Has A Screw Gotten Loose In Bush’s Head?

By James Donahue

Oct. 9, 2005

Is it just me or does anybody else have the strange sense that our president is not thinking right? I ask this because Mr. Bush has been saying some very odd things.

During a televised speech designed to muster lagging public support for the war effort in Iraq Bush said he believes Islamist radicals, namely the al-Qaida, are seeking to “enslave whole nations” throughout the Middle East and “intimidate the world.”

Mr. Bush also boasted, without giving specifics, that his administration and Homeland Security has successfully thwarted at least 10 al-Qaida attacks, including three inside the United States since 9-11. He said another five more attempts by terrorists to “case targets in the US or infiltrate operatives into the country” also have been stopped.

He told reporters and the nation that this is why he has made Iraq a main front in a war against terror, because the Islamic radicals have made Iraq their main front in a war against civilized society.

To imply that we attacked Iraq because of what happened on 9-11 also is wrong, although government propaganda has since attempted to link that event to our actions. We attacked Afghanistan, not Iraq, after 9-11 because we had information that the al Qaida operatives were headquartered there. There never was proof of an alliance between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

That attack failed to accomplish anything more than shift the disruption of Afghanistan’s government and create new chaos. Osama bin Laden and his gang moved up into the mountains where they are still at large. And we appear to be committed to keeping troops in Afghanistan indefinitely.

If we roll back the clock about two years and recall how it was, the U.S. attacked Iraq because Mr. Bush and his top advisors were telling us that Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction. There was no mention of any link to al Qaida or 9-11. Hussein denied this charge and even allowed the UN sent a team into Iraq to conduct a search. Nothing was found. We attacked anyway and we found that Hussein had been truthful. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

Suddenly the reason for our invasion shifted to a quest to “free” the Iraqi people from a dictatorship and move to establish a democracy. In the process we bombed all the cities, polluted the place with uranium-tipped munitions, destroyed road, bridges, water, sewer and electric systems, and killed an untold thousands of innocent civilians.

While there, our troops have fallen under attack by what was originally a rag-tag group of angry “insurgents” resisting the U.S. occupation of their country. We fought back. Since then, this resistance movement has gotten organized, largely with the help of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who appears to have joined an alliance with the al-Qaida network.

But this battle line was drawn by the insurgents AFTER the U.S. assault on Iraq and the forceful removal and arrest of that nation’s leader, Saddam Hussein. In Hussein’s place, the U.S. has established what appears to Iraqis as a puppet government that is having little success at drawing the three different Islamic factions within Iraq together.

For Mr. Bush to say that the al Qaida plots to enslave whole nations is a radical and unproven thing to say. It appears that al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden’s purpose for attacking the U.S. on 9-11 has never changed. It was always to drive the United States out of Middle Eastern affairs.

It may be true that al Qaida also wants to establish its religious system throughout the area. Islamic groups, like the various factions of Christianity, tend to disagree on ideology and think they have the only true way to heaven. Still, Moslem is Moslem, and for a Islamic group to want to force fellow Moslems to still be Moslems isn’t exactly what we think of when we describe the “enslavement” of whole nations. Religion, by its very nature, is an enslavement.

Anyone who has ever studied the history of that region knows that the United States has maintained an involvement in Middle Eastern leadership for a very long time. Our interest there has always been oil. It still is. We supported Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran after our puppet dictator in that nation was overthrown by radical cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.  

Either Mr. Bush is not thinking clearly these days, he has inside information that has never been revealed, or he is going to great lengths to make the American people believe a radical twisting of facts.

His mere boast that U.S. authorities have thwarted numerous attempts by terrorists to attack our homeland appears to be an open challenge to al Qaida. Merely by saying this, like his challenge early in the Iraq war to “bring them on,” invites a real attack.