Truth - Al Franken [110]
The Bremer walls are a daily reminder to Iraqis of everything that has gone wrong since the Americans arrived. And they’re not a reminder that can be easily tuned out. Just ask Khalid Daoud, a worker in Iraq’s Culture Ministry, who described his personal encounter with a Bremer wall to The New York Times. It was every homeowner’s worst nightmare.
A few months ago, [Daoud] said, the American military arrived with a crane and tore up the trees in his garden, smashed the low wall surrounding it, swung the slabs into place and topped them with concertina wire.
The beauty part of Bremer walls is that the more we build, the more we need.
Bush partisans like to point out that after World War II, it took years to form democratic governments in Germany and Japan. What they won’t tell you is that the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany, Japan, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo is zero, a number invented by Arab mathematicians like Ahmed Chalabi.
Speaking of inventing things, Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice claim that there was a postwar insurgency in Germany that bears many parallels to the Iraqi insurgency today. Trying to put one over on, of all people, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Condi and Rummy, in separate speeches on the same day, both drew the comparison:
RICE: SS officers—called “werewolves”—engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them—much like today’s Baathist and fedayeen remnants.
RUMSFELD: One group of those dead-enders was known as “werewolves.” They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated, including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as ten were used as snipers, radio broadcasts and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?
No. And it probably didn’t ring a bell to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, either. Why? It didn’t happen! According to Golo Mann, author of The History of Germany Since 1789 :
The [Germans’] readiness to work with the victors, to carry out their orders, to accept their advice and their help was genuine; of the resistance which the Allies had expected in the way of “werewolf” units and nocturnal guerrilla activities, there was no sign.
International security scholar Daniel Benjamin, writing in Slate, noted:
When an officer in Hesse was asked to investigate rumors that troops were being attacked and castrated, he reported back that there had not been a single attack against an American soldier in four months of occupation.
What about the mayor of Aachen, whom Rumsfeld had mentioned so dramatically? Well, he was assassinated. On the orders of Himmler. How, you ask, could Himmler be in a position to give orders? I’ll tell you how. The war wasn’t over yet! The mayor of Aachen was assassinated on March 25, 1945, six weeks before the Nazi surrender at Reims.
Why would Rice and Rumsfeld spin such a far-fetched yarn? Habit.
One of the few habits that the administration was finally forced to break was insisting that the war had been justified by Saddam’s growing stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction. At first, they made a small adjustment, saying that Iraq’s grave threat to America had actually come from Weapons of Mass Destruction–Related Program Activities. When it turned out there were none of those either, they had to change the subject entirely.
Errrr . . . Freedom. That was it. That’s worth fighting for! We’re all for that. Right? In his second inaugural address, President George W. Bush completed the bait and switch. Goodbye, imminent threat and the ties to al Qaeda. Hello, world freedom.
All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States