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MUST READ TOO: “Propaganda Redux” - by Ion Mihai Pacepa

In addition to the other must read I mentioned today in my J-Lines…

I can’t possibly do this brilliant editorial the justice it deserves by quoting bits of it, but be that as it may, here are some in order to entice you.  You must read this whole editorial (four-minute-read).

Propaganda Redux

Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America’s enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.

During last week’s two-day summit, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thanked President Bush for leading the global war on terror. Mr. Brown acknowledged “the debt the world owes to the U.S. for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism” and vowed to follow Winston Churchill’s lead and make Britain’s ties with America even stronger.

Mr. Brown’s statements elicited anger from many of Mr. Bush’s domestic detractors, who claim the president concocted the war on terror for personal gain. But as someone who escaped from communist Romania—with two death sentences on his head—in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a “liar,” a “deceiver” and a “fraud.”

[…]

But in September 2002, a German cabinet minister, Herta Dauebler-Gmelin, had the nerve to compare Mr. Bush to Hitler. In one post-Iraq-war poll 40% of Canada’s teenagers called the U.S. “evil,” and even before the fall of Saddam 57% of Greeks answered “neither” when asked which country was more democratic, the U.S. or Iraq.

Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler—as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink.

[…]

Now we are again at war. It is not the president’s war. It is America’s war, authorized by 296 House members and 76 senators. I do not intend to join the armchair experts on the Iraq war. I do not know how we should handle this war, and they don’t know either. But I do know that if America’s political leaders, Democrat and Republican, join together as they did during World War II, America will win. Otherwise, terrorism will win. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi predicted just before being killed: “We fight today in Iraq, tomorrow in the land of the Holy Places, and after there in the West.”

My Two Cents’ Worth:

Since I haven’t done so for a few weeks, let me reiterate my position on the Iraq war, which I used to do with such frequency that even I got bored reading it:  I fully support the Iraq war.  No, not just the troops, the war.  The mission.  I always thought, and I think this is true now more than ever, that Canada should be right in the thick of it with thousands of troops and all our, well, rather pathetic military mini-might. 

I don’t care how unpopular that war is, or becomes.  I don’t care who walks away from it and starts denouncing it as “a mistake”, like the brilliant professor Iggy Ignatieff, the failed Liberal leadership contender, ditherer, and arrogant, bloviating ass, who recently found it politically expedient to pretend he made a mistake in supporting it.  I wouldn’t care if Albert Einstein talked it down.  I don’t care if President Bush walks away from it—I would still support it. It was and is the right thing to do.  And America—and the west—must win in Iraq and of course the whole broader war on radical Islamists and jihadist terrorists. 

And staying in Afghanistan in full fighting force mode until that war is completely won is an absolute no-brainer.  Those who question it for political gain—politicians, media, academics, and anyone else—are simply stupid.

 

Joel Johannesen
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