Do you ever marvel at the audacity of the Bush administration. I do. Almost every day. Take Tony Snow, for example.
On the first day of the 34th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, a former Fox News Channel anchor, made a speech in which he argued that terrorists were to blame for the Global War on Terror, not the United States.
We got attacked by some terrorists, if that is what Tony Snow means. They were 19 angry men, organized by college educated European immigrants into four deadly suicide missions. The organizers had gone to Afghanistan and met with Usama bin-Laden. They were allegedly put up to their plot by a man named Khalid Sheihh Mohammed (KSM). KSM is in our custody now. He’s been so thoroughly tortured that he could never be put on trial. This group attacked us, according to them, because of our military presence in the Middle East (particularly our bases in Saudi Arabia and our embargo of Iraq). They also opposed our policies in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This group also had, by 9/11, recruited and trained a lot of men. Our job, after 9/11, was to punish as many of the people responsible for the terrorist attack as we could identify, make corrections to our homeland security, and then figure out how to counteract the appeal of these groups, so they would atrophy over time. There was a global aspect to this. But it not the relatively small and stateless group of al-qaeda affiliated groups that declared a global war on terror. The President did that. In doing so, he defined a war on a tactic, assuring his own defeat. He then set out to create more enemies that would seek revenge and seek to do us harm.
We didn’t attack ourselves. But we did create the global war on terror…as a concept and as a failed strategy.
Speaking at the Omni Shoreham Hotel’s Regency Ballroom in Washington DC, the presidential advisor said, “We didn’t create the war in Iraq. We didn’t create the war on terror.”
This is such a tricky one. Who is meant by ‘we’ here? It’s true that the United States did not invade Kuwait. It’s true that it wasn’t this administration that told Saddam ‘we have no interest in your Arab-Arab disputes’ and then turned around and told him that we did have a problem with his Arab-Arab disputes. It’s true that it wasn’t this administration that got us bogged down in a thankless and interminable containment policy in Iraq. But it was this administration that created this war in Iraq. There is a guy on trial for perjury right now that was one of the chief creators.
Snow also vowed that the US would “capture terrorists hiding out in their caves and their spider holes, tapping away on keyboards.”
How comforting.
According to The Right Angle, one of twenty-five blogs which received credentials for the conference, Snow “received a standing ovation following his speech.”
“His message for conservatives was simple: take off the dark-colored glasses ‘because we’ve got a lot of work to do,'” Ivy J. Sellers blogs. “The world is watching and waiting, Snow told the crowd, and ‘when we win…the rest of the world’s going to say, “We want to be like (sic) American.””
How delusional. We cannot and will not win because we have chosen a strategy that is morally, tactically, and strategically doomed. Never before have so many not wanted to be like an American. But, stand up and cheer. This kind of chutzpah and ostrich-like thinking is worthy of a standing ovation.
