Reply to a Wrongheaded Neocon Email

Some form of this boneheaded email has been making the rounds for years, and it's time to set the reord straight.

For some reason the neocons, through ignorance or intention, habitually have a difficult time getting their historical facts straight which, naturally,
affects their reasoning and occludes their judgment. This was originally written in 2004 and has been updated.

The erroneous neocon claims are in italics with the facts in bold.

"Liberals claim President Bush shouldn't have started this war [in Iraq]. They complain about his prosecution of it. One liberal recently claimed
Bush was the worst president in U.S. history. Let's clear up one point: We didn't start the war on terror. Try to remember, it was started by terrorists BEFORE 9/11."

Let's clear up this point: Bush started a war in Iraq which had nothing to do with the war on terror. If he had taken the $200 billion (Update: $400 bil. now) of our money he's wasted trying to make Iraq a democratic state, and spent it going after Al-Qaeda, who attacked us on 9/11, we might have eliminated that particular terrorist organization by now.

"Let's look at the 'worst' president and mismanagement claims."

Let's.

"FDR led us into World War II. Germany never attacked us...Hitler declared war on the US. JAPAN attacked us."

That's wrong on several counts: On Oct. 17, 1941, the USS Kearny was attacked and damaged by a German U-Boat in international waters; on Oct. 30, 1941, the US Navy destroyer USS Reuben James was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Iceland and 100 American sailors died. It was the first US warship sunk in WWII.
On Dec. 8, 1941, the US Congress, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, declared war on the Japanese Empire; Germany and Italy, Japan's Axis partners, were not included.
On Dec. 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States; only then did Congress recognize a state of war with those two countries.
So, FDR did not 'lead us into war' or attack Germany first, although we had been attacked by Germany at least twice prior to Dec. 7, 1941.
[The source for this information is the Encyclopedia of American Facts & Dates, 8th Edition, published by Harper & Row.]

"From 1941-1945, 450,000 lives were lost, an average of 112,500 per year."

Considering that all of Asia, Europe and most of the Pacific area were at war, with tens of millions of combatants, that's not surprising.
To construe WWII with Bush's War on Terrorism is the same as not knowing the difference between a basketball and a peanut.

"Truman finished that war and started one in Korea, North Korea never attacked us. From1950-1953, 55,000 lives were lost, an average of 18,333 per year."

This is also wrong: The Korean War started when the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, invading South Korea. We had a treaty with South Korea at the time; any attack on South Korean soil was tantamount to an attack on the United States.
The United Nations ordered North Korea to withdraw, they refused, and Truman, honoring both our treaty with South Korea and our commitment to the UN, sent US troops to South Korea as part of an international peacekeeping force, after the US Congress passed a resolution enabling him to send in US military forces.
Truman acted only after he had received permission from the UN Security Council authorizing the use of force, something Bush did not have prior to his invasion of Iraq.
So, Truman did not 'start a war' in Korea.
[The source for this information is the Encyclopedia of American Facts & Dates, 8th Edition, published by Harper & Row.]

"John F. Kennedy started the Vietnam conflict in 1962. Vietnam never attacked us. History might show Eisenhower committed the troops and Kennedy was honoring that commitment."

The third sentence invalidates the first; American involvement in Vietnam began during the Eisenhower Administration, after the French withdrew following their defeat at Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954. Ike sent in US 'advisors' and air support who participated in combat in Vietnam before Kennedy was president.

"Johnson turned Vietnam into a quagmire. From 1965-1975, 58,000 lives were lost, an average of 5,800 per year."

Johnson did indeed increase troop strength and American involvement in the Vietnam War, but he left office in 1968, and Nixon, who promised 'peace with honor' during the 1968 presidential campaign, expanded the war and bombed Laos and Cambodia, thereby extending combat and casualties to two countries with tangential ties to Ho Chi Minh's regime in North Vietnam. Millions of innocent Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian citizens were killed, directly or indirectly, as a result of this action.
Here's another interesting story that has surfaced since then: In October of 1968, Nixon dispatched his future Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to the Paris Peace Talks to make an illegal back-channel deal with the North Vietnamese.
The official US government negotiators were on the brink of a peace agreement with the North, and Nixon was afraid that, if the war ended in Vietnam, his Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey would get the credit and win the election, so he sent Kissinger to tell the North Vietnamese that if they waited until after Nixon was elected, he would make them a better deal.
They stupidly trusted Nixon, and the Paris Peace Talks ground to a halt. Of course Nixon, following the election, reneged on his promise to the North Vietnamese and kept the war going.
Do I need to mention here that it is illegal for a private citizen, such as Nixon was at the time, to negotiate with foreign governments without the approval of Congress, especially simply to increase their chances of winning an election?

