" WE'RE FIGHTING THE STRAWMEN HERE, SO WE DON'T HAVE TO FIGHT THEM OVERSEAS"

From Rumsfailed's speech in Salt Lake City : ❖ " Indeed, that year -- 1919 -- turned out to be one of those pivotal junctures in modern history -- with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations -- a treaty and an organization intended to make future wars unnecessary and obsolete." *The Treaty of Versailles is widely reguarded as one of the causes of World War II. *The United States didn't join the League of Nations. " We find ourselves in a strange time: ❖When a database search of America’s leading newspapers turns up 10 times as many mentions of one of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib who was punished for misconduct, than mentions of Sergeant First Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the Global War on Terror; ❖When a senior editor at Newsweek disparagingly refers to the brave volunteers in our Armed Forces as a “mercenary army”; ❖When the former head of CNN accuses the American military of deliberately targeting journalists and the former CNN Baghdad bureau chief admits he concealed reports of Saddam Hussein’s crimes when he was in power so CNN could stay in Iraq; and ❖It is a time when Amnesty International disgracefully refers to the military facility at Guantanamo Bay, which holds terrorists who have vowed to kill Americans and which is arguably the best run and most scrutinized detention facility in the history of warfare, as “the gulag of our times.” *Abu Ghraib is one of the great blunders of the invasion of Iraq, and was the result of the lack of training & planning, and failure to understand the conflict we were fighting there. *I'll let Newsweek defend themselves.......Although the out sourcing of our military, and 20,000 private security contractors running around