OpinionJournal - Extra: "Just Like Stalingrad
If Bush is another Hitler, what words are left to describe Hitler?
According to Sidney Blumenthal, a onetime adviser to president Bill Clinton who now writes a column for Britain's Guardian newspaper, President Bush today runs 'what is in effect a gulag,' stretching 'from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantanamo to secret CIA prisons around the world.' Mr. Blumenthal says 'there has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union.'
In another column, Mr. Blumenthal compares the April death toll for American soldiers in Iraq to the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Mr. Bush's 'splendid little war,' he writes, 'has entered a Stalingrad-like phase of urban siege and house-to-house combat.'
The factual bases for these claims are, first, that the U.S. holds some 10,000 'enemy combatants' prisoner; and second, that 122 U.S. soldiers were killed in action in April.
As I write, I have before me a copy of 'The Black Book of Communism,' which relates that on '1 January 1940 some 1,670,000 prisoners were being held in the 53 groups of corrective work camps and 425 collective work colonies. In addition, the prisons held 200,000 people awaiting trial or a transfer to camp. Finally, the NKVD komandatury were in charge of approximately 1.2 million 'specially displaced people.' '
As for Stalingrad, German deaths between Jan. 10 and Feb. 2, 1943, numbered 100,000, according to British historian John Keegan. And those were just the final agonizing days of a battle that had raged since the previous August.
Mr. Blumenthal is not alone. Al Gore last month accused Mr. Bush of creating 'more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation.' Every single column written by the New York Times' Paul Krugman is an anti-Bush screed; apparently, there isn't anything else worth writing about. A bumper sticker I saw the other day in Manhattan reads: 'If you aren't outraged, you're not paying attention.'
There are two explanations for all this. One is that Mr. Bush really is as bad as Sid, Al and Paul say: the dumbest, most feckless, most fanatical, most incompetent and most calamitous president the nation has ever known. A second is that Sid, Al and Paul are insane..........
There is the situation in Iraq, where the U.S. has lost about 800 soldiers in action over the course of more than a year, as well as several thousand Iraqis. The fact that events have not gone well over the past two months is somehow taken as proof that they've gone disastrously. Yet in the run-up to the war, the German Foreign Ministry was issuing predictions of about two million Iraqi deaths, making the actual Iraqi death a very small percentage of that anticipated total. As for the American rate, the U.S. lost more than 6,000 soldiers in Vietnam in 1966, the year U.S. troop strength there was comparable to what it is now in Iraq. That's about nine times as many fatalities as the U.S. has so far sustained in Iraq."
If Bush is another Hitler, what words are left to describe Hitler?
According to Sidney Blumenthal, a onetime adviser to president Bill Clinton who now writes a column for Britain's Guardian newspaper, President Bush today runs 'what is in effect a gulag,' stretching 'from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantanamo to secret CIA prisons around the world.' Mr. Blumenthal says 'there has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union.'
In another column, Mr. Blumenthal compares the April death toll for American soldiers in Iraq to the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Mr. Bush's 'splendid little war,' he writes, 'has entered a Stalingrad-like phase of urban siege and house-to-house combat.'
The factual bases for these claims are, first, that the U.S. holds some 10,000 'enemy combatants' prisoner; and second, that 122 U.S. soldiers were killed in action in April.
As I write, I have before me a copy of 'The Black Book of Communism,' which relates that on '1 January 1940 some 1,670,000 prisoners were being held in the 53 groups of corrective work camps and 425 collective work colonies. In addition, the prisons held 200,000 people awaiting trial or a transfer to camp. Finally, the NKVD komandatury were in charge of approximately 1.2 million 'specially displaced people.' '
As for Stalingrad, German deaths between Jan. 10 and Feb. 2, 1943, numbered 100,000, according to British historian John Keegan. And those were just the final agonizing days of a battle that had raged since the previous August.
Mr. Blumenthal is not alone. Al Gore last month accused Mr. Bush of creating 'more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation.' Every single column written by the New York Times' Paul Krugman is an anti-Bush screed; apparently, there isn't anything else worth writing about. A bumper sticker I saw the other day in Manhattan reads: 'If you aren't outraged, you're not paying attention.'
There are two explanations for all this. One is that Mr. Bush really is as bad as Sid, Al and Paul say: the dumbest, most feckless, most fanatical, most incompetent and most calamitous president the nation has ever known. A second is that Sid, Al and Paul are insane..........
There is the situation in Iraq, where the U.S. has lost about 800 soldiers in action over the course of more than a year, as well as several thousand Iraqis. The fact that events have not gone well over the past two months is somehow taken as proof that they've gone disastrously. Yet in the run-up to the war, the German Foreign Ministry was issuing predictions of about two million Iraqi deaths, making the actual Iraqi death a very small percentage of that anticipated total. As for the American rate, the U.S. lost more than 6,000 soldiers in Vietnam in 1966, the year U.S. troop strength there was comparable to what it is now in Iraq. That's about nine times as many fatalities as the U.S. has so far sustained in Iraq."
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