"Clinton went to war in Bosnia without UN consent, Bosnia never attacked us. He was offered Osama bin Laden's head on a platter three times by Sudan and did nothing. Osama has attacked us on multiple occasions."

To the last first: Clinton denies he was ever offered Osama bin Laden at any time; so far, I have heard from neocons he was offered Osama once, twice and, now, three times. If you have any hard evidence that he was offered Osama at any time, and I don't mean some Rush Limbaugh OxyContin fantasy, present it, or stop making this claim.
We do know that Clinton ordered a missile strike on an Al-Qaeda training camp in northern Afghanistan in an attempt to assassinate the terrorist leader; George W. Bush, with the entire nation of Afghanistan under his control in 2002, couldn't find bin Laden.
As far as Bosnia is concerned, not one American soldier died in that war and, according to the World Almanac and Book of Facts, both the United Nations and NATO were involved in peacekeeping efforts in the former Yugoslavia as early as 1992, before Clinton took office.
In December of 1995, the US brokered a peace agreement between Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia called the Dayton Accords. NATO troops, which included US forces, were charged with implementing the agreement, with the blessing of the UN.
So, once again, this neocon accusation is dead wrong; Clinton did have UN consent.

"In the two years since terrorists attacked us, President Bush has liberated two countries, crushed the Taliban, crippled al-Qaida, put nuclear inspectors in Lybia [sic], Iran and North Korea without firing a shot, and captured a terrorist who slaughtered 300,000 of his own people. We lost 600 soldiers, an average of 300 a year. Bush did all this abroad while not allowing another terrorist attack at home."


A regular feast of error and half-truth! Let's take these one-by-one: Iraq is not 'liberated' as of yet, that issue is still in doubt; in Afghanistan, the warlords control most of the country and the Taliban is on the rise again; Al-Qaeda enlistment is up around the world, thanks to the Iraq war; the nuclear inspectors in Iran, North Korea and Libya were put there by the UN, not George Bush, and they were there before Bush became president; the only connection to international terrorism by Saddam Hussein was giving $20,000 checks to the families of suicide bombers in Israel, and there was no Iraq connection to Al-Qaeda, nor any other global terrorist organization, ever established.
Did Saddam kill 300,000 of his own people? It's hard to say: certainly he killed many, but in those mass graves Bush likes to talk about, some of the bodies have been proven to be victims of our bombing raids during the first Gulf War, so the exact number of Saddam's victims are not yet known.
By the way, we have lost over 900 in the past year [2004] just in Iraq, not an average of 300, as you claim.
[Update: We have lost over 2,700 troops in Iraq since March, 2003, an average of nearly 900 per year.]
Yes, it's true that, up to now, there has not been a major terrorist attack on our soil since 9/11, but the number of terrorist attacks worldwide have increased, and the Bush Administration has been promising us that another domestic attack is on the way and they are apparently powerless to stop it.
Which brings up this question: Why are we spending half a trillion dollars for defense every year, only to have the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, and the head of Homeland Security guarantee us there will be another devastating attack within our borders?
We could get that kind of dismal advice for considerably less, I suspect.
(Update: For political reasons, the Bush Administration has stopped promising another terrorist attack since this was written.)

"Worst president in history?"

