GOT FEAR? NO? NEITHER DO MOST AMERICANS

BUSH FEAR MONGERING ON IRAQ WAR HAS LOST ITS POWER THROUGH OVERPLAY

Interesting column here by Philip Gaitley on why Bush Co can't rely on the War On Iraq to unite the country anymore.

Here's the gist of it :

With the fifth anniversary of 9/11 and a midterm election coming up, the Bush gang is still trafficking in fear, which is about all they have left. But polls show that a majority of Americans are on to their game. The public no longer believes the invasion of Iraq has made us safer or that it was related to the fight against terrorism.

The war is going miserably in Iraq. And it's not going that well on the home front, either. Public support for the war is collapsing, and even some Republican hawks are beginning to distance themselves from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld quagmire in Iraq.

Bush said we would be fighting terrorists "in the streets of our own cities" if we withdrew from Iraq without victory...the president suggested they fail to see the war as part of the larger struggle against terrorists he called the "successors to fascists, to Nazis, to communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century."

"The war we fight today is more than a military conflict," Bush said. "It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century."

If Bush really believes the stakes in Iraq are as high as they were in World War II, he should mobilize the nation and call for sacrifice. He should institute a military draft and repeal tax cuts to pay for the long and costly struggle against Islamic terrorists. And he should replace Rumsfeld with a defense secretary who is competent in the business of waging war.

Read the whole column here.