can't wait until we get rid of bush, so there won't be any more hate directed at america from overseas
Here's an interesting list of attacks believed to have involved al Qaeda. Note how the list starts right as George W. Bush took office in 1993:* 1993 (Feb.): Bombing of World Trade Center (WTC); six killed.
* 1993 (Oct.): Killing of U.S. soldiers in Somalia.
* 1996 (June): Truck bombing at Khobar Towers barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killed 19 Americans.
* 1998 (Aug.): Bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa; 224 killed, including 12 Americans.
* 1999 (Dec.): Plot to bomb millennium celebrations in Seattle foiled when customs agents arrest an Algerian smuggling explosives into the U.S.
* 2000 (Oct.): Bombing of the USS Cole in port in Yemen; 17 U.S. sailors killed.
* 2001 (Sept.): Destruction of WTC; attack on Pentagon. Total dead 2,992.
* 2001 (Dec.): Man tried to denote shoe bomb on flight from Paris to Miami.
* 2002 (April): Explosion at historic synagogue in Tunisia left 21 dead, including 14 German tourists.
* 2002 (May): Car exploded outside hotel in Karachi, Pakistan, killing 14, including 11 French citizens.
* 2002 (June): Bomb exploded outside American consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, killing 12.
* 2002 (Oct.): Boat crashed into oil tanker off Yemen coast, killing one.
* 2002 (Oct.): Nightclub bombings in Bali, Indonesia, killed 202, mostly Australian citizens.
* 2002 (Nov.): Suicide attack on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, killed 16.
* 2003 (May): Suicide bombers killed 34, including 8 Americans, at housing compounds for Westerners in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
* 2003 (May): Four bombs killed 33 people targeting Jewish, Spanish, and Belgian sites in Casablanca, Morocco.
* 2003 (Aug.): Suicide car-bomb killed 12, injured 150 at Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia.
* 2003 (Nov.): Explosions rocked a Riyadh, Saudi Arabia housing compound, killing 17.
* 2003 (Nov.): Suicide car-bombers simultaneously attacked two synagogues in Istanbul, Turkey, killing 25 and injuring hundreds.
* 2003 (Nov.): Truck bombs detonated at London bank and British consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, killing 26.
* 2004 (March): Ten terrorists bombs exploded almost simultaneously during the morning rush hour in Madrid, Spain, killing 202 and injuring more than 1,400.
* 2004 (May): Terrorists attacked Saudi oil company offices in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing 22.
* 2004 (June): Terrorists kidnapped and executed American Paul Johnson, Jr., in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
* 2004 (Sept.): Car bomb outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, killed nine.
Let's be sure to elect John Kerry, so we can have peace again. I'm glad we've been able to figure out that Bush is solely to blame for all the hostility directed at the U.S. Clearly we can see that getting rid of Bush will bring immediate peace -- especially after Kerry makes a speech to the United Nations.
It's a relief to discover that the world is such a simple place.
UPDATE: I am, of course, being a little assholish in this post. But I'm increasingly amazed, as the election nears, at the depth of Bush's failure (as revealed in daily conversation in Los Angeles, on-campus and off-campus). The salad dressing isn't tasty and delicious! Damn you, George W. Bush! Anything and everything is the direct fault of a single administration. Itchy feet? Small blister? Yep, he did it.
Meanwhile, John Edwards helpfully reveals that Bush killed Christopher Reeve, and that people like Reeve will walk again -- the Blood of the Lamb!!! -- when Kerry is elected. (Which will, I think, be "never.")
I didn't vote for Bush. I'm not going to vote for him this time. But I doubt very much that the world would change all that much if he were to lose the election. The Bush administration has been reckless and hubristic in foreign policy, reckless and shitty in domestic policy. And I'm still not convinced that John "Terrorism is a Nuisance" Kerry would be much of an improvement.
I know that Bush can't carry all the weight the left has tried to put in his basket. Most of the things he's blamed for have roots that stretch back well before his presidency, or that result to some degree from structural shifts in the post-Cold War, post-dot com world. If he'd broken half as much furniture as the DNC says he has, god himself would come down from the sky and strike him down. Is it really necessary to resort to Bush killed Christopher Reeve in order to beat him?
posted by Chris Bray @ 4:11 PM
8 Comments:
Chris your argument here needs work. If you average the attacks per year during Clinton you get 3/4 attacks per year. If you average the attacks during Bush you get 4 and 1/4 attacks per year. Clinton clearly wins. So I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
It's true of course that terrorism won't be defeated by electing Kerry. Nor will the world stop hating us. Electing Bush likewise won't defeat the terrorists.
It's also true that a nicer more friendly America won't by itself solve our problems. But, and this is critical, it's stupid and naive to think that we can solve the problem merely by killing the terrorists. If we knew who the terrorists were, of course, this might work. But we don't know who they are and we don't know where they are. So we can't just kill them either.
