LIBERATION THEOLOGY:

President Rallies Troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa: Remarks by the President to Socom and Centcom Community (President George W. Bush, Macdill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida, 3/26/03)

Our entire coalition has a job to do, and it will not end with the liberation of Iraq. We will help the Iraqi people to find the benefits and assume the duties of self-government. The form of those institutions will arise from Iraq's own culture and its own choices. Yet, this much is certain: The 24 million people of Iraq have lived too long under a violent criminal gang calling itself a government.

Iraqis are a good and gifted people. They deserve better than a life spent bowing before a dictator. The people of Iraq deserve to stand on their feet as free men and women -- the citizens of a free country.

This goal of a free and peaceful Iraq unites our coalition. And this goal comes from the deepest convictions of America. The freedom you defend is the right of every person and the future of every nature. The liberty we prize is not American's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity.

The Army Special Forces define their mission in a motto, "To liberate the oppressed." Generations of men and women in uniform have served and sacrificed in this cause. Now the call of history has come once again to all in our military and to all in our coalition. We are answering that call. We have no ambition in Iraq except the liberation of its people. We ask no reward except a durable peace. And we will accept no outcome short of complete and final success.

The path we are taking is not easy, and it may be long. Yet we know our destination. We will stay on the path -- mile by mile -- all the way to Baghdad, and all the way to victory.

Thank you, all. And may God bless America.

This is the President of whom Paul Berman says the following:

[Q:] So you think the way he's presenting this war to the world is really where he's gone wrong.

[A:] Yes, it has been wretched. He's presented his arguments for going to war partly mendaciously, which has been a disaster. He's certainly presented them in a confused way, so that people can't understand his reasoning. He's aroused a lot of suspicion. Even when he's made good arguments, he's made them in ways that are very difficult to understand and have completely failed to get through to the general public. All in all, his inarticulateness has become something of a national security threat for the United States.

In my interpretation, the basic thing that the United States wants to do -- overthrow Saddam and get rid of his weapons -- is sharply in the interest of almost everybody all over the world. And although the U.S. is proposing to act in the interest of the world, Bush has managed to terrify the entire world and to turn the world against him and us and to make our situation infinitely more dangerous than it otherwise would have been. It's a display of diplomatic and political incompetence on a colossal scale. We're going to pay for this.

[Q:] Then what is it that the public doesn't understand? What hasn't he been able to get across?

[A:] One thing he hasn't gotten across is that there is a positive liberal democratic goal and a humanitarian goal here. Iraq is suffering under one of the most grotesque fascist tyrannies there's ever been. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, have been killed by this horrible regime. The weapons programs are not a fiction. There's every reason to think that Saddam, who's used these weapons in the past, would be happy to use them in the future. The suffering of the Iraqi people is intense. The United States is in the position to bring that suffering to an end. Their liberation, the creating of at least the rudiments of a liberal democratic society there, are in the interests of the Iraqi people and are deeply in the interests of liberal society everywhere. There are reasons to go in which are those of not just self-interest or self-defense, but of solidarity of humanitarianism, of a belief in liberal ideals. And Bush has gotten this across not at all.

If you can tell how Mr. Bush is failing to meet Mr. Berman's standards you're wiser than I. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 27, 2003 11:47 AM