BUSH WORLD: "Where Pigs Fly & Fish Commute On Bicycles" - By Eugene Robinson

[kpete]

What if Bush Were President During the Cold War?

Thinking War-War Again
Churchill quote: "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war."
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, January 12, 2007; Page A19

Listening to George W. Bush announce his fantasy-based escalation of the war in Iraq, which could only make sense in some parallel universe where pigs fly and fish commute on bicycles, I flashed on something Bush's hero Winston Churchill once said: "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." By that standard, President Bush is no fanatic.

True, he scores off the charts on the part about inflexibility of mind. But the Decider changes the subject all the time. First, the way to fight the "war on terror" was to invade Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime was sheltering Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Before finishing that job, Bush decided to invade Iraq, which had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And now, with Iraq mired in bloody chaos, he seems to be changing the subject yet again -- to Iran.

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On the shift to Iran, I hope I'm wrong but fear I'm right. In his speech Wednesday night, Bush went out of his way to lay out the goal of "stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges," specifying that this new task "begins with addressing Iran and Syria."

Of course, he doesn't mean addressing them with tough-minded diplomacy, which is what the Iraq Study Group suggested. Bush decided long ago that talking to regimes he doesn't like amounts to rewarding bad people for bad behavior. However dangerous a world this reckless president leaves behind for his successor, at least we can be thankful that he wasn't anywhere near the White House during the Cold War. He probably would have disconnected the hotline to the Kremlin, or at least kept Leonid Brezhnev on permanent hold.


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