Bush compares war on terror with WWII.

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Bush compares war on terror with WWII.
21
Fri, 06-04-2004 - 10:21am

Is this a fair comparison? What is your reaction?


Is he using the D-Day ceremonies in an attempt justify the invasion of Iraq?


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3570538&thesection=news&thesubsection=world


United States President George W. Bush yesterday compared his war on terror to America's mission in World War II while calling for a new era of reform to avoid the emergence of "terrorist-controlled states" in the oil-rich Middle East.


In a speech to Air Force Academy graduates, the Republican President rejected claims that his Administration's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan have fuelled militancy in the Muslim world.

"Now freedom is stirring in the Middle East and no one should bet against it," Bush said a day after embracing a newly chosen Iraqi interim government.

"Overcoming terrorism and bringing greater freedom to the nations of the Middle East is the work of decades," he added.

"In the short term, we will work with every Government in the Middle East dedicated to destroying the terrorist networks. In the longer term, we will expect a higher standard of reform and democracy."

The address was billed as a follow-up to Bush's speech at the Army War College a week ago in which he discussed US expectations for democracy in Iraq, where a new interim government emerged to a deadly string of car bombs and clashes between American forces and insurgents.

The President has repeatedly held out the prospect of a democratic Iraq as a catalyst for political and economic reform across the region through a proposal called the Greater Middle East Initiative, which he will push at next week's Group of Eight summit during meetings with Western and Arab leaders.

His remarks were replete with references to World War II milestones and, at one point, Bush compared the September 11, 2001, attacks to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Undeterred by political pressure, Bush has donned the mantle of war President by undertaking a series of war-related speeches that will include a weekend appearance at the site of the 1944 Normandy invasion.

Bush travels to Europe today amid fears of violence in Italy, where demonstrators opposed to their country's role as US ally in Iraq plan widespread demonstrations.

"Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the US. We will not forget that treachery and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy," he said.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry accused the President of misleading Americans by linking the Iraq war to September 11.

"It was the weapons of mass destruction which were given to Congress as the primary cause and rationale for our involvement. So I think that's once again misleading America, frankly," Kerry said.

The President acknowledged the danger of spreading violence in countries including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

"We will prevent the emergence of terrorist-controlled states," he told an audience of 29,300 people, who responded with lacklustre applause.

Administration officials have often compared the March 2003 invasion of Iraq with the popular Allied invasion of Europe.

Bush said he was never angry with France over its refusal to back the US-led war in Iraq, as both countries sought to play down past tensions ahead of the 60th anniversary of the D-day landings.

Bush is among 17 heads of state scheduled to attend the commemorations in Normandy.

Like French President Jacques Chirac, Bush said there was never any falling-out between the US and France, which led opposition to the war that ousted Saddam Hussein.

"I made a difficult decision and not everybody agreed with that decision. But I understand that," he said.

"Jacques told me clearly he did not think the use of force was necessary. We debated it as friends."

Chirac yesterday also denied relations with Bush had ever disintegrated or been affected by their disagreement over the Iraqi conflict.

"I was never angry with him and I never had the feeling that he was angry with me. We had a disagreement of views and that's normal."

cl-Libraone~

 


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Registered: 08-12-2003
Mon, 06-07-2004 - 8:14am
I think Bush was just saying there are similarities to WWII. He was on with Tom Brokaw last night and explained that there are similarities as well as differences to WWII. So to say that Bush thinks the war on terror is JUST LIKE WWII, is incorrect. You can compare and contrast any war.
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Mon, 06-07-2004 - 8:22am

Here's how the media felt about WWII. Eerily similar to 2004, don't you think? Now this is a comparison.















LIFE Magazine: Americans Are Losing the Victory in Europe



January 7, 1946




We are in a cabin deep down below decks on a Navy ship jam-packed with troops that’s pitching and creaking its way across the Atlantic in a winter gale. There is a man in every bunk. There’s a man wedged into every corner. There’s a man in every chair. The air is dense with cigarette smoke and with the staleness of packed troops and sour wool.

“Don’t think I’m sticking up for the Germans,” puts in the lanky young captain in the upper berth, “but…”

“To hell with the Germans,” says the broad-shouldered dark lieutenant. “It’s what our boys have been doing that worries me.”

The lieutenant has been talking about the traffic in Army property, the leaking of gasoline into the black market in France and Belgium even while the fighting was going on, the way the Army kicks the civilians around, the looting.

“Lust, liquor and loot are the soldier’s pay,” interrupts a red-faced major.

The lieutenant comes out with his conclusion: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” You hear these two phrases again and again in about every bull session on the shop. “Two wrongs don’t make a right” and “Don’t think I’m sticking up for the Germans, but….”