So...what is your point here?
Obviously, electing Kerry or Bush or Badnarik or Jesus Christ himself won't somehow bring an end to all attacks on the US. (Even Saint Reagan suffered a large number of attacks on Americans by terrorists.) Likewise, 9/11 wasn't the result of failures by any one administration. That's one project we managed to achieve through bipartisan idiocy over many presidential terms.
I will argue that Bush's approach has increased hatred of the US, not only among our enemies but among our friends. In the Middle East, our opponents could always convince many that the US was imperialistic and even convince a small number to attack us. But when US troops occupy a Muslim country, that task becomes childishly simple. Sometimes it's worth the cost and sometimes it's not. Afghanistan was, IMHO, well worth the cost, both directly in American lives in the campaign and indirectly in the increase in anti-Americanism among some radical groups. Iraq was not remotely worth the price, even without the benefit of hindsight. I opposed the war even when I believed that Iraq probably had a small stockpile of chemical agents (possibly even weaponized in bombs and artillery shells) and possibly a biological weapons program (but not weaponized). There was never any good reason to believe that they would give any such weapons to terrorists or that they were a direct threat to us. Iraq wasn't even a realistic threat to our allies in the region after the Gulf War and a decade of sanctions. Even had we managed to get through the war without a major insurrection within Iraq, the presence of large numbers of our troops in Iraq would have mobilized huge numbers of people against us throughout the Muslim world. The end result would have been that we would be less safe, not safer. In the much more likely event that we weren't welcomed as liberators, things would just get astronomically worse; and they have. Afghanistan was readily accepted in most of the world as legitimate self-defense and, yes, revenge. Iraq could never have been seen as anything but self-serving imposition of power for no better reason than that we could. We've screwed up badly and, no matter who is elected next month, things are going to be rough for a good long while. But "anybody but Bush" will have a much easier time making things better, if for no other reason than that they won't have the same need to deny the mistakes.
Mojo
I want to see the quote where John Edwards said Bush killed Christopher Reeves. It's too bizarre not to check out.
I also wonder who you're listening to if your impression is that everyone is blaming everything on Bush.
To take the low-hanging fruit, Michael Moore has made a movie blaming Bush for the actions of the Fresno County Sheriff's Department and the state of Oregon.
In other news, George W. Bush is personally responsible for gas prices at the pump.
For a look at the Edwards quote, here's a column in the Washington Post (free registration required). The first paragraphs:
An Edwards Outrage
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 15, 2004; Page A23
After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word "plan" 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.
This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
First, the inability of the human spinal cord to regenerate is one of the great mysteries of biology. The answer is not remotely around the corner. It could take a generation to unravel. To imply, as Edwards did, that it is imminent if only you elect the right politicians is scandalous.
Second, if the cure for spinal cord injury comes, we have no idea where it will come from. There are many lines of inquiry. Stem cell research is just one of many possibilities, and a very speculative one at that. For 30 years I have heard promises of miracle cures for paralysis (including my own, suffered as a medical student). The last fad, fetal tissue transplants, was thought to be a sure thing. Nothing came of it.
Chris,
I agree that it would be deceptive to claim that there is an imminent cure for spinal cord injury and yes, there are a number of lines of inquiry into possible cures. But it certainly doesn't improve the odds or bring a cure closer to limit promising lines of research for partisan political purposes.
Mojo
Okay, so claiming that stem cell research would lead to cures for paralysis is a little different than saying Bush killed Christopher Reeves.
With Michael Moore...I'm guessing you're referring to "9/11"? I don't remember the references to Fresno or Oregon very well, but I imagine they had something to do with cutting funding? Or at least the Oregon one did.
I guess I would follow up to say that I think Bush has been blamed largely for the economy, and that poses the difficult question of, "Can you blame a president for the economy of the nation?" I think I can certainly blame Bush for some of the stupid economic choices he made, like his tax cuts, but as for the foreign relations issue; obviously his election or the election of his father can't be blamed solely for a perceived increase in terrorist attacks, but as someone living overseas currently, I strongly believe that if Bush is elected next month, America will certainly reach a new low in the eyes of the majority of the rest of the world.
Maybe Kerry doesn't have a simple solution, and I think there are a significant number of international citizens who don't see much of a difference between Kerry and Bush--but if the rest of the world could vote in our election, and I almost think they should be able to, since whoever we elect will impact not just the U.S. but the rest of the world, Bush would lose by a huge landslide.
And this fact--how much Bush is hated and how avidly the international community is watching our election--undeniably assigns Bush and his administration a pretty big chunk of responsibility in the foreign relations department.
I could go into more detail but I think it would be a bit repetetive and not very useful. But I guess I do think "the world" will change, or at least the world's perception of the U.S. will change, if Bush loses. Whether or not Kerry can turn the economy around or will significantly alter our foreign policies is unforseeable, and in some ways an entirely different issue.
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