Reasons to be in Iraq No 17

Against the backdrop of the huge (1,092-foot ) new aircraft carrier “Ronald Reagan”(CVN 76 see pic ) at Naval Air Station North Island,San Diego, the Texan Terrorist addressed a crowd celebrating the signing for General McArthur by the Japanese leadership of a Peace Treaty to on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, to formally end the war in the Pacific, which had actually ended two weeks previously on August 14th.

“Now, as then, our enemies have made their fight a test of American credibility and resolve. Now, as then, they are trying to intimidate free people and break our will. And now, as then, they will fail.

They will fail because the terrorists of our century are making the same mistake that the followers of other totalitarian ideologies made in the last century. They believe that democracies are inherently weak and corrupt and can be brought to their knees. They looked at our response after the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombings of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the first World Trade Center attack, the killing of American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole.

They concluded that free societies lack the courage and character to defend themselves against a determined enemy. Hear the words of Osama bin Laden that explain why he believed he could get away with the attacks of September the 11th, 2001: "We've seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier, who is ready to wage cold wars and unprepared to fight long wars. . . After a few blows they ran in defeat. . . (They forgot) about being a world leader."

Bush curiously lists these events as evidence that the US “cut and run”. A strange message for a military audience. Reagan faced with the instant death of over 250 Marines in the Beirut bombings, prudently saw that the fight wasn’t worth the prize. The Mogadishu killings presaged the futility of fighting the savage warriors who controlled no vital assets the invader wanted, the first World Centre bombing, as those of the US African Embassies and the SS Cole eventually resulted, directly in the rain of missiles ordered by Clinton at pregnant (!) moments in his defence of impeachment for whoring with an intern and ultimately in invasion. The newly leveraged war by remote control, perfect by Wesley Clark in his bombing from 20,000 feet of Serbia.

Now the Commander - in - Chief has a newly minted motive, which he outlined today …

“The terrorists and insurgents are now waging a brutal campaign of terror in Iraq.
1.They kill innocent men and women and children in the hopes of intimidating Iraqis.

2. They're trying to scare them away from democracy.

3.They're trying to break the will of the American people.

4.Their goal is to turn Iraq into a failed state like Afghanistan was under the Taliban.

5. If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions; they could recruit more terrorists by claiming an historic victory over the United States and our coalition.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, Saddam the evil mastermind busy arming with weapons of insidious and sinister purpose to gas, destroy , maim and infect with deadly disease, has morphed into a multi headed hydra of scheming “insurgents”, fuelled both by Iraqi oil receipts –( perhaps funded in Euros as Saddam did, to finally seal his fate as a US ally), and by Anti - American hatred.

As Justin Raimondo says at Anti War today.

…… the party line will change, once again, as we fight a monster of our own making – and that, in a nutshell, is the whole story of this endless "war on terrorism": it is a self-renewing monster that can, in theory, never die. We slay it and it keeps reappearing – and how convenient is that?