Mission Accomplished ... we've heard this discussed a million times ... we hear Democratic arguments like "bush said we won the war in Iraq but it's still going on" ...
the main issue isn't just whether combat is continuing ... bush easily dodges that bullet by saying that his speech was referring to "major combat" and that the "mission" he was referring to was the success of our brave troops who helped get rid of Saddam ...
there's a much more important point to make and I'm afraid we've done a very poor job making it ... we need to help voters understand that bush's judgment on Iraq has been wrong all along and continues to be wrong ...
bush thought our troops would be welcomed as liberators ... he listened to Rumsfeld's advice that this war could be fought with a small force heavily reliant on technology ... bush stated repeatedly that Saddam could use his WMD against the U.S. at any time ... he stated that Saddam was trying to obtain nuclear materials from Africa ... he believed a puppet government friendly to the U.S. would be well received by the Iraqi people ... and he believed that a Western-style democracy could be installed very quickly, perhaps in less than a year ...
bush was dead wrong on everything he believed about Iraq ... the fact that he regularly tries to associate himself with the brave men and women who serve in Iraq does not excuse his putting them in harm's way with an ill-conceived plan to, as Kerry so ineptly phrases it, "win the peace" ... Kerry needs "better words" than these to highlight bush's total failure to understand what the future in Iraq holds given our current, misguided course ... perhaps some enlightened DU'er can suggest some better words ...
bush believed there were direct ties between Saddam and al Qaeda ... he even suggested that Saddam was channeling WMD to terrorists ... that's not an easy thing to do given that he didn't have any !!!
and btw, for those needing a little documentation to support the case that bush tied Saddam directly to al Qaeda, here's a quote or two from bush's "mission accomplished" speech:
source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/05/03/wbush03.xml
"The al-Qa'eda no longer have an ally in the regime in Iraq," he said. "Terrorists no longer have a funding source in the regime of Iraq.
"One thing is certain: terrorists will no longer have a source of weapons of mass destruction in the regime that used to be in Iraq because the regime is no longer."
using real video clips of bush's speeches, the American people need to be taught a history lesson on how bush viewed the Iraq war starting with day one ... he was wrong then; he's even more wrong now ... he's never demonstrated he understood what we've gotten ourselves into in Iraq ... and staying the course when things are going as badly as they are is the perfect definition of insanity ... a simple review of the record will tell the story very clearly ... bush's words on Iraq are the best evidence we have that he has failed our troops in Iraq, he has failed the American people and he has failed the Iraqi people as well ... his own words reveal that he has never understood the mission in Iraq ...
but so far, Kerry has failed to make the strongest possible case ... it's important that this gets changed ...