RSSThe Bin Laden-Bush Consensus
President George W. Bush spent the last week pointlessly tooling about the Middle East trash-talking Barack Obama and vainly pleading with the Saudis to pump more oil — and scolding the Arabs to be more democratic, even as he maintains his sanctions against the Palestinians for exercising their democratic right to choose their own leaders. (Never mind, nobody in the region takes him seriously, anyway, so these little inconsistencies don’t really matter…) But the most consistent message Bush muttered everywhere was that Iran was trying to dominate the Middle East, and had to be resisted.
Turns out that some of Bush’s talking points are the same as Osama bin Laden’s. In his latest message, the Qaeda leader excoriates Hizballah (a little professional jealousy, there, Osama?) and accuses Iran of “trying to dominate the Middle East”…. You can be sure that if a civil war does, in fact, kick off in Lebanon, that Bush and Bin Laden will find themselves fighting on the same side, just like Afghanistan in the 1980s… Funny old world, eh?
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One Response to “The Bin Laden-Bush Consensus”
The Bush Doctrine merges the worst aspects of neocon-ism and realism:
(A) from the neocons you get the bright idea of invading countries that don’t meet your democratic standards and then bombing them to smithereens;
(B) from the realists you get the bright idea that if you’re going to do (A) anyway you might as well (B1) pick countries to invade that have lots of oil and (B2) declare undying friendship toward any nasty dictatorship that will help you with task (A).
So you end up with the worst of all worlds.
The Bush doctrine applied to Iran works like this: (A) tells you to invade Iran; but (B) tells you you don’t have the army to do it. What (B) also tells you is that every enemy of Iran is now your friend. So, it’s happy times again with Bin Laden.
Maybe the CIA could send him a cake and a bible? Or if that’s too old-fashioned, how about the latest edition of “Video-Making for Idiots.”
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