Published on Monday, September 1, 2003 by the Long Island, NY Newsday
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
by Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan
Now that American-British lies and distortions about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida links have been thoroughly exposed, Bush administration officials have had to create new rationalizations for the Iraq war.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in late July that “military and rehabilitation efforts now under way in Iraq are an essential part of the war on terror. In fact, the battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the war on terror.”
Last Tuesday, George W. Bush told the American Legion, “a democratic Iraq in the heart of the Middle East would be a further defeat for [the terrorist networks’] ideology of terror.”
And in early August, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice compared the U.S. mission in Iraq with the civil rights movement: “[W]e must never, ever indulge in the condescending voices who allege that some people in Africa or in the Middle East are just not interested in freedom … or they just aren’t ready for freedom’s responsibilities. … [That] view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad.” Rice implied that those opposing the U.S. occupation are the moral equivalent of white supremacists who thought black Americans incapable of citizenship. To critique the Iraq occupation is to stand in the schoolhouse door.