http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14560336/

Bush: Anger over war won’t change U.S. policy
President, conceding unpopularity, vows to stay the course in Iraq
NBC VIDEO

Updated: 11:12 p.m. ET Aug 29, 2006
NEW ORLEANS - Calling resistance against terrorism the “defining struggle of the 21st century,” President Bush declared Tuesday that he would not let Americans’ frustration with the war deter him from finishing the job in Iraq.

In an exclusive interview Tuesday night on “NBC Nightly News,” the president said history would vindicate his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and remove President Saddam Hussein from power. But it would consign him to ignominy if he heeded the calls of critics and much of the public to pull U.S. troops home before democracy could be stabilized in Iraq, he said.

“If we lose our nerve and leave the Middle East before the job is finished, the world will be much worse off,” Bush told “Nightly News” anchor and Managing Editor Brian Williams.

“I have been saying all the time that we need perseverance and patience and the willingness to defeat a terrorist organization, an ideology of hate, with not only military action but the spread of freedom,” he said.

“I believe this is the calling of our time.”

‘War came to our shores’
The president acknowledged that many Americans were dismayed by the rising number of U.S. service personnel who have been killed in a seemingly ever-more-volatile Iraq. He said that while he did not dismiss that concern lightly, he could not let it temper his resolve.

“I have no doubt — the war came to our shores. Remember that,” he said, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes on New York and Washington. “We had a foreign policy that basically said, ‘Let’s hope calm works.’ And we were attacked.”

Response to critics
On criticism by University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson that his “patrician” upbringing blinded him to the reality of Katrina:
“I don’t know Dyson, and Dyson doesn’t know me. But I will tell you this: When it’s all said and done, the people down here know that I stood in Jackson Square, and I said we’re going to help you, and we delivered.”

Bush said he could “understand the frustrations of our citizens.” But “if we retreat for the sake of popularity, is that the smart thing to do? My answer is absolutely not,” he said. “It’d be a huge mistake to give the battlefield to these extremists.

“We retreat, they follow us,” he added. “And I see this clearly as day.”

Bush spoke with Williams as he toured a rebuilding site in New Orleans, which he visited Monday and Tuesday as a show of support for the Mississippi gulf region on the anniversary of the devastating landfall of Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,600 people. He admitted that there were “failures” in the federal response after the hurricane and promised the people of Louisiana and Mississippi that he would do all he could to right the wrongs.

U.S. unpopularity seen as necessary price
Still, Bush acknowledged that the war effort — along with other policies that have bucked international sentiments or treaties — had cost the United States on the world stage. But he insisted that it was wrong to equate criticism of his administration with opposition to American principles and ideals.

“People don’t like my policies, necessarily,” he said, noting opposition to the decision in 2002 to withdraw U.S. support for the International Criminal Court and his opposition to the Kyoto Protocols on global warning, in addition to the war in Iraq.

But “you’ve got to make decisions based upon what you think is right — that you can’t try to be popular,” he maintained.

“I readily concede our policies may not be beloved,” the president said. “But I’ll tell you the policies that are: We feed the hungry. When the tsunamis hit, it was the United States of America who took the lead. On HIV/AIDS, we’re spending $15 billion of taxpayers’ money to help people [who are] suffering. And so this country is a country that is doing a lot of good.

“I think when it’s all said and done that they’ll look back and say: ‘Thank goodness America took the lead in fighting this war on terror, too. Thank God they’re helping to lay the foundation for peace.’”

Asked what other goals he hoped to reach before he left office in January 2009, Bush returned to two of the major themes of his State of the Union address last winter: repair Social Security and reduce American dependence on foreign oil.

“Baby boomers are retiring, fewer people are paying into the system, and the system is going broke,” Bush said of the retirement program, which the White House projects will begin paying out more in benefits than it collects in payroll taxes in 2017. “And it’s going to require both Democrats and Republicans coming together to reform these systems so that they keep their promise.”

He was more animated when it came to energy.

“We’re addicted to oil — which is a pretty strong statement for a guy from Texas to make,” Bush said, calling U.S. dependence on foreign sources of oil “a national security issue — not only an economic security issue, it’s a national security issue.”

