Stephen Zunes on the President's 9/11 speech
One of the definite dvidends of being a National Catholic Reporter subscriber is exposure to great writers, of which Stephen Zunes is one. He has written a rebuttal to the Presient's 9/11 speeches at the Foreign Policy in Focus web site:
[url]http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3503[/url]
The president's speeches (and all politician's speeches) are great fodder for those who want to study the use of language and argument. However, this president uses argument to support policies that have been internationally disastrous. Of course I felt that in this speech, even as the president acknowledges that Hussein had no connection to 9/11 bombers, he subtly tries to tie the legitimacy of the Iraqi war back to 9/11. No mean feat!
This is an excerpt from the above link. The first paragraph in quotes is a quote from the Presiden't speech. What follows is Zunes' analysis and rebuttal.
“We are now in the early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom. Amid the violence, some question whether the people of the Middle East want their freedom … For 60 years, these doubts guided our policies in the Middle East. And then, on a bright September morning, it became clear that the calm we saw in the Middle East was only a mirage. Years of pursuing stability to promote peace had left us with neither. So we changed our policies, and committed America's influence in the world to advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism. With our help, the people of the Middle East are now stepping forward to claim their freedom … By standing with democratic leaders and reformers, by giving voice to the hopes of decent men and women, we're offering a path away from radicalism.”
There is no question that people in the Middle East want freedom; for President Bush to imply that those who disagree with his policies feel otherwise is incredibly misleading. Despite a shift in rhetoric, however, U.S. policy regarding freedom and democracy in the Middle East has not changed. Under President Bush, U.S. security assistance and arms transfers to autocratic regimes in the greater Middle East has actually increased. The United States still provides unconditional military and police support for the brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime in Saudi Arabia and other family dictatorships of the Persian Gulf. U.S. taxpayers continue to give billions of dollars annually to prop up the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt. It was from these countries that the 9/11 hijackers, the al-Qaida leadership, and the terrorist organization's financial support came, not from Iraq and Afghanistan, whose despotic governments were overthrown by U.S. forces, nor from Syria or Iran, whose repressive governments are now the focus of U.S. threats.
In addition, in the two years after 9/11, President Bush provided over a billion dollars of aid to the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan—which has massacred hundreds of pro-democracy activists—and will shortly be welcoming the corrupt dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev of neighboring Kazakhstan to his summer home in Maine. From Pakistan to Azerbaijan to Tunisia to Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, the Bush administration has provided aid and comfort to the forces of repression. By contrast, soon after the people of Lebanon and Palestine voted in free elections, the Bush administration backed brutal military assaults against those countries by the government of Israel. And, rather than being a model for democracy, the U.S. backed government in Iraq and militias of its ruling parties have engaged in widespread extra-judicial killings, torture, ethnic cleansing, and other gross and systematic human rights abuses.
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I am deeply disturbed at what I see as the relative success of the president's capacity to acknowledge a bit of truth and then continue to push the basic falsehood, the linkage to 9/11 as a rationale for war in Iraq.
I feel Zunes' writings are helpful to peace activists because he helps us see how language is used and I think scripts us aptly for when we discuss peace issues.
