Posted on 06/06/2004 9:40:10 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
I was nearly finished writing a column on a different topic when news of President Bush's address at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony flashed on the Drudge Report Web site.
"Bush drops 'crusade' from Eisenhower's D-Day message," read the headline.
What? He couldn't; he didn't ... did he? Thanks to instantly accessible archives on the Internet, I quickly found Eisenhower's Order of the Day given to the men of the Allied Expeditionary Force as they prepared to begin the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
It went like this: "Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed people of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world." And so, stirringly, on.
Sixty years later, facing another global threat from another totalitarian ideology, President Bush saw fit, wisely and importantly, to link essential aspects of our past and present struggles. These include the totalitarian nature of both Nazi fascism and Islamofascism, and the fact that freeing Europe then and the expanding freedom in the Middle East now are crucial to American security. In so doing, Bush invoked the opening lines of Ike's order -- but with a shameful, history-defiling cut. "Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force," Bush said, quoting General Eisenhower. "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you."
Missing, of course, is Eisenhower's loin-girding line about those tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen being about to embark on "the Great Crusade" -- the reason "the eyes of the world" are upon them in the first place. This cut may not strike everyone as a reason to tear up Page One. But to me the omission hits at the heart of what is lacking in the so-called "war on terror" -- the courage of clarity.
It's possible President Bush didn't drop Ike's language himself. Indeed, his speechwriters might not have given him the choice. They well know that "crusade" was officially outlawed long ago. And by "crusade" I don't mean Christendom's medieval battles to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim rule. But, of course, neither did Gen. Eisenhower (not in his D-Day remarks, and not in his popular account of the war, "Crusade in Europe"). Neither did President Bush, for that matter, when, in the week following Sept. 11, 2001, he said that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." Speaking in terms of a cause may have steadied most Americans at home, but it drove Muslims, Europeans and political correctniks everywhere crazy. A headline in The Christian Science Monitor on Sept. 19, 2001 said it best: "Europe cringes at Bush 'crusade' against terrorists."
It didn't have to cringe long. Rather than inviting citizens of the world to join the new "crusade" against Islamic terror networks -- the successor to earlier, victorious crusades against Nazism and Communism -- Ari Fleischer, then the president's spokesman, immediately expressed "regret" over unspecified "connotations" the word "crusade" might have had "for anybody, Muslim or otherwise." In other words, America was officially sorry if anyone out there -- and I mean "out there" -- believed, five days after the fiery collapse of the World Trade Center, that the president of the United States was going send an army of barons to take Jerusalem for the Pope.
Of course, what this was really all about were the terms of engagement -- literally. We could not embark on a "crusade" against Islamic jihad, because that term carries echoes of centuries of struggle between the Christian West and the Muslim East. (Never mind that the echoes still have plenty to tell us.) And we may not fight a war against "Islamic jihad," even as Muslims, from "militants" (terrorists) to "spiritual advisers" (terrorist kingpins), claim bloody inspiration from the jihad verses of the Quran. Nope, this is a fight against what the president amorphously describes as "the terrorist ideology," and the religiously based doctrines of fighting and subjugating non-Muslims under Islamic law may not be acknowledged, let alone discussed. Which is preposterous. But it is our lot: a life-or-death struggle to save Judeo-Christian civilization from a masked enemy, a camouflaged ideology and our own willful naivete. Our crusade may be quixotic, but a crusade it is, if ever there was one.
Well .. it was the stinking libs who had a cow when Bush used the word "crusade", and now there are people whining about because he didn't use it. There is just no pleasing these people.
G'evening, my friend :-)
I noticed that Fox News Channel also dropped this line when they replayed the audio of then General Eisenhower's address during a commercial promoting their D-Day coverage. They editing the audio so it skipped right to "The eyes of the world are upon you" right after "Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force". I thought that was pretty cowardly of them. I watched for awhile longer and I didn't see the spot again. Did anyone else hear this?
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