Tao of Bush
The article Bush Tells West Point Graduates Terror War Is in Early Stages (Bloomberg) covers Bush’s commencement speech this year, in which he lifted everyone’s spirits with zingers like the one about how the Global War on Terror “will rival the Cold War in its length and difficulty”. It sound like his customary wit must have had them all in stitches. In a rare show of honesty, Bush acknowledged his tendency to not finish what he started by noting further that “[t]he war began on my watch, but it’s going to end on your watch”. I can just see his former business partners wincing knowlingly and ruefully shaking their heads.
Democracy for Everybody!
Bush instructed the cadets on their mission—the one that eventually stuck as the only one even FOX News would buy as the reason for invading Iraq—bringing democracy to the world. “Bush alluded to Iran and Syria as governments that aren’t adopting democratic principles”, while at the same time pretending he was firing a mounted turret gun and making shooting noises through pursed lips. Countries like Egypt (“$2 billion in U.S. aid per year”) which is run as a quasi-dictatorship, Israel ($3 billion plus in U.S. aid per year), which only allows Jewish people to hold office, and Saudi Arabia, which is ruled by a single royal family, were not deemed to be suffering from any sort of democratic deficit by Bush. Funny that.
Prevention is not Preëmption
Bush continued to come clean to the cadets, instructing them in the “Tao of Bush”, a philosophy of life in which one cannot spare “second thoughts”—presumably because the first one caused such pain when it happened.
“Bush and other administration officials have said they had no second thoughts about the results of the preemption policy, even though no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons were found in Iraq after dictator Hussein was deposed.”
It is in this same sentence that the reporter manages to—hopefully innocently—mix two completely different concepts: preëmptive and preventive war. To be fair, they both sound about the same, but journalists should at least pretend to a greater intellectual depth than Bush himself has. The Bush administration is a proponent of, and wages, preventive wars, which are not legal under any circumstances according to international law. Preëmptive wars are legal if the attack being preëmpted is either clearly imminent or already underway. Just because Bush said an Iraqi attack was imminent—and most of America believed him—doesn’t mean that it was. Therefore the attack on Iraq is a preventive war.
It’s the difference between punching someone in the face because he’s about to take a swing at you (preëmptive) and punching someone in the face because he has hands (preventive). In Bush’s case, he didn’t even make sure the guy had hands first.