Bush Plays Dominos

President Bush spoke from the Oval Office tonight on the fifth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11/01. Here is part of a recap from the New York Times:

If we do not defeat these enemies now,” Mr. Bush said, “we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.”

The address capped a week of speeches in which Mr. Bush tried to lay out his best case for the war in Iraq by defining it as a crucial front in the war on terror, while portraying the broader struggle as a natural successor to World War II and the Cold War in defining the place of the United States in the world.

Even by the standards of his latest round of speeches, Mr. Bush’s language was particularly forceful, even ominous, with warnings of a radical Islamic network that was “determined to bring death and suffering to our homes.”

Bush wants to play dominos, just like one of our first cold-war Presidents, Eisenhower, with just about the same logic—see if you can pick out the inconsistencies, or how history went vs. how our leaders told us how it would go:

First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production
of materials that the world needs.

Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world. Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

Now, with respect to the first one, two of the items from this particular area that the world uses are tin and tungsten. They are very important. There are others, of course, the rubber plantations and so on.

Then with respect to more people passing under this domination, Asia, after all, has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship, and we simply can't afford greater losses.

But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people.

Finally, the geographical position achieved thereby does many things. It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of the Philippines and to the southward; it moves in to threaten Australia and New Zealand.

It takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go -- that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live.

So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world. --News Conference of April 7, 1954

So the choice here is, give up tin and tungsten, or kiss Australia goodbye?

After 50 years, in a time of crisis, we the people are being fed the same theory -- dominos falling -- the name of which we had to learn in high school 40 years ago. It was a mistake then, a game of smoke and mirrors to lull the citizens into falling lockstep in line behind the hairbrained leadership for the sake of the powerful interests--whoever tin and tungsten was benefitting at that time.

I truly trust our troops in Iraq are kept safe, until they get to come home, and soon! The oil windfall never panned out anyway, and the manpower could come in handy to overcome the terrorist cells in the US, not to mention in all the other countries the world over. And who plays dominos anymore?