Informed Comment Homepage

Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion

Header Right

Donate

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • Email
  • RSS
  • Featured
  • US politics
  • Middle East
  • Environment
  • US Foreign Policy
  • Energy
  • Economy
  • Politics
  • About
  • Archives
  • Submissions

© 2023 Informed Comment

  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Uncategorized

Bush Taunts Kerry I Just Heard

Juan Cole 09/21/2004

Tweet
Share
Reddit
Email
0 Shares

Bush Taunts Kerry

I just heard President Bush taunt John Kerry for suggesting that the US was not safer because Saddam Hussein was deposed, and for saying that the US was in fact less safe because of the chaos in Iraq.

Bush attempted to turn this statement around and suggest that Kerry was preferring dictatorship to democracy.

Iraq, however, does not have a democracy, and cannot possibly have a democracy any time soon because of events such as those described below (and they are only 24 hours’ worth)– that is, because of a failed state and a hot guerrilla war.

Moreover, if Mr. Bush abhors dictatorships so much, why hasn’t he overthrown that in China? North Korea? Zimbabwe? Or, say, Egypt? There are enormous numbers of dictatorships in the world. Is the US to overthrow them all? Putin’s decision to appoint provincial governors rather than allowing them to be elected (as though Bush should appoint the governors of US states) is a step toward dictatorship. Shall we have a war with Russia over it?

Surely the conditions under which the Palestinians live in the West Bank are a form of dictatorship (they haven’t voted for their Israeli military rulers). Why not invade the West Bank and liberate the Palestinians?

Obviously, what was obnoxious to the American people about Saddam Hussein was not that he was a dictator. Those are a dime a dozen and not usually worth $200 billion and thousands of lives. It is that he was supposedly dangerous to the US because, as Bush alleged, he was trying to develop an atomic bomb. But whatever nuclear program he had was so primitive as not to be worth mentioning, and there is no evidence that Saddam posed any threat at all to the United States’ homeland, or would have in his lifetime.

I have a sinking feeling that the American public may like Bush’s cynical misuse of Wilsonian idealism precisely because it covers the embarrassment of their having gone to war, killed perhaps 25,000 people, and made a perfect mess of the Persian Gulf region, all out of a kind of paranoia fed by dirty tricks and bad intelligence. And, maybe they have to vote for Bush to cover the embarrassment of having elected him in the first place.

How deep a hole are they going to dig themselves in order to get out of the bright sunlight of so much embarrassment?

Filed Under: Uncategorized

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

Primary Sidebar

STAY INFORMED

Join our newsletter and have sharp analysis delivered to your inbox every day.

Twitter

Follow Juan Cole @jricole or Informed Comment @infcomment on Twitter

Facebook



Sign up for our newsletter

Informed Comment © 2023 All Rights Reserved

Posting....