September 5, 2006

In his speech on Tuesday, Bush was up to his old game of hyperbole, casting today’s enemies in the same outfits as Lenin and Hitler.

The costumes may be scary, but they are way too large.

Bush said that Al Qaeda aims to “destroy the free world.” But it is not capable of doing so, and no one is suggesting that Al Qaeda be left alone while it regroups.

He said Islamic fundamentalists, armed with nuclear weapons, would “raise a mortal threat to the American people.”

But the United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons, and Iran has none.

Even if it obtained one or two, it would not constitute a “mortal threat” to the United States, and it would be committing national suicide if it decided to use them.

Bush can wheel out history’s bogeymen as much as he wants, but that does not make today’s threat equivalent to yesterday’s.

Even when he combines radical Sunnis with radical Shiites with Iraqi insurgents and makes of them a composite terrorist force, which they are not, this threat does not approach that of Hitler or the Soviet Union.

Had Hitler not opened the Eastern Front, he could have conquered the United States.

Al Qaeda, Iran, the Iraqi insurgents, and Hezbollah can’t do that.

Had Stalin or Khrushchev or Brezhnev wanted to, they could have incinerated the United States with ICBMs.

Al Qaeda, Iran, the Iraqi insurgents, and Hezbollah can’t do that.

The United States has the single most powerful military ever assembled, with unrivaled dominance in the air and on the seas and with every lethal technology available.

Still, Bush wants us to feel imperiled.

He speaks in grandiose terms, calling this “the great ideological struggle of the twenty-first century,” but how does he know what ideological struggles may come down the pike in, say, 2065?

He says “we’re answering history’s call,” and “it is the calling of our generation,” but that, too, is self-inflating and deluded.

What’s more, Bush is completely ignoring many of the conditions that give rise to Islamic fundamentalism, chief among them today being the Iraq War itself and U.S. support for Israel’s belligerent policies in the Occupied Territories and Lebanon.

Bush seems to believe in the Great Evil Man theory of history, but Lenin and Hitler did not arise from the rib of the devil himself.

Certain social conditions brought them to power. And Bush seems intent on creating the conditions that fill the ranks of Islamic fundamentalism.

It’s as if Bush were President of the United States in Lenin’s day, he would have urged Tsar Nicholas to keep fighting World War I and not to worry about the starving peasants.

Or if Bush were at Versailles, he would have urged the most stringent conditions be imposed on Germany, the better to humiliate its people.

For this is what Bush is doing now. He is inciting the wrath not of the Great Evil Man but of millions and millions of people, from whom a demagogue or two will arise, even after bin Laden and Zawahiri are gone and Ahmadinejad discredited.

Still, Bush hypes the threats.

All he can do now is jump from behind a corner and yell boo.

He’s got nothing else.