Bush urges resolve on Iraq war – Los Angeles Times
West Virginia is a once-reliably Democratic state that for the last two presidential elections has been central to Bush’s victories, and Wednesday marked the fourth Independence Day he has visited the state since taking office.
But even here, where he won repeated rounds of applause in a gigantic hangar just completed for a new detachment of C-5 Galaxy cargo planes, there were hundreds of empty seats behind a towering American flag.
Offering a history lesson on the 231st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence from Britain, Bush said, “We were a small band of freedom-loving patriots taking on the most powerful empire in the world.”
It was not his intent to evoke a comparison to the Iraq war, but some Iraqis who oppose the continued presence of U.S. troops in their country have made similar arguments. In an echo of his own warnings that the fight against terrorism will last years, Bush said that at the start of the fight for independence, “America’s victory was far from certain…. Citizens had to struggle for six more years to finally determine the outcome of the Revolutionary War.”
The “hundreds of empty seats” probably wasn’t too telling – all the military people that were in attendance were probably under orders to be there anyway. Perhaps it was simple miscommunication, as they may have gone on previous numbers of civilian, ticketed, hand-picked guests during the election years. And now there’s simply no point in inviting supernumeraries, perhaps.
Clearly, irony is lost on this Administration and its speechwriters, though. Watch for new graffiti to blossom on the sand-brown walls of Baghdad soon, in English and Arabic:
“We are a small band of freedom-loving patriots taking on the most powerful empire in the world.”