Yes, and here are a few reasons why:
-- He has violated his oath of office to uphold the Constitution by illegally imprisoning two American citizens (Hamdi and Padilla) without access to a lawyer, a speedy trial by jury, or the right to be confronted by witnesses against them, among other things. (Read the Bill of Rights, Amendments V, VI, VII, VIII.)
In doing so, Bush has not only violated his oath, he has also illegally usurped the power of the Congress; only Congress and the States have a right to alter the Constitution, and Congress has no power to invest the president with any powers not specifically granted to him by the Constitution without an amendment.
This, alone, is a high crime; denying a citizen his or her rights is one of the most serious crimes a president can commit, and punishable by impeachment.
-- Members of Bush's White House staff leaked the name of a covert CIA agent to the press for political reasons, endangering her, her family, her contacts, and US intelligence operations abroad. This is serious; this is treason.
Commander-in-Chief Bush didn't seem to be worried about it though; instead of turning the White House upside down to search for the leaker/leakers, making it a top priority, the only action he took is to hire a private lawyer to protect him should he be accused of any wrongdoing.
-- Bush is the first president to pre-emptively invade a country. US policy since its inception has been not to instigate wars without direct provocation, not to fire the first shot; Bush, by invading Iraq, has changed that, and for, as it turns out, terrible reasons. This gross incompetence, which led to Americans being killed and wounded, far exceeds the ineptitude of any president in our history.
-- Bush has promoted the interests of global corporations over the average citizen, leading to our jobs being sent overseas, enhancing the profits of multi-national corporations while destroying the lives of our people. This is reprehensible, and also a violation of his oath of office to protect the US from enemies foreign and domestic; economic predators and the dismantling of our standard of living are ultimately more of an enemy than terrorists to the future health and prosperity of our nation.
-- Bush is the first president to be illegally appointed to the presidency by the Supreme Court. If you doubt this, read the Constitution; the Supreme Court has no right under law to determine the fate of an election; that right is reserved to the voters, the Electoral College and the Congress. Yet Bush accepted the presidency under a cloud, rather than making sure his election was legal.
If this isn't enough, there are many more examples of why Bush is the worst president in our history.
(Update: Since this was written, Bush has used signing statements to avoid following the laws passed by Congress, has just signed a bill making it legal for him to declare anyone, including American citizens, 'unlawful enemy combatants' and suspend their Constitutional rights, and has authorized the use of torture which violates international treaties signed by the United States, another flagrant abuse of his oath of office to uphold the Constitution.)

"The Democrats are complaining about how long the war is taking, but it took less time to take Iraq than it took Janet Reno to take the Branch Davidian compound. That was a 51day operation."

American troops are still fighting in Iraq, so this is wrong as well; we have occupied the country, but the war is not over. [Update: In fact, now it's become a bloody civil war.]

"We've been looking for evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq for less time than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records."

This isn't true, either; UN inspection teams have been in and out of Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War in 1992, and two different Bush-appointed US inspection teams have failed to find any WMD.

"It took less time for the 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines to destroy the Medina Republican Guard than it took Teddy Kennedy to call the police after his Oldsmobile sank at Chappaquiddick."

Unfortunately, we'll never know if anyone was killed or injured as a result of George W. Bush's drunken-driving episodes since his records have been sealed from public view. And, as history has proven, it really doesn't matter how quickly we destroyed the Medina Republican Guard.

"It took less time to take Iraq than it took to count the votes in Florida."

Catch up on the news; the war in Iraq is hardly over.
One final thing: Neocons, be fair and balanced: Read back through this and replace Bush's name with Clinton's and then see how you feel about his presidency.
====================
New GOP TV Programming for October

- Macaca and Me
George Allen stars as 'Neck,' a wacky Californian from an upper-middle-class family transplanted to the rustic Virginia outback. Laugh along as George displays Confederate flags, ties lynch ropes, chews tobacco, leaves a dead deer head on a black family's property, and invents new racial slurs in an effort to win the hearts of the locals. If you liked "Hee Haw" and "Amos 'n' Andy," you'll love "Macaca and Me"!

- Maf54 - Where Are You?
Madcap hijinks abound as the Republican 'Animal House' Leadership chases 'Screwy' (Mark Foley) around trying to quietly make him quit sending lewd e-mails and IMs to the young 'uns in the Congressional Page program. Starring Denny Hastert as 'Flubber,' John Boehner as 'Boner' and Tom Reynolds as 'Bunghole.'

- All in the Family Business
You'll laugh and you'll cry, but mostly cry, at this stirring saga of life in an American crime family as Don Bandar (George Bush, Sr.) sends in his man Jimmy the Fixer (James Baker III) to set son Meathead (George Bush, Jr. ) straight on his war with the Iraq Gang. Also starring Don Rumsfeld as The Artful Dodger.

- I Love Looneys
If you're a conservative Christian, the laughs are on you as Satan's Apprentice Mackie V. (Karl Rove) plots and schemes to get you out to vote for people who contemptuously think you're nuts. Also starring Dick Cheney as the Antichrist.

- Don't Leave It to Beaver!
Prominent gay Republicans get together to chat about rank hypocrisy and charming closet decorations. Hosted by Ken Mehlman with Dave Dreier as 'Poofer,' Rush Limbaugh as 'Mrs. Beardsley' and Arnold Schwarzenegger as 'Muscles the Bi-Boy.'

- Introduction to Great American Fiction
Join host George W. Bush in examining some of the greatest works of fiction in the English language. In the first episode, Mr. Bush has his assistant Dan Bartlett read from the White House Iraq Group's report on Saddam Hussein's WMD (PNAC Publications, 2002). Later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice comments on highlights of her 9/11 Commission testimony and Mary Matalin reads from the speeches of Dick Cheney.