While President Bush is likely to have been removed from most Americans’ Christmas card list this year, he still gets my support for his basic handling of the new world war. While I vehemently fault him and his administration for failing to make every attempt at getting Americans to understand the extent of the threat we face, and properly explain why he’s done what he’s done, at the end of the day, George W. Bush is exactly right on the war.
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Following a meeting with all the big-time US defense officials including Don Rumsfeld, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Joint Chiefs, and Vice President Cheney, President Bush gave a brief statement and took a couple of questions. In answering a question, this is the part that grabbed my attention:
… at the appropriate time, I will stand up in front of the nation and say here’s where we’re headed..But one thing people got to understand is we’ll be headed toward achieving our objectives. And I repeat, if we lose our nerve, if we’re not steadfast in our determination to help the Iraqi government succeed, we will be handing Iraq over to an enemy that would do us harm, the consequences of which — of leaving Iraq before the job is done, for example, would be grave for the American citizens..As we learned on September the 11th, the enemy has got the capacity to strike us. And there’s no doubt in my mind a failure in Iraq would make it more likely the enemy would strike us. It would certainly make it more likely that moderate people around the Middle East would wonder about the United States’ will. Moderate people — moderate governments in the Middle East would be making irrational decisions about their future. It would be a disaster for governments that have got energy resources to be in the hands of these extremists. They would use energy to extract blackmail from the United States.
Gasp! That’s right- it really is, at least in no small part, a "war for oil." But what it’s really all about, is, as President Bush says rather plainly, this:
And when you couple all that with a regime that is — doesn’t like the United States having a nuclear weapon, you can imagine a world of turmoil. And we’re not going to let it happen.