Letters to the Editor
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More Authoritarian B.S. From nabalzbbfr
nabalzbbfr:
There is a cancer growing in the Middle East and threatening to metastasize worldwide. President Bush courageously decided to address this problem head on instead of patching it over with band aids like previous administrations.
Ah yes! The courageous codpiece to the rescue!
The fearless authoritarian leader can do no wrong. He takes up Hurculean tasks that other (girly) men have shrunk from in shame, and sets right the order of the world!
Meanwhile, in the real world, Bush is feeding the cancer, having totally ignored the most pressing problems we faced in the Middle East, in order to create a whole bunch of new ones.
Here's what his former Mideast envoy, General Anthony Zinni said back in August, 2002, regarding the notion of invading Iraq:
You need to weigh this: what are your priorities in the region? That's the first issue in my mind.
The Middle East peace process, in my mind, has to be a higher priority. Winning the war on terrorism has to be a higher priority. More directly, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Central Asia need to be resolved, making sure Al Qaeda can't rise again from the ashes that are destroyed. Taliban cannot come back. That the warlords can't regain power over Kabul and Karzai, and destroy everything that has happened so far.
Our relationships in the region are in major disrepair, not to the point where we can't fix them, but we need to quit making enemies we don't need to make enemies out of. And we need to fix those relationships. There's a deep chasm growing between that part of the world and our part of the world. And it's strange, about a month after 9/11, they were sympathetic and compassionate toward us. How did it happen over the last year? And we need to look at that -- that is a higher priority.
The country that started this, Iran, is about to turn around, 180 degrees. We ought to be focused on that. The father of extremism, the home of the ayatollah -- the young people are ready to throw out the mullahs and turn around, become a secular society and throw off these ideas of extremism. That is more important and critical. They're the ones that funded Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. That ought to be a focus. And I can give you many, many more before you get down to Saddam and Iraq.
Woops!
Source:
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/zinni.html