"The struggle against violent extremists will not end with a single battle or campaign. Rather, we will defeat them through the patient accumulation of quiet successes and the orchestration of all elements of national and international power. We will succeed by eliminating the ability of extremists to strike globally and catastrophically while also building the capacity and resolve of local governments to defeat them regionally. Victory will include discrediting extremist ideology, creating fissures between and among extremist groups and reducing them to the level of nuisance groups that can be tracked and handled by law enforcement capabilities."
In this new policy, the Pentagon adopts the language of John Kerry, circa 2004... a language that President George W. Bush mocked. During the 2004 Presidential campaign, Kerry stated:
'We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life."
When Kerry delivered these remarks, the Republicans argued that these remarks revealed "Kerry didn't get it" as President Bush stated:
"Senator Kerry talked of reducing terrorism to - quote - 'nuisance' - end quote - and compared it to prostitution and illegal gambling," President Bush said. "See, I couldn't disagree more. Our goal is not to reduce terror to some acceptable level of nuisance. Our goal is to defeat terror by staying on the offensive, destroying terrorists, and spreading freedom and liberty around the world."
Bush-Cheney also went after Kerry for using 'nuisance' as pertains to terrorism in a TV ad.
"Nor can we think of our goal in this war in the way Senator Kerry described it yesterday in The New York Times," said Vice President Dick Cheney. "Quote: 'We have to get back to the place,' he said, where terrorism is 'a nuisance,' sort of like - and these are his comparisons — sort of like gambling and prostitution. This is naive and dangerous."
While this new report provides the proper definitional argument, defining the poorly named "War on Terror" as an ideological and not a military conflict, it is still a sad fact that George Bush adopts the vision of John Kerry, who was by no means a god presidential candidate, four years after the fact.
Does anyone else wonder if President Bush knows he is using the language of Kerry? I suppose that even if he knew, he would not care.
4 comments:
Harrogate's money is on Bush and Gates both knowing, as you say, but not caring.
Well, I think that they may not care for different reasons. Gates because it was well before his time and he is actually trying to make situation better and this is the way to do it.
Bush, well, he may not care though he may think it is funny as a frat-boy joke... "Heh..Heh...we showed him...Heh."
With Bush, Harrogate sees it less as the Frat Boy thang, and more Machievellian.
In 2004, this kind of rhetoric did not benefit him. Now it does. And the question of consistency is largely foreclosed. He came out of the WMD Rhetoric unscathed, managed to get away with saying it was never about WMD's. Why should he worry about this?
Maybe it would be different if we had a vigorous, uncentralizied media in this country. But we don't. Same company that owns the Chicago Tribune owns the Asheville Citizen-Times, and on and on the trail goeth.
Whaddaya gonna do?
Post a Comment