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UNREAL
We would all agree that some beliefs are only possibly or probably true, and other beliefs are certainly true. So, according to President Bush, what belief about the war on terror is certainly true? Here’s what he said in his speech to the American Enterprise Institute this week:
As scholars and thinkers, you are contributing to a nationwide debate about the direction of the war on terror. A vigorous debate is healthy for our country, it really is, and I welcome the debate. It’s one of the true hallmarks of a free society, where people can get up and express their beliefs in open forum. Yet five years into this war, there is one principle of which every member of every party should be able to agree on—in other words, after all the debate, there is one thing we all ought to be able to agree on, and that is: We’ve got to fight the terrorists overseas, so we don’t have to face them here at home again…. If we were to leave Iraq before the job is done, the enemy would follow us home.Unbelievable. Of all the arguments Bush and his supporters have used over the last four years, the statement that we had to fight terrorists in Iraq, or they would somehow come here, has always been the most baseless and ridiculous slogan of them all (with the possible exception of the statement that all people desire and deserve freedom). Yet now Bush is claiming that it is the most CERTAIN of all beliefs about the war, commanding the agreement of all sides in the debate. We are living in an absurdist universe created by Bush and his intellectual advisors the neoconservatives, who used to stand for a relative degree of rationality against the madness of the left, but who during the Bush years have become mad ideologues themselves. Now, to be fair, Bush is not just speaking about Iraq, he is talking about actions taken against Islamic terrorists around the world, which I agree do protect our security. But he falsely conflates the “war on terror” with our occupation of Iraq. Also, the statement, “If we were to leave Iraq before the job is done, the enemy would follow us home,” must be one of the most intentionally ironic things ever said. The only way the enemy can come here is if we let them in. But who is it who wants to let them in? Bush, who supports the admission of 7,000 Iraqi refugees. True, the ones we let in will be people who supported our efforts in Iraq.* But they are Muslims, and once they are here, they and their children will be manifesting themselves, not as supporters of the Coalition in Iraq (since that will be a thing of the past), but as Muslims living in a Western country with an ever increasing Muslim population, and thus they will naturally become a part of, and in many cases will be actively supporting, the expanding power of Islam and sharia in this country. And the few thousand being admitted now are only the start of what will certainly be a demand that we admit tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from Iraq as that country fails, many of whom may not be friendly to us at all but furious at us for unleashing the forces that destroyed their country. So Bush’s comment, “If we were to leave Iraq before the job is done, the enemy would follow us home,” is true in a way he does not imagine: If we leave Iraq, Bush himself will work to let the enemy come here. . ___________________ * Correction: I wrote that sentence thinking in terms of people whose lives may be in danger because they supported the U.S. But it’s not necessarily true at all. The 7,000 are among the many thousands who have already fled Iraq because of various sectarian attacks, not because they were working for the Coalition. If the U.S. withdraws from Iraq and the Iraq government falls, then we will see the demand to let in people who are threatened as “collaborators” of the U.S. But that is not the situation now. For all we know, the 7,000 could be anything from Assyrian Christians to Sharia-supporting jihadists.
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