r.President and Secretary Rumsfeld, can you name any thinking U.S. citizen or member of Congress who advocates cutting off funds to support our troops in Iraq? Nor are there a substantial number of Democrats or Republicans who believe that if we withdraw from Iraq, that would persuade terrorists to change their approach and desist from targeting Americans.
Just last week Mr.Bush suggested that Democrats are telling voters that they will block additional money for continuing the war. That's not so. Can you or Dick Cheney, the Vice President, name a single major Democrat who has proposed doing so?
The President and his surrogates are off and running, launching a campaign aimed at rebuilding support for the war in Iraq and doing so by accusing the voices of opposition to their campaign of appeasing terrorists. This is all centered on the 5th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
And Secretary Don Rumsfeld, in an inflammatory speech, cited passivity toward Nazi Germany prior to World War 2 saying that "many have still not learned history's lessons" and "believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased."
Mr. Secretary, isn't it time that you stepped down - retired? Democrats are as determined as any to continue a sustained battle against terrorism. There is no talk of "appeasement".
Let us not forget that this kind of rhetoric; this kind of campaigning, worked well for the Republicans in 2002. The aim then, and now, is to equate Democratic dissent (in fact all dissent) as tantamount to appeasement.
And this from the Bush administration which talked, the first time around, of harmony and bipartisanship: "I'm a uniter not a divider." Have we ever been more divided.
He's now on his third campaign this year to address public concern and opposition to the on-going conflicts; Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and other places. This time around they are, he says, fighting against "Islamic Fascism". The president has denied that his current effort has anything to do with politics. I don't believe them and I believe that he's as forthright in his stance as he was when he proclaimed "Bring 'em on" and "Mission Accomplished".
In a strong and effective editorial in the Los Angeles Times the editors say "Take the suggestion that critics of Bush's Iraq policy are the moral equivalent of those who refused to stop Hitler. There's a reason why high school debators are warned away from Nazi analogies: They're almost always disproportionate." Those who are opposed to the administration's approach are not Neville Chamberlains.

Even as a critic of Rumsfeld I must agree with his statement that there should be no moral confusion about who is responsible for the horrific violence in Iraq. It isn't the U.S. that is planting car bombs in markets. However, in his August 29th speech he attacked critics of the American war effort in Iraq for "moral and intellectual confusion", lambasted the media for spreading "myths and distortions" about the U.S. military and argued that the west faces a "new type of fascism" in the Middle East. It may play well on the home front in the elections...but speaking of fascism is not the answer to our problems there.