Doublespeak of the Week

President Bush's 9/28 speech Ft. Bragg:
"After September 11, I made a commitment to the American people: this nation will not be attacked again. We will defend our freedom. We will take the fight to the enemy. Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war. Many of the terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children on thestreets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home. The commander in charge of thecoalition operations in Iraq, who is also senior commander at this base, General John Vines, putit well the other day. He said, 'We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, orwe deal with it when it comes to us.'"
This rhetoric would all be well and good, but Iraq was not the enemy and never was a threat to America. Now we are fighting terrorists there because we did not secure the boarders after our ill-conceived invasion and WMD hunt. Before the US Army showed up there were no terrorists, terrorist camps, or ties to Al Quida of any kind to be found. Now, terrorism is Iraq's major industry. I liken it to fighting crime by fire-bombing a low-crime neighborhood, and then goingto fight the rising crime-rate that is a result of our destruction and violence.
This is one of the biggest misconceptions about the war in Iraq: that we went there to fight terrorists. Everyday, people mention Iraq in the same breath as terrorists. They say if we are better off fighting them abroad than at home. But we shouldn't be fighting in Iraq at all. We never should have gone there. The 9/11 Commission found that Iraq never had any terrorist ties, and our own troops have found that Iraq never had any WMDs and never was a threat. It would have been like invading China for Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor. You can't win a war if you can't even identify the threats.
Rather than spouting off newspseak and rhetoric, I want to hear someone tell the facts: "We are in Iraq because we thought they had WMDs. We were wrong and now we have inflamed the hearts andminds of thousands of would-be-terrorsts, hatered we have helped justify with our reckless, intolerant behavior. Now we are trying desperately to fix what we've broken."