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June 30, 2005

Brzezinski Comments On President Bush's June 28 Fiction

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the U.S. national security adviser during the Carter Administration, compared President George W. Bush's July 28, 2005 address to the nation to "a novelist who wishes to inject verisimilitude into his fiction." Writing in the June 30, 2005 issue of The Financial Times of London, he said:

George W. Bush, US president, began his speech on Iraq with a reference to a historical fact all too tragically well known to his audience. The evocation of the monstrous crime of September 11 2001 served as his introduction to the spin that followed: that Iraq was complicit in 9/11 and thus, in effect, attacked the US; that the US had no choice but to defend itself against Iraq's aggression; and, finally, that if America does not fight terrorists in Iraq, they will swarm across the ocean to attack America.

Since fiction is not ruled by the same standards as history, Mr Bush was under no obligation to refer to his own earlier certitude about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (or, rather, to their embarrassing absence), or to the inept sequel of the initially successful US military campaign; or to the fact that the occupation of Iraq is turning it into a huge recruitment centre for terrorists. "Similarly," Mr.Brzezinski added, "there was no need to deal with the perplexing fact that the Iraqi insurgency does not appear to be in its last throes, or with the complex choices that the US now confronts."

Financial Times subscribers can read "Bush's hollow fiction of Iraq war" for more of Mr. Brzezinski's analysis.

Posted by Munir Umrani at June 30, 2005 09:57 PM

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