Who's administration was the attack made under though?
We have not been directly striked since Pearl Harbor. F.D.R made up for it by bringing us into WWII and we won. This 'attack' on Iraq is pointless we shoudl still be going after Osama...if he is even still alive and fight the war on terror...not the war on oil.

Russell Kirk, a staunch conservative, had much to say about Bush 1 and his adventures. One wonders what he would have said about this Bush administration.

Political Errors at the End of the Twentieth Century -- Heritage

But, time running on, I must turn to affairs diplomatic and military: Republican errors internationally. What are we to say of Mr. Bush's present endeavor to bring to pass a gentler, kinder New World Order?

Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson were enthusiasts for American domination of the world. Now George Bush appears to be emulating those eminent Democrats. When the Republicans, once upon a time, nominated for the presidency a "One World" candidate, Wendell Willkie, they were sadly trounced. In general, Republicans throughout the twentieth century have been advocates of prudence and restraint in the conduct of foreign affairs.

But Mr. Bush, out of mixed motives, has embarked upon a radical course of intervention in the region of the Persian Gulf. After carpet-bombing the Cradle of Civilization as no country ever had been bombed before, Mr. Bush sent in hundreds of thousands of soldiers to overrun the Iraqi bunkers -- that were garrisoned by dead men, asphyxiated.

And for what reason? The Bush Administration found it difficult to answer that question clearly. In the beginning it was implied that the American national interest required low petroleum prices: therefore, if need be, smite and spare not!

That excuse reminds me of Burke's rebuke to the Pitt ministry in 1795, when it appeared that the British government was about to go to war with France over the question of the navigation of the River Scheldt, in the Netherlands. "A war for the Scheldt? A war for a chamber-pot!" Burke exclaimed. Now one may say, "A war for Kuwait? A war for an oilcan!"
"The blood of a man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man,"
Burke wrote in his first Letter on a Regicide Peace. "It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime." Burke was eager that England declare war against France because of the menace of the French revolutionaries to the civilized order of Europe, and because of their systematic crimes. But he set his face against war for mere commercial advantage. So should Republicans. "The rest is vanity; the rest is crime."

War for Righteousness. A war for an oilcan not turning out to be popular, however, President Bush turned moralist; he professed to be engaged in redeeming the blood of man; and his breaking of Iraq is to be the commencement of his beneficent New World Order. Mr. Bush has waged what Sir Herbert Butterfield, in his little book Christianity, Diplomacy, and War, calls "The War for Righteousness." As Butterfield begins the third chapter of that book, "It has been held by technicians of politics in recent times that democracies can only be keyed up to modern war -- only brought to the necessary degree of fervor -- provided they are whipped into moral indignation and heated to fanaticism by the thought that they are engaged in a 'war for righteousness'."

Now indubitably Saddam Hussein is unrighteous; but so are nearly all the masters of the "emergent" African states (with the Ivory Coast as a rare exception), and so are the grim ideologues who rule China, and the hard men in the Kremlin, and a great many other public figures in various quarters of the world. Why, I fancy that there are some few unrighteous men, conceivably, in the domestic politics of the United States. Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy? And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? Just that is what happened in the Congo, remember, three decades ago; and nowadays in Zaire, once called the Belgian Congo, we zealously uphold with American funds the dictator Mobutu, more blood-stained than Saddam. And have we forgotten Castro in Cuba?

Momentum of Its Own. I doubt whether much good is going to come out of the slaughter of perhaps a hundred thousand people in Iraq. "For one of the troubles of war," Butterfield writes, "is that it acquires its own momentum and plants its own ideals on our shoulders, so that we are carried far away from the purposes with which we began -- carried indeed sometimes to greater acts of spoilation than the ones which had provoked our original entry into the war. Before the war of 1914 had lasted a year, its own workings had generated such a mood that we had promised Russia Constantinople and had bought the alliance of Italy with offers of booty, some of which had later to be disavowed by President Wilson. And it is a remarkable fact that in wars which purport to be so ethical that the states attached to neutrality are sometimes regarded as guilty of a dereliction of duty, the great powers primarily concerned may have required an iniquitous degree of bribery to bring them into the conflict, or to maintain their fidelity. The whole ideal of moderate peace aims, and the whole policy of making war the servant (instead of the master) of negotiation, is impossible -- and the whole technique of the 'war for righteousness' has a particularly sinister application -- when even in the ostensibly 'defending' party there is a latent and concealed aggressiveness of colossal scope, as there certainly was in 1914."

You may perceive some parallels between Butterfield's description of the course of the Allies during World War I and the course, so far, of the coalition against Iraq. Already there is talk of what shall be done with the "remains of Iraq." Mr. James Baker talks of rebuilding Iraq; others talk of dismantling Iraq altogether, by way of spoilation. And what promises and bribes were provided by the government of the United States, in recent months, to secure the assent of such murderous governments as that of Ethiopia to strong measures against Iraq; to secure, indeed, by holding out prospects of massive economic aid, the cooperation of the Soviet Union, Iraq's former patron?

Was not Egypt's cooperation obtained by forgiving the Egyptian government's indebtedness of several billion dollars? Was not Syria's assent gained by America's ignoring of the Syrian conquest of the Lebanon, with a massacre of General Aoun's Christian army? What began as determination to restore a legitimate (if somewhat arbitrary) government in Kuwait may result in the overturn of several governments in the Levant. As for regarding neutral states as guilty of dereliction of duty -- why, the United States has done just that to Jordan, by cutting off economic aid at the very time when Jordan is crammed with destitute refugees from Iraq.

Could not agree more. Worst president ever!

Remember Baghdad Bob?


BaghdadBush




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Soldiers who died in the BushCabal WarHawks atrocity salute their Commander-In-Chief...





Their Commander-In-Chief returns the salute...

There have been attempts though..(bombing of the WTC during the Clinton administration) and a few others..

I think the Iraq war, the economy and the attack on the Middle Class demonstrate a principle of governing not heretofore seen. For these three reasons, and the attack on the constitution in order to "keep track of terrorists", Bush appears to me to be if not the WORSE president by individual standards (Carter was speaking in terms of foreign policy), then he certainly is the ONE president in my lifetime who has threatened my democratic way of life.

He's BAD. I never thought twice about that. Still, we've lived through a lying scumbag (Nixon) and an uncaring elitist (Hoover). I'd say Bush is definitely in the top three, but whether or not he's the worst is debatable.

You know, a lot of Bush supporters use this as proof that he's made us safe, but come on!!!! How many attacks on US soil did we have BEFORE 9/11???

The answer? 1

And that was in 1993.

knot_e_lady wrote:Pancho Villa raided the US in March 1916…

RAID

And then there was the BLACK TOM affair…