Bush's speech deconstructed....

An excellent critical analysis of Bush's Sunday speech. A must read, by Stephen Zunes, associate professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.

A sample:

...“We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness.”

Again, there are no doubts among extremists in the Middle East regarding America’s military strength. The perceived weakness is in regard to America’s moral strength. Millions of people in the Middle East and beyond believe that it is morally wrong for the United States to support Arab dictatorships and Israeli occupation forces. They believe it is morally wrong that the amount of U.S. military aid to the Middle East is six times that of its economic aid. They believe it is morally wrong that the #1 U.S. export to the region is not consumer goods, high-tech equipment or agricultural products, but armaments. They believe it is morally wrong that a powerful country from the other side of the world would invade a sovereign Arab nation and justify it by falsely claiming that its government currently had weapons of mass destruction and was supporting Al-Qaeda. They believe it is morally wrong that U.S. bombing and sanctions against Muslim countries has killed far more civilians than have the terrorists themselves.

The unfortunate reality is that the more the United States has militarized the Middle East, the less secure we have become.

“And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.”

It is absurd to believe that those Iraqis and Afghanis currently fighting U.S. occupation forces in their own countries actually want to somehow sneak into the United States to fight Americans here. Indeed, no Afghans or Iraqis are known to have ever committed an act of terrorism against Americans on American soil.

The president’s statement is essentially a retread of the line used by supporters of the Vietnam War that “If we don’t fight them over there, we will have to fight them here.” However, more than 28 years after the Communist victory in Vietnam, we are yet to fight the Vietnamese in our streets and there is no indication that we ever will. The Iraqis and Afghans, as were the Vietnamese, are fighting Americans because U.S. troops are in their country and, like the Vietnamese, will stop fighting Americans once U.S. troops leave their country.

Complete story here via Common Dreams