Oh please, there he goes again. Bush Compares Today’s Wars to World War II Efforts [Associated Press]. Once again, President Bush is analogizing between the quagmire of Iraq and the Marshall Plan.
Ah, W, you seem to forget that those nations were Western, industrialized and had been beaten into "unconditional surrender." Yes, Iraq attacked the Gulf emirates, Iran and the Kurds, but it is hardly the warmongering country Japan was in WWII and certainly nothing like the genocidal psychopaths of Nazi Germany. There is no place in the Islamic Middle East where US-style democracy has taken hold — except perhaps Israel — and the economic structures never existed, and likely never will, to support the middle class which powered the post-war re-emergence of Japan and Germany.
It is not "supporting the troops" to paint then as the vanguard of a democracy army, proselytizing Western values in a land that for 1,000 years has rejected everything Christian and Western. Instead, it’s another lie to obscure the real sacrifices America and its young men are making, for no political or foreign policy reason. The President should be ashamed of himself, but is so myopic he fails to realize this is precisely the Democratic, Wilsonian-style "nation-building" the Republican party, and W himself, have railed against for decades.