Fascists Cry: "Fascists!"

Like Ed Naha says, You know we're in serious trouble when George W. Bush is on TV more often than re-runs of "Seinfeld."

Bush's speech today could be the first time he has used the word "Islamofascists" in public. Can anybody explain that term to me? I always thought Fascism had more to do with control of a state by big companies and private interests, as opposed to control by religious theologists. How is a Caliphate a Fascist Empire, unless it's enforcing an unquestioned devotion to the cult of Ronald McDonald?

The real Fascists, of course, are in the Bush White House, as Scott McLellan's post-speech press gaggle showed quite clearly:

Q Scott, all this talk about a radical Islamic empire stretching from Europe across to southeast Asia, even some Republicans are saying that it has the appearance of the President trying to cover up bad policy in Iraq by unduly alarming people.

MR. McCLELLAN: I haven't heard any Republicans say that. Do you have one in mind?

Q A couple in mind, yes.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, do you want to share them with me?

Q You can call them and ask them, but I'm just wondering what you think of that?

MR. McCLELLAN: I -- you made a statement. I haven't heard any Republican make such allegation. So I was just wondering where that came from.

Q What's your response to the allegation that you're trying to cover up bad policy in Iraq by unduly alarming people?

MR. McCLELLAN: It's an allegation by John Roberts. [gandhi: I assume that's the name of the reporter asking the hard questions here].

Q Pardon me?

MR. McCLELLAN: Are you saying it's an allegation by John Roberts?

Q It's not my allegation, no.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, go and look at what the President said in his remarks...

In other words, if anyone in the GOP is daring to doubt the Presidential crapola, we want their names right now!

And later in the press conference, the cold eye of Fascism turned on the press themselves:

Q One more question on the speech. In telling us yesterday that this was going to be a significant speech, you said that the President was going to speak in unprecedented detail. What parts of the speech did you have in mind?

MR. McCLELLAN: About the first half of it. When he talked about the nature of the enemy.

Q Right, but his points were things that we've heard him say many times before: that the enemy is determined --

MR. McCLELLAN: He's never spoken in that much detail about the nature of the enemy, like he did today. He has spoken about the nature of the enemy, you're correct. But he spoke in very specific and detailed ways about the nature of the enemy, their strategy and their ambitions and their goals and their beliefs.

Maybe you missed the first half of the speech, but I would encourage you to go back and look at it and I'll be glad for you to come up and show me where he talked about all those things before.

Q That's a little gratuitous to suggest I wasn't listening, Scott, don't you think?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I'm sorry about that, Mark.

Q I listened --

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, then, it sure didn't seem like it, because I think most people in this room recognize that it was much greater detail that he talked about than ever before.

Q Care for a show of hands on that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Sure.

I would love to know how that show of hands went, but can't find any record of it (yet). But again, the implied threat is obvious: anyone in the press gaggle dares to support this kind of dissent, you're outta here.

As for the central tenet of Bush's speech - that Iraq is a hotbed of terrorism from which the US dare not now withdraw its forces - John Nichols blows holes in that old chestnut by pointing out in the clearest possible terms that this is a mess of the USA's own making, and Bush's policies have only been making it worse:

To hear the president tell it, the U.S. went to Iraq to combat bin Laden's al Qaida network.

The problem, of course, is that going to Iraq to confront al Qaida in 2003 was like going to the Vatican to confront Protestants.

Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party cadres were a lot of things, but they were never comrades, colleagues or hosts to the adherents of what Bush referred to in his speech as "Islamic radicalism," "militant jihadism" or "Islamo-fascism."

If any individuals on the planet feared and hated al Qaida, it was Hussein and his allies. The Iraqi Baathists were thugs, to be sure, but they were secularist thugs. Indeed, many of the most brutal acts of oppression carried out by the Iraqi regime targeted Islamic militants and governments aligned with the fundamentalists. The eight-year war between Iraq and Iran pitted the soldiers of Hussein's secular nationalism against the armies of the Ayatollah Khomeini's radical vision of Islam. That is why, while the United States remained officially neutral in the war that lasted from 1980 to 1988, it became an aggressive behind-the-scenes backer of Hussein. As part of that support, the U.S. State Department in 1982 removed Iraq from its list of states supporting international terrorism. That step helped to ease the way for loans and other forms of aid -- such as the U.S. Agriculture Department's guaranteed loans to Iraq for purchases of American commodities. It also signaled to other countries and international agencies that the U.S. wanted them to provide aid to Hussein -- and if the signal was missed, the Reagan White House and State Department would make their sentiments clear, as happened when the administration lobbied the Export-Import Bank to improve Iraq's credit rating and provide it with needed financial assistance. If any lingering doubts about U.S. attitude remained, they were eased by the December 20, 1983, visit of Donald Rumsfeld, who was touring the Middle East as President Reagan's special envoy, for visits with Hussein and Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.

As it happened, the U.S. was reading Hussein right. In a region where the common catchphrase is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," Hussein was not merely someone who was fighting a neighboring country. He was fighting the spread of the radical Islamic fundamentalism that the U.S. so feared because he was a committed secularist. Hussein promoted the education of women and put them in positions of power. Under Hussein, Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims enjoyed a greater measure of religious freedom than they have in most Middle Eastern countries in recent decades. Hussein included non-Muslims among his closest advisors, most notably Aziz, a Christian adherent of the Chaldean Catholic faith that remains rooted in Iraq.There was a paranoid passion to Hussein's secularism. He and his vast secret police network remained ever on the watch for evidence of Islamic militancy, and when it was found the response was swift and brutal. It was an awareness of the fact that Hussein was a bulwark against militant Islam that led key aides to President George H.W. Bush to argue against displacing him after the liberation of Kuwait by a U.S.-led force in 1991.