Posted on 06/10/2002 2:54:11 PM PDT by seamus
Date published: Sun, 06/09/2002
PRESIDENT BUSH'S finest rhetorical hour--his post-9/11 speech when he told the world that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"--were the boldest words uttered by an American president since FDR. They were described, not inaccurately, as Churchillian.
As Winston Churchill did with the Nazis, Bush framed our fight against terrorism in clear moral terms. We are on the side of freedom and peace. They are on the side of tyranny and evil. The fight, now that it has been brought to us by the slaughter of 3,000 innocent Americans, is nothing less than a struggle to preserve our way of life.
Though al-Qaida has been dealt a mighty blow by our actions in Afghanistan, the terrorists are regrouping at this very minute--in Pakistan, Iraq, the Philippines, and elsewhere around the world in "sleeper cells"--plotting more massacres. And they are being cheered on and most likely supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whose fingerprints are all over 9/11 after it was revealed that at least one of the plot's masterminds consulted with Iraqi agents before the attacks.
We face the very real possibility of a nuclear attack that could kill millions and destroy a city whose rebuilding schedule would not be measured in years, but by the atomic half-life. In this regard, Saddam could prove most helpful.
Iraq has defied the United Nations-brokered peace after the Gulf War by keeping out inspectors who could
sniff out factories and labs producing weapons of mass destruction. And other than lobbing a missile into the country every few weeks or so, the West has done nothing to make him comply.
The U.N. has for years now largely ignored the threat of Saddam, much as the impotent League of Nations did nothing while Hitler broke treaties and built up his military in the 1930s. But in those dangerous times, one man warned the world of the grave danger
of Nazism: Winston Churchill.
Two new Churchill biographies--"Churchill: A Biography" by Roy Jenkins, and "Churchill: A Study of Greatness" by Geoffrey Best--remind us in these perilous times that the Allied victory in World War II was anything but inevitable. The near-clairvoyance
of Churchill, along with his gift for rhetoric and his bulldog-like tenacity, was indispensable in preventing Hitler from establishing a new German empire in much of Europe.
In 1934--when much of the world was either willfully ignorant of Hitler's ultimate aims, or still holding to naive dreams of peace through appeasement--Churchill publicly called the Nazis a regime that "cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality, the threat of murderous force."
Sound familiar?
Larry Arnn, reviewing the two biographies in The Claremont Review of Books, points out that while no one would argue with that characterization of Hitler today, speaking those truths in 1934 took "a certain kind of genius" and "an amazing persistence and courage to advance it against the forces Churchill faced."
Yet since Bush's similar first moment of moral clarity and declaration of purpose, his rhetoric has become murky and his actions tentative.
Standing with French President Jacques Chirac on May 26, Bush said
he had "no immediate plans to attack Iraq." And just a few days earlier, the Washington Post broke a story in which top military brass "believe they have persuaded the Pentagon's civilian leadership to put off an invasion of Iraq until next year at the earliest and perhaps not to do it at all."
One can only hope that Bush's "no immediate plans" comment was intended as a ploy to keep Saddam guessing, and that the Washington Post's mole in the Pentagon is wrong.
We cannot afford to wait very long before toppling Saddam. Years of intelligence gathering suggest that he is very close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction--either by stealing them, or, with chilling irony, leaning on Iraqi scientists who have studied the biological and nuclear sciences in America and Britain to develop what he needs.
In his review, Arnn likens Saddam and bin Laden to Hitler after the Allied invasion of France: "Like Hitler, they see us coming, and they work furiously on their anthrax spreaders, dirty bombs, and atomic bombs, just as Hitler did. Hitler's bombs and rockets and jet aircraft were almost ready in time. But for Churchill, they might have been. Unless we find another like him, Osama and Saddam will meet their deadline."
George W. Bush never thought he had to be another Churchill when he took office. But if he does not rise to the challenge--and quickly--the world could be as different and as dangerous as if Hitler had not been stopped.
JAMES G. LAKELY is assistant editorial page editor of The Free Lance-Star.
