WASHINGTON, Sept 12: Using a combination of fear and promises of victory, US President George Bush is asking his nation to support the occupation of Iraq despite their doubts about whether it was necessary to invade the Arab state.
His Monday night speech culminates a two-week campaign to rally Americans behind his policies and he tried doing so by summoning the memories of Sept 11, 2001, and by telling them that they can and must win the war in Iraq.
There were echoes of the language and logic President Bush invoked five years ago after terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
“On this solemn night … we must (pledge to) put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us,” said the US president.
“The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation,” he said. “America did not ask for this war, and every American wishes it were over. So do I. But the war is not over — and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious.”
Sharing his plans for the future with Americans, Mr Bush stressed the need for ‘the building of a more hopeful Middle East that holds the key to peace for America and the world’.
In his prime-time address from the Oval Office, Mr Bush defended the war in Iraq even though he acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
“Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone,” Mr Bush said. “They will not leave us alone. They will follow us.”
He argued that Iraq was a central front in the broader struggle against terrorism. Premature withdrawal, he asserted, could make Iraq what Afghanistan was before the Sept 11 attacks — an ‘incubator for terrorists’.
To support the point, he pointed to not only the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq but the words of Al Qaeda leaders themselves describing the Iraqi conflict as ‘a war of destiny between infidelity and Islam’.
IDEOLOGICAL STRUGGLE: In his speeches this week, Mr Bush advanced several arguments, starting with the proposition that the United States was engaged in a long-term ideological struggle between forces of freedom and Muslim radicals who want to destroy freedom. Mr Bush characterised the opposition as forming a single movement, ‘a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those that stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology’.
In discussing proposed new rules for trying terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison, Mr Bush said that ‘the US does not torture’.
“That may have been the White House interpretation, but the CIA has approved tactics — water-boarding, for example, in which interrogators simulate drowning — that many military and international lawyers consider outside legal boundaries,” noted the Washington Post.