Reversing that dependence will take a lot longer than environmental critics of the White House believe, he said. “Technology is going to take the lead. [But] technology doesn’t happen overnight.”

“If there was a magic wand to wave, I’d wave it,” he added. “... What I don’t want to do is lay out something that is not going to work.”

By MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson with NBC News’ Brian Williams in New Orleans.

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

Highlights excerpted follow in subsequent posts.

What went wrong in the gulf
“I think we should have had better coordination with the state and local government. The enormity of the storm just overwhelmed all aspects of the government. And I believe had we been better coordinated, communicated better, moved equipment better, coordinated better on who’s responsible for troops, we could have done a better job.”

What went right
“I hope the American people realize there were some great successes, like the Coast Guard pilots that flew endless hours to pull people off roofs. Or the Louisiana Guard that moved in. There are the neighbors helping neighbors, the Cajun navy — fishermen and folks down from the bayou who pulled people out. And so, yes, things could have been better, but what I don’t want people to do is overlook the great heroism of the local citizenry that really did a remarkable job.”

American sacrifice for Sept. 11
“Americans are sacrificing. We pay a lot of taxes. Americans sacrificed when the economy went in the tank. Americans sacrificed when air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.”

Staying in Iraq
“This is the defining struggle of the 21st century, and we will succeed. We’ll succeed in Iraq. We’ve done it — helped the Lebanese democracy succeed. We need to work for a Palestinian state, and yet those fragile democracies or the idea of democracy is being attacked by extremist elements — extremist Sunni elements and extremist Shia elements. The American people must ask why. Why is that?”

Saddam and al-Qaida
“I personally do not believe Saddam Hussein picked up the phone and said to al-Qaida, ‘Attack America.’ [But] he was on our state-sponsor-of-terrorists list, and he was paying families of suiciders. He also, by the way, had weapons of mass destruction at one time and had the capacity to make them. That’s a dangerous mix. We didn't put him on the state-sponsors-of-terrorists list. Previous administrations put him on the state-sponsors-of-terrorists list.”

Democracy in Iraq
“I believe the unity government of Iraq will succeed. I believe you’re beginning to see the Iraqi government beginning using their armed forces to fight off militia. I believe they understand when 12 million people vote they have a duty to listen to the will of the 12 million.”

U.S. status in the world
“Listen, America is respected. People still want to come to America. You ask anybody in the world who wants to better their life, where would you most like to go, most would say America. People don’t like my policies, necessarily, and they didn’t like the fact that I didn’t join the International Criminal Court, they didn’t like the fact that I wouldn’t sign the Kyoto Protocol — both of which I did not think were for the good of the country. Many people didn’t like the fact that we went after Saddam Hussein — resolution after resolution. I understand that. But ... you’ve got to make decisions based upon what you think is right — that you can’t try to be popular. And so I would tell you America is respected.”

Breaking energy dependence
“I spoke very clearly about it at the State of the Union. I stood up and said we got a problem. We’re addicted to oil. Which is a pretty strong statement for a guy from Texas to make. I’m willing to go as far as practical. What I don’t want to do is lay out something that is not going to work. We’re spending billions of dollars on new technologies, and technology is going to lead us away from dependency on oil.”

Bush Takes Rhetorical Aim at War Critics

By DEB RIECHMANN

LITTLE ROCK -- President Bush is kicking off another series of speeches to counter opposition to the war in Iraq, Americans' impatience with the rising U.S. death toll and anxiety about possible terrorist attacks.

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/08/3..._of_history.php
Rumsfeld's Misuse Of History
John Prados
August 31, 2006


John Prados is a senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. His forthcoming book is Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Ivan Dee Publisher).

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, said the philosopher George Santayana a century ago. Knowing the facts of history is crucial to much of what we do as a nation and a people, but so is how it is used. And the Bush administration’s use of history—and specifically its use of “appeasement”—requires comment because it is both dangerous and misleading.

In the past week Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has twice invoked the historical analogy to appeasement—referring to the years just before World War II, culminating in the Munich conference of September 1938—to frame the globe’s current struggle with terrorism in apocalyptic terms. Vice President Dick Cheney has used the same analogy, without even gracing it with a name, to defend what he calls the “battle for the future of civilization.”