I think Bush is at that same point. That is, I think he said what needed to be said, and has, since then, quietly been trying to build up our lamentably shabby defenses before the inevitable attack. Bush is not someone who calls a press conference at the drop of a hat or, for that matter, who is followed by an adulatory press corps that reports his every idle word (ring any bells?). I think sometimes that his low profile gives the impression that he's not doing anything, but as we saw in the Homeland Security proposal last week, that's hardly the case. And I think when the strike comes (our preemptive strike, that is), we'll realize again that a lot has been going on behind the scenes.
Yes, the world needs another Churchill. But we don't have anything close. GWB was picked out of the air by a consortium of industrial magnates.
Just as the opposition said, he was annointed. Compare this to the man Churchill. There is no comparison.
The American people are going to have to pull our own chestnuts out of this fire for we have elected just an average guy with an Ivy League LIBERAL education and a globalist viewpoint. He's his father's son in spades. This apple didn't even fall from the tree. It's still clinging to the branches.
If he did not take the Prime Ministership after Halifax wisely declined after Chamberlain's resignation, millions more people would have died and suffered under a new racist German empire. He led a fractous home government and a shaky international alliance to victory over Hitler. That far overshadows the mistakes he made at Galliopoli -- ones he made not out of blithe disregard for the lives of troops, but out of a monumental miscalculation of his enemy -- a miscalculation that he did not make of Hitler.
You have just disqualified yourself from intelligent conversation.
Your source for that statement, please?
Bush is a fine man, but he couldn't hold Churchill's brandy-glass.
In WWI terms for the Allies, about a week's worth on the Western Front, about five days on the Eastern Front.
On full-battle periods (Somme, Verdun etc) about two days' worth. Not exactly the Butcher of Gallipoli, really, was he?
He is so obviously unqualified for the job. It is so plainly and undeniably clear after these first two years that one has to be willfully blind not to see it.
The bushies have to make up things out of whole cloth to continue their dellusions. "He's doing what he has to do in order to gain a majority in the house." etc. By the time the man has had six more years in the White House it won't matter the proportion of dims to pubbies because GWB will have accomplished everything the dims ever wanted to do.
And this doesn't even touch upon his dismal failure in his phony "War on Terror". He has capitulated to the Wahabi oil princes and repeatedly gone against the very morality of Western Civilization in his treatment of Israel .... not to mention our geopolitical interests.
His lack of any real immigration control in a so called time of war is criminal. His and his administration's constant flip flops and policy goofups is laughable.
He's the pampered son of an eletist East Coast family that is much to much involved in politics. He's a pol and a globalist. I've never trusted politicians. Although they are necessary they must always be distrusted. GWB is no diferent. In fact by all lights he is in fact a pol amoung pols. Unfortunately in these dire times we don't need his sort as President. But we are stuck with him. If more of us would make evident our outrage at his behaviour .... change might be effected.
Just as the opposition said, he was annointed. Compare this to the man Churchill. There is no comparison.
Good column. Whatever people think about Churchill's personal habits or even Gallipoli, he was indeed farsighted and one of the few who simply had the nerve to go ahead and say what most people could probably see but preferred to ignore.
So we need more people like Churchill, huh? May I remind you that the reason Churchill declared war on Germany was to save Poland. Instead, Poland was sacrificed to the Communist to be slaughtered. I would surely hope that Bush has more success against the axis of evil.
Churchill's main desire was to save his Empire, so he teamed with Roosevelt, whose main desire was to destroy the English Empire and set up a world government, the U.N., with himself as its leader.
Our alliance with the devil incarnate, dictator Stalin, would quickly dissolve into the Cold War, which is in a large part responsible for the arming of so many terrorists around the world.
Then the world is doomed. George Bush is to Winston Churchill what a budgie is to an F-16.
Check your numbers because your completely wrong. In terms of life lost, try comparing Gallipoli to the Western Front. That’s not intended to diminish the sacrifice made by the ANZAC’s, but you need to get the facts in perspective.
”I guess he figured they were not British”
The truth is that the majority of the ANZAC’s were first generation immigrants to Australia and New Zealand. They still held some degree of loyalty to their place of birth and the crown and that’s why they went to war.
If I remember right; several of his fellow governors, some
senators, representatives, encouraged him to run for office.
I don't buy this crap about him being, how did you put it,
picked out of the air by a consortium of industrial magnates.
Well, you're full of it, because he wasn't, and he wasn't
'annointed', either. He was chosen by, and supported by at
least half the American people. So go bark up another tree!
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