanese group Hizbullah to the events of September 11.
The president said: “The current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East. … For decades, the status quo in the Middle East permitted tyranny and terror to thrive. And as we saw on September 11, the status quo in the Middle East led to death and destruction in the United States, and it had to change.”
See here, for a posting by Tom McCarthy on Huffpo, click here.
Bush might be correct — that the current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East. The problems is that not everyone agrees with Bush about who are the "forces of freedom" and who are the "forces of terror." Bush's invasion of Iraq was orchestrated with false information, deliberate manipulation of government propaganda and outright lying to Congress; it has relied on kidnapping, torture, rendition and other denials of basic human rights; it has involved flagrant and continuing violations of both the U.S. Constitution and U.S. federal law; it has resulted in the totally unnecessary deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqis, including more than 50,000 innocent civilians (plus several times this number of severely injured casualties); it has needlessly cost more American lives than the 9/11 attack (if we include the thousands of Americans that the military excludes from official statistics, such as contractors and soldiers who have been killed in non-combat situations); it has exploded the federal deficit, devaluating the dollar against foreign currencies; it has led to Israel adopting a near-identical strategy for dealing with Hezbollah, with similarly disastrous results; and it has utterly failed to reduce terrorist attacks against U.S. targets (in fact, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has grown so much since the Iraq invasion that the Bush Administration has stopped publishing the data on global terrorism. At every step of the way, Bush and his Administration have told whatever lies suit their immediate purposes in their desperate grab for dictatorial executive power. In sum, Bush might believe he represents the "forces of freedom," but any impartial review of the facts would unlikely reach this conclusion.