Bush says the families of fallen troops (14 killed Wednesday) can know their loved ones died in a noble cause -- and their sacrifice will be honored "by
completing the mission."
And what mission might that be today Bush?
WMD's?
Saddam?
Democracy?
Fighting them 'over there' . . .?
Ayman al-Zawahri, the al-Qaida equivalent of Cheney, has issued a predictable offer of a
truce if we will pack up and leave Iraq. It's enough to boil the blood of anyone who abhors the use of violence to achieve that which can not be gained through political means, or anyone who abhors the use of violence for anything other than true defense.
Al-Zawahri's edict is laced with threats of more violent attacks against Londoners. One should barely give notice to such a crass, opportunistic ploy, except that it is the precise formula that many in the anti-war movement have proscribed. Out of Iraq to quell the violent resistance. The war hawks in and out of the administration will undoubtedly view any effort to cut short Bush's "mission" as appeasement, and the call by al-Zawahri to withdraw as he blames the London bombings on our occupation of Iraq will only harden the obstinacies of the Bush cabal against any precipitous exit.
But al-Zawahri doesn't actually expect Bush to pack up and leave. What he hopes to achieve is to define, to justify the assaults against the U.S., our agents, and our allies as a reaction, a resistance to our invasion and occupation of the Muslim-dominated territory. His rationale will be transparent and absurd to those who have not forgotten that there was no Iraq invasion before al-Qaeda attacked New York.
But, his rhetoric will resonate with those who rightly view our involvement in Iraq as nothing less than classic imperialism and are determined to resist us with any tool or ally they can muster. Bush and Blair are mindlessly compliant in this with their 'justifications' for our military meddling which has mushroomed into massacres of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens and resulted in the deaths of over two thousand soldiers in our alliance.
The invasion of Iraq was calculated to, as Blair said a week before the London bombings, "draw a line in the sand". It was meant to send a message of 'shock and awe' throughout the world to bolster the weak images of Bush and Blair following the devastating attacks in New York. Here at home, we were led by the hand through the niceties of the administration's pre-war justifications. Saddam was an evil-doer and madman bent on our destruction, we were told. The Iraqis, Bush warned, were enemies who had "no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality."
"The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East," President Bush told us. "It has a deep hatred of America and our friends and it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaeda.
But Osama Bin Laden, the ringleader of the 9-11 attacks, was not in Iraq. The rebel leader, in fact shunned and denounced the leadership of Saddam Hussein as a betrayal of fundamental Islam. The terrorist group, al-Qaeda, did not have a foothold in Iraq before Bush and Blair invaded. They do now. There are now daily attacks on our soldiers and Iraqi citizens by an Iraqi resistance - aided by some outside terror network, possibly led by al-Zawahri. This didn't happen in a vacuum either.
It was Bush with his blustering who, by inviting attacks on our soldiers in Iraq, fueled the groundswell of resistance to our occupation and encouraged would-be attackers to cross the border into Iraq to challenge our troops, mindless of the effect his taunting would have on the behavior of those who might be inclined to actively oppose his bloody military expansionism into the Middle East.
It was Bush who likened the conflict he started in Iraq to his 'war on terror'. "We're fighting them over there so that we don't have to fight them here." goes the Bush line. So much for that. Now al-Zawahri has figured out that all he has to do is parrot our opposition to undermine our efforts to get Bush to pull out as he (apparently) continues to direct his barbarous reprisals.
See, al-Zawahri doesn't want us out of Iraq anymore than Bush does. For both of these megalomaniacs, the invasion and occupation of Iraq serves their Machiavellian missions for conquest and power. Bush, the would-be warrior king has his conquered country and his delusions of grandeur, and al-Zawahri has his antagonist to direct his follower's rage against.
Both want to destabilize the region rather than achieve some utopian state of democracy, or conversely, Islam. That's their mission: to keep us yoked to a perpetual state of militarism from which they can lord over their respective faithful herds.
Mission accomplished.
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