Both sought friendly audiences, confident they would not be challenged. Rumsfeld, most recently, spoke before the American Legion (interesting, isn’t it, how the Legion and the VFW have been treated to so many key public manipulations in the past few years) and Cheney at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska, famous as the home of the Strategic Air Command and today the center of the United States Strategic Command.

Cheney’s line, which he has used before also, was that today’s jihadists are “not an enemy that can be ignored, or negotiated with, or appeased.” Cheney speaks of the enemy as a “totalitarian empire,” Rummy refers to it as “the rising threat of a new type of fascism.”

At least Rumsfeld acknowledges his resort to historical analogy, recounting his little portion of the Munich story and adding that “once again, we face similar challenges.” His history is directly tied to Munich, where Britain and France negotiated with Adolf Hitler a “settlement” that skewered Czechoslovakia but succeeded only in gaining the Allies a few months before Hitler invaded Poland, igniting global conflict.

The Bushies clearly intend to evoke an atmosphere of shattering events, but their history is fractured and misleading, and their use of this analogy is a throwback to the methods that led America into Vietnam, among the nation’s greatest errors of the last century. In invoking Munich, Secretary Rumsfeld claims that the Western approach was based upon “a sentiment that took root that contended that if only the growing threats . . . could be accommodated, then the carnage . . . could be avoided.” He further presents this as “cynicism and moral confusion” and “a strange innocence” about the world.

None of this is true. There was no mass political movement demanding appeasement of Germany. Rather there was a specific policy choice—made primarily by Sir Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister of the time—to mollify Hitler and gain time for rearmament. In fact, the French wanted to stand on their alliance with the Czechs and fight Hitler, but were persuaded to back down. The British might even have been right within a certain narrow framework: For years they had restricted defense spending and were just starting to correct that, while Hitler’s promises—both to his military and his Italian allies—envisioned no war before 1942, which could have enabled an allied military buildup to bear fruit. The widely accepted charge that the Allies were wrong to “appease” Hitler stemmed in part from Neville Chamberlain’s extravagant declaration that Munich had brought “peace for our time”—when only a short time later World War II broke out.

That was the lesson of Munich, at least until Vietnam. There the Munich analogy was used repeatedly to justify intervention and escalation. Here is President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954, writing to Sir Winston Churchill: “We failed to halt . . . Hitler by not acting in unity and in time . . . the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril.” Eisenhower wanted support to jump into the Vietnam War at the time of Dien Bien Phu. Ironically, Churchill, whom Rummy today makes the hero of his Munich triptych, turned Ike down.

In February 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked Munich in his reasoning for responding to a terrorist incident in the Central Highlands by beginning the bombing of North Vietnam. That summer, when LBJ sent U.S. armies to fight in Vietnam, he invoked Munich again. As Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk repeatedly mentioned the dangers of appeasement. It was the effort to avoid another Munich that led to years of stark tragedy and desperate peril in Vietnam.

The correct lesson to be drawn from Munich today is that when presidents and their administrations raise its specter, it is a sure sign they want to pursue extravagant policies, usually of violence, based on narrow grounds with shaky public support. Today the Munich analogy functions as a provocation, a red flag before a bull. It is dangerous because it claims that the only solution to any situation is to fight—Cheney’s point exactly. Having done nothing beyond silly propaganda—despite its own claims—to undermine the jihadists by eliminating the economic and political oppression that form the basis of jihadist appeal, the Bush people counsel that the fight is everything and that talking is “appeasement.” We have seen in Lebanon lately just how misguided is that approach.

Bush administration history is like their reality—faith-based. President Bush himself, along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, characterized those who saw and spoke the truth about the run-up to the Iraq war as “revisionists”—historians who try to change the conventional wisdom about the past. Cheney not long ago declared it was “inexcusable” to repeat that truth. The same speeches that contain the Munich claims portray the Iraqi and Afghan people as “awakening to a future of hope and freedom” (Cheney) and say the U.S. strategy in Iraq “has not changed” (Rumsfeld).

The faith is that if you repeat falsehoods enough times the public will believe them. There is another historical analogy there—a real one—to Adolf Hitler’s henchman, Josef Goebbels. He called it the “Big Lie.” No wonder the administration’s flacks need friendly audiences.