Awe and reverence

Atrios asks, about Iraq, “Isn’t there a wee contradiction between spreading freedom and democracy and turning a country into a terrorist battlefield?” It’s called multi-tasking.

This is, as you know, the Blog of Record, so occasionally I must risk boring y’all by repeating something every other blog has, in this case Bush saying that “years from now, when America looks out on a democratic Middle East growing in freedom and prosperity, Americans will speak of the battles like Fallujah with the same awe and reverence that we now give to Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima.” The only awe I feel is at the sheer scale of Bush’s assholery in making that comparison. What the hell does he think happened in Fallujah that we’d ever revere?

In that speech, at the dedication of the Marine Corps Museum, he also said that the Japanese on Iwo Jima “had learned from costly battles that they could not defeat American forces. Yet, they believed that by inflicting maximum casualties on our forces, they would demoralize our nation and make America tire of war.” Of course he’s really talking about Iraq. Iwo Jima was in 1945, the Japanese did not think they were going to “demoralize” the United States into cutting and running.

The alliterative Gen. Peter Pace (who should be made to follow Rumsfeld out the door) today defined “winning” downwards yet again, to “provid[ing] governments in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere with enough security capacity to keep the [terrorist] acts below a level at which their governments can function.” Dare to dream, alliterative Peter Pace, dare to dream!