Bush Offers Saudis Tongue for Oil

Posted by Attaturk, Firedoglake at 4:20 AM on January 15, 2008.

While CNN this morning has a headline implying that Bush is offering tongue to the Saudi King to get oil prices down, there is one other historical piece of illogic that has too often shaped U.S. foreign policy and is clearly winning what little mind George Bush has.

It's always Munich 1938 for Bush and his kind and they are always Churchill and the rest of us are always Chamberlain. Someone else, whatever the convenient target is, is Hitler.

For years, it was the Soviets. And though they had their own criminalities they could be excoriated with, it was easy to call anyone in favor of dealing with them as an "Appeaser"; then it was Mao; then it was Ho Chi Minh; Castro; Khomeini and Iran; the Sandinistas; Saddam; Chavez; and now it is back to Iran again. So many faux Hitlers so little facts.

Poor Chamberlain, let his foolish ghost rest in peace, and stop making the most powerful country on earth, the U.S., into the Sudetenland.

But time after time the rhetoric goes there. And again on his latest awkward trip overseas, the alleged history major Bush and his black and white, pop history, version of the world came on full bore and should scare us shitless.

There are two key moments when this incredibly insipid and dangerous predeliction was exposed and I am hardly the first one to note it.

First, Bush brings up the thought to Condi Rice "we should have bombed Auschwitz" as if this thought never occurred and was never debated at during the Second World War. There are, of course, a myriad number of reasons this did not occur, from the fact it would be ineffective -- the Germans weren't above killing people in mass shootings (Baba Yar ring a bell?) to the fact it would have been incredibly difficult for much of the war to pull off. Whether it was the camp itself or railways such bombing by B-24s or B-17s would have been quite difficult, risky, and likely ineffective. It is a debate that has been engaged in countless times, but ultimately in the manner in which Bush made it, comes down as an accusation at Franklin Roosevelt and the usually sainted Churchill (or even Eisenhower) who as war leaders Bush is a tragically laughable shadow.

Second, Bush's even more worrisome and bizarre statement to Ehud Olmert (who is even less popular in Israel than Bush is here) that the President of the United States is disowning his own intelligence services for that of Israel's because the latter gives him the Iranian intelligence he WANTS to believe -- that Iran equals Nazi Germany 1938 (or in Jonah Goldberg's World: Berkeley, California 2008).

Added together, with just over one year left in his presidency, with the moronic yelps of how "victory" has been achieved in Iraq (victory apparently then takes at least a decade off), one starts to realize that Bush has resurrecting Chamberlain's ghost one more time and Iran is the Rail Depot to Auschwitz of his fevered dreams.

Tagged as: iran, bush, middle east, saudi arabia, rice, nazi germany, world war 2

Attaturk is a regular blogger for FireDogLake