Not a Republican war?

Tyrrell: Not just a Republican war

This is wrong and outrageous on so many levels. Let me count some of them:

1) American soil was attacked in the US embassy bombings in east Africa. Most Republicans insisted the real threat to the United States was Monica Lewinsky, and that Clinton and the Democrats were involved in a "wag the dog" strategy to distract America with a phony Islamic threat.

2) It is not "a" war. Iraq has absolutely NOTHING to do with September 11. For the first time in American history we are at two wars at once. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, famously said "one war at a time" when one of his cabinet officers suggested starting a second war to convince the seceding southern states to come back in the Civil War. We have to explain to people that Iraq was the "wag the dog" distraction from our real national security business.

3) Who made it a Republican war? Who politicized it by refusing to cooperate with Democrats? Who used national security for partisan political gain at the expense of the national interest? Who outed a CIA agent to take petty revenge on her husband? Who ignored the professional advice of non-political generals? Who invaded Iraq for no real reason and then tried to use the Iraq invasion for partisan political ends?

If the Iraq war, or even the war against Al-Qa'ida, is a Republican war (and don't forget that the latter started under Clinton and most Republicans refused to get on board) Republicans have no one to blame but themselves for their mismanagement. Democrats were not the ones who let bin Ladin get away, not the ones who lied America into an unrelated war that prevents us from dealing with our real enemies, not the ones alienating moderate Muslims, and not the ones who have been mismanaging the wars America finds itself fighting, one thrust upon us and one Bush chose.

We have to get the word out. Real information about these two wars has to reach the American people, so that articles like this one will no longer be taken seriously, and Tyrrell will be scoffed off of CNN. I have only dealt with the obvious errors here, but Americans in general need a crash course on the Islamic world and how the Bush regime is playing into the hands of our enemies. We don't need more lies about how Democrats are umpatriotic. Republicans have been losing the war. If Lincoln's administration had done this badly we would be reading about President McClellan in our American history books.