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.
Churchill was not a man of the present or the future. He and his worldview were firmly rooted in the last days of Victorian England and Empire. It was his almost irrational adherance to an England that no longer existed enabled him to see in the battered English people a strength and nobility that they themselves no longer felt. His genius was in his ability to make them believe.
In this GWB is no Churchill...but, we don't need another one now. We need a pissed off leader with his eye on the future and his finger on the trigger.
C'mon Marple, this is Free Republic, you should know better than that: where's your source?? :-)
I couldn't have said it better myself, ma'am.
Looks like you don't know enough about GW and Churchill.
If you are pro life, anti tax and all that, and I believe you are ... why not go the whole way and live in reality? You have shed so much of the brainwashing pap of our generation but you are afraid to take the final step. Come into the light. Yes it may kill you but you will die whole.
You obvioously think that bluster and flailing around are the most effective ways to accomplish goals. I am glad that you (and no one like you) are in charge.
As far as the use of the word "feminine"....I suppose you would tar Jesus Christ with the same brush.
Churchill had company in his failure to appreciate the effect of entrenched machine guns.
His assessment of Hitler was right on.
May he be damned in Hell forever for his tacit support of Stalin by overlooking his conquest of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Moldavia, and eastern Poland, as well as his aggression in attacking Finland.
His refusal to acknowlege Hitler's persecution of the Jews, and his failure to report on Brittan's attrocities against the Boers would be enough in themselves.
Yup,but all of these things would disqualify him as a Republican candidate in America. The bible-thumpers would see to that.
Yeah,but the sad truth is that so was his opponet. We have reached the point where only the annointed will ever win public office.
The one action that would have been easiest to accomplish would have been the abrogation of Clinton's EOs that continued the "War on the West" and the giveaways of our sovreignty to the UN. He hasn't taken it.
Where did you get this from? Churchill did everything he could do to get King Franklin to not trust Stalin or give in to him,and failed.He was in no position to make demands.
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