Paul Greenberg, the conservative columnist, writes today that President Bush needs to be honest, as Churchill was in 1940, if he wants to keep Americans behind their Iraq policy.
After all, he explains later, "We have been attacked not so much by a new nationalism, but by an old fanaticism straight of Churchill’s dark abyss."
Greenberg doesn’t bother to note that Churchill was speaking about a Nazi Germany when Hitler’s ambitions and capabilities were plain.
Nor does he distinguish between al Qaeda, perpetrator of 9/11, and Iraq, which was not the perpetrator.
That, of course, is exactly the White House line; Bush and buddies blurred the differences, used 9/11 to carry out another, pre-existing agenda. And connecting Iraq to Osama bin Laden wasn’t the only tactic they used to get us into a so-called "war on terrorism." Let’s see, off-hand, we can list Iraq’s WMD, its welcoming population, how its oil would pay for the war, how we could do this with a skeleton Army and – the final cover story - how much the Iraqis wanted freedom.
I frequently complain that we are ignorant of history. But ideologues misuse history as often as they don’t know it.