The troops returning home are worried. “We’ve lost the peace,” men tell you. “We can’t make it stick.”

A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans. Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word “liberation.” Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting.

You try to explain to these Europeans that they expected too much. They answer that they had a right to, that after the last war America was the hope of the world. They talk about the Hoover relief, the work of the Quakers, the speeches of Woodrow Wilson. They don’t blame us for the fading of that hope. But they blame us now.

Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. People never tire of telling you of the ignorance and rowdy-ism of American troops, of out misunderstanding of European conditions. They say that the theft and sale of Army supplies by our troops is the basis of their black market. They blame us for the corruption and disorganization of UNRRA. They blame us for the fumbling timidity of our negotiations with the Soviet Union. They tell us that our mechanical de-nazification policy in Germany is producing results opposite to those we planned. “Have you no statesmen in America?” they ask.








The Skeptical French Press

Yet whenever we show a trace of positive leadership I found Europeans quite willing to follow our lead. The evening before Robert Jackson’s opening of the case for the prosecution in the Nurnberg trial, I talked to some correspondents from the French newspapers. They were polite but skeptical. They were willing enough to take part in a highly publicized act of vengeance against the enemy, but when you talked about the usefulness of writing a prohibition of aggressive war into the law of nations they laughed in your face. The night after Jackson’s nobly delivered and nobly worded speech I saw then all again. They were very much impressed. Their manner had even changed toward me personally as an American. Their sudden enthusiasm seemed to me typical of the almost neurotic craving for leadership of the European people struggling wearily for existence in the wintry ruins of their world.

The ruin this war has left in Europe can hardly be exaggerated. I can remember the years after the last war. Then, as soon as you got away from the military, all the little strands and pulleys that form the fabric of a society were still knitted together. Farmers took their crops to market. Money was a valid medium of exchange. Now the entire fabric of a million little routines has broken down. No on can think beyond food for today. Money is worthless. Cigarettes are used as a kind of lunatic travesty on a currency. If a man goes out to work he shops around to find the business that serves the best hot meal. The final pay-off is the situation reported from the Ruhr where the miners are fed at the pits so that they will not be able to take the food home to their families.

“Well, the Germans are to blame. Let them pay for it. It’s their fault,” you say. The trouble is that starving the Germans and throwing them out of their homes is only producing more areas of famine and collapse.

One section of the population of Europe looked to us for salvation and another looked to the Soviet Union. Wherever the people have endured either the American armies or the Russian armies both hopes have been bitterly disappointed. The British have won a slightly better reputation. The state of mind in Vienna is interesting because there the part of the population that was not actively Nazi was about equally divided. The wealthier classes looked to America, the workers to the Soviet Union.

The Russians came first. The Viennese tell you of the savagery of the Russian armies. They came like the ancient Mongol hordes out of the steppes, with the flimsiest supply. The people in the working-class districts had felt that when the Russians came that they at least would be spared. But not at all. In the working-class districts the tropes were allowed to rape and murder and loot at will. When victims complained, the Russians answered, “You are too well off to be workers. You are bourgeoisie.”

When Americans looted they took cameras and valuables but when the Russians looted they took everything. And they raped and killed. From the eastern frontiers a tide of refugees is seeping across Europe bringing a nightmare tale of helpless populations trampled underfoot. When the British and American came the Viennese felt that at last they were in the hands of civilized people. But instead of coming in with a bold plan of relief and reconstruction we came in full of evasions and apologies.

U.S. Administration a Poor Third

We know now the tragic results of the ineptitudes of the Peace of Versailles. The European system it set up was Utopia compared to the present tangle of snarling misery. The Russians at least are carrying out a logical plan for extending their system of control at whatever cost. The British show signs of recovering their good sense and their innate human decency. All we have brought to Europe so far is confusion backed up by a drumhead regime of military courts. We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease.

The taste of victory had gone sour in the mouth of every thoughtful American I met. Thoughtful men can’t help remembering that this is a period in history when every political crime and every frivolous mistake in statesmanship has been paid for by the death of innocent people. The Germans built the Stalags; the Nazis are behind barbed wire now, but who will be next? Whenever you sit eating a good meal in the midst of a starving city in a handsome house requisitioned from some German, you find yourself wondering how it would feel to have a conqueror drinking out of your glasses. When you hear the tales of the brutalizing of women from the eastern frontier you think with a shudder of of those you love and cherish at home.

That we are one world is unfortunately a brutal truth. Punishing the German people indiscriminately for the sins of their leader may be justice, but it is not helping to restore the rule of civilization. The terrible lesson of the events of this year of victory is that what is happening to the bulk of Europe today can happen to American tomorrow.

