Iraqi Insurgent Group Was Behind 9/11 Attacks, Bush Announces

Bush is getting really desperate now.

President Bush equated the war in Iraq on Wednesday with the U.S. war for independence. Like those revolutionaries who "dropped their pitchforks and picked up their muskets to fight for liberty," Bush said, American soldiers were also fighting "a new and unprecedented war" to protect U.S. freedom.

In a reprise of speeches he delivered throughout the 2006 congressional campaign, the president said the threat that emerged on Sept. 11, 2001, remained today and "a major enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that dared attack the United States on that fateful day."

Bush knows goddamn good and well that "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is the adopted name of an Iraqi insurgent group (albeit with foreign fighters) and is not Osama Bin Laden's "Al Qaeda" (9/11), yet he is intentionally conflating the two for domestic propaganda purposes.

A security expert I know in Washington puts it this way: "If a group of Iraq insurgents had taken the name "The Boy Scouts of America" instead of "Al Qaeda in Iraq", I doubt that the president would be claiming that the Boy Scouts of America were behind attacks on our soldiers over there."

It wouldn't be as easy to blame them for 9/11, either.

Also, more fearmongering from the Crim-in Chief:

In an Independence Day address before members of the National Guard and their families, the president again painted a dire portrait of the consequences of pulling out of Iraq, asserting as he has before that "terrorists and extremists" would try to strike inside the United States.

"If we were to quit Iraq before the job is done, the terrorists we are fighting would not declare victory and lay down their arms. They would follow us here, home," Bush told a crowd of about 1,000 gathered at a West Virginia Air National Guard maintenance hangar.

Bush's presidency has always relied upon the ignorance of the American people. It has been a good bet so far.

But as when someone relies too much upon any type of artifice, Bush has lost the perspective necessary to avoid chronically pandering to the lowest common denominator.