It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you start to plan withdrawing

Today is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Bush put out a statement. It touches some of the bases that need to be touched: 1.5 million Armenians dead (well, he said “as many as” 1.5m), need to remember and examine the historical events, blah blah blah. And some that didn’t need to be touched: “Our Nation is grateful for Armenia’s contributions to the war on terror”. And missed one altogether: it referred to “mass killings,” but failed to characterize them as genocide or in any way acknowledge the ethnic-religious impulse towards extermination. Indeed, “mass killings” is not coupled with any mention of the mass killers: those “as many as 1.5 million Armenians” merely “lost their lives.” As I said about last year’s presidential message, Bush “calls it a ‘tragedy,’ which is a word that does not entail responsibility, especially not Turkish responsibility.” Imagine a similar statement about the Holocaust that shied away from naming the Nazis.

Speaking of ethnic-religious impulses towards extermination, Bush’s other statement this morning (which he made with a helicopter behind him)


was yet another demand for a “clean” bill funding his dirty wars. “It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you start to plan withdrawing,” he said. Speaking of making no sense, I think he was supposed to say “when you plan to start withdrawing.” That enemy, of course, is Al Qaida; Bush these days is back to ignoring the existence of a civil war in Iraq. He complains that the bills are “legislative mandates telling [US generals[ which enemies they can engage and which they cannot.” I have no idea what he’s talking about. He used the phrase “precipitous withdrawal” twice. He’s against it. He did not explain how withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2008, as opposed to 2003, could in any way be described as precipitous.