Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young’s arrests at the State of the Union for wearing opposing “protest” T-shirts is the latest illustration of how the Iraq War is the nation’s most provocative issue. The attack on free speech for both sides was in fact outrageous. But lost in the T-shirt battle is what really matters: President George W. Bush’s failure to tell the nation about the true costs of the war.
Lost amidst the predictably negative reaction to the victory by Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary elections is the crucial role that the U.S. government had in bringing the radical Islamist group to power.
In his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush admitted to the American people that America has a problem: Oil addiction. The first step in overcoming an addiction is acknowledging the problem. The logical second step should be addressing the root causes of that addiction and correcting the imbalances that enable it. But the Bush proposal does little to meet this challenge.
“Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
This essay evaluates some of the key claims made by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address of January 31, 2006.
This law, as has become more and more clear over the last three months, was but the initial move by the Bush administration in what has become an extended and coordinated attack on the civil liberties of U.S. persons in the name of national security and—ironically—in the name of bringing democracy and civil liberties to Iraq.
Iran has long been a target of the Bush administration’s rhetorical ire. The president called it “the world’s primary state sponsor of terrorism,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice characterized it as “something to be loathed,” and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Teheran of designing roadside bombs to kill U.S. and British troops. But with the U.S. military under siege in Iraq, and polls running heavily against the White House’s Middle East version of Vietnam, it seemed just bluster and so much talk.
Last year, 5,736 Iraqis died and 845 U.S. soldiers died in the Iraq War, many at the hands of the estimated 2,000 foreign terrorist fighters based in the U.S.-occupied country. If this conflict is part of a larger war on terrorism as President George W. Bush claims, it’s clear the U.S. is losing the so-called “global war on terror.”
Reprinted from Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures
While the nation mourns the 2,000th U.S. combat death in Iraq, instead of looking for ways to plan an exit strategy, Congress is finalizing another payment of $50 billion to continue fighting the war.