Self-defeating
Raising $1.8 million at lunch, he stuck to the line that "we are aggressively striking the terrorists in Iraq, defeating them there so we will not have to face them in our own country."
As usual, an intersting column by Maureen dowd. But I was distracted by the one paragraph quoted above. It's the new Rummy/Bush line. We cleverly turned Iraq into a terrorist magnet so we would not have to fight them here.
As CNN pointed out last night with a piece of archive footage of Lyndon Johnson, this is the exact same line used to justify Vietnam when things were going badly. But that aside, I think it just changed the entire political dynamics of a second attack on the US.
I have always thought that if the terorist strike here again, it will strengthen the Bush hand from a political standpoint. But now he is almost inviting them to attack here to prove they are wrong - and under those circumstances an attack might have the exact opposite political impact.
Posted by Greg Stone at November 6, 2003 04:12 AM