In America we are still rich, we are still free to move from place to place and to talk to our friends without fear of the secret police. The time has come, for our own future security, to give the best we have to the world instead of the worst. So far as Europe is concerned, American leadership up to now has been obsessed with a fear of our own virtues. Winston Churchill expressed this state of mind brilliantly in a speech to his own people which applies even more accurately to the people of the U.S. “You must be prepared,” he warned them, “for further efforts of mind and body and further sacrifices to great causes, if you are not to fall back into the rut if inertia, the confusion of aim and the craven fear of being great.”


Getting Déjà Vu yet? Here's more from this issue of LIFE...

The first winter of peace holds Europe in a deathly grip of cold, hunger and hopelessness. In the words of the London Sunday Observer: “Europe is threatened by a catastrophe this winter which has no precedent since the Black Death of 1348.”

These are still more than 25,000,000 homeless people milling about Europe. In Warsaw nearly 1,000,000 live in holes in the ground. Six million building were destroyed in Russia. Rumania has her worst drought of 50 years, and in Greece fuel supplies are terribly low because the Nazis, during their occupation, decimated the forests. In Italy the wheat harvest, which was a meager 3,450,000 tons in 1944, fell to an unendurable 1,304,000 tons in 1945. In France, food consumption per day averages 1,800 calories as compared with 3,000 calories in the U.S.

Germany is sinking even below the level of the countries she victimized. The German people are still better clothed than most of Europe because during the war they took the best of Europe’s clothing. But their food supply is below subsistence level. In the American zone they beg for the privilege of scraping U.S. army garbage cans. Infant mortality is already so high that a Berlin Quaker, quoted in the British press, predicted. “No child born in Germany in 1945 will survive. Only half the children aged less than 3 years will survive.”

On Germany, which plunged the Continent into its misery, falls the blame for its own plight and the plight of all Europe. But if this winter proves worse even than the war years, blame will fall on the victor nations. Some Europeans blame Russia for callousness to misery in eastern Europe. But some also blame America because they expected so much more from her. On the following pages the distinguished novelist John Dos Passos, who has been abroad as LIFE correspondent, reports on Europe’s suffering and what it means for America.

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/eibessential2/life.guest.html


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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 06-07-2004 - 8:26am

>"there are similarities to WWII<


I would like to know what these similarities are? The only similarity

 


Photobucket&nbs

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Registered: 03-23-2003
Mon, 06-07-2004 - 10:42am
War is h*ll...your point?

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Registered: 08-12-2003
Mon, 06-07-2004 - 10:55am

Here's part of the transcript of the interview of President Bush by Tom Brokaw from last night.


Tom Brokaw: “Mr. President, in the last week or so, you have been comparing World War II with the time that we're going through now. And a lot of people wonder whether that's really an

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iVillage Member
Registered: 06-02-2004
Mon, 06-07-2004 - 11:44am
>>>The similarities were when we were attacked in an unprovoked fashion in World War II and on September the 11, 2001<<


Sept 11th had NOTHING to do with Iraq and President Bush has acknowledged this, so the comparison between iraq war and world war 11 is erroneous. A country did not attack us on sept 11th, nor did a country declare war, a terrorist group did. NO comparison.

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Registered: 08-12-2003
Mon, 06-07-2004 - 11:49am
Um, he wasn't talking about the Iraq war, he was talking about the war on terror. (See: title of thread)
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Mon, 06-07-2004 - 12:31pm
I used his own statement where he made a comparison between being attacked during the second world war and the attack on sept 11th, no comparison! Nor is there any comparison between WW11 and the war on terror. Care to elaborate on what those comparisons are?

alfreda

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Registered: 08-12-2003
Mon, 06-07-2004 - 1:13pm

<>


He made a comparison between Pearl Harbor and Sept 11th and said they were similar because both attacks on the U.S. were unprovoked. That cannot be argued!


And as for your second question,


<>


I think you meant "care to elaborate on what the similarities are", and in that case, please read the answer Bush gave in the Brokaw interview.


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Registered: 06-02-2004
Mon, 06-07-2004 - 1:32pm
While you feel a desire to correct my grammar, the content of what I said stands. Can YOU elaborate on the comparisons between the war on terror and world war 11?

>>>And this war that we're fighting, there's fanatics who hide in cities and caves and kill innocent people. Both armies, or both the movements, were trying to dispirit the free world.<<<

No comparison between the german army and a group of international terrorists? the german army consisted of conscripted german citizens who served their country, bin ladens group consists of volunteers from all over the world to serve their cause.


>>>that we can win the war on terror like we won the war against communism and like we won the war against fascism, by being tough and strong and spreading freedom.<<<

The war against communism did not involve us invading russia but using international pressure, embargoes and diplomacy. There is no comparison between fighting a political ideology and fighting a group of international terrorists.