It's almost amusing watching the President contort himself trying to make terrorism into the new Communism. It would be hilarious, except for the fact that he probably believes it . . . and happens to be the leader of the free world. There are a million reasons why this whole line of reasoning is ridiculous, but a major one is that we never really "defeated" communism or fascism, we defeated (some of) the countries that used them as political systems. Communism and fascism largely defeated themselves because they proved themselves to be inferior forms of government, with democracy as the better option. We fight countries (and people) who want to harm us, not who have different political systems, except when those systems are so eggregiously harmful to their people that it compels a response (e.g. Kosovo or, many would argue, Darfur).
Aside from the general political philosophy, though, I think it's pretty entertaining to hear President Bush that we must fight Islamic extremism so we can establish democracy . . . which then votes for Islamic extremism! (See: Hezbollah, Lebanon; Hamas, Palestinian territories; United Iraqi Alliance, Iraq.) I guess somebody forgot to tell them that when we say "democracy" we really mean "liberalism."
Still, the best part of the speech was this:
At the same time, he placed various factions of terrorists Sunnis who swear allegiance to Al Qaeda, Shiite radicals who join groups like Hezbollah and so-called homegrown terrorists under one umbrella.Well thanks, New York Times, for that piece of understatement. For next time, let me suggest, "Everyone who knows anything about the region, its people, its politics, and its religions knows that is a blatant lie." While there is certainly tactical cooperation between a variety of disparate groups at the ground level, all those groups are working towards very different ends, and most of them hate each other. Which is, come to think of it, probably why they're blowing each other up.
Experts said that might be overstating the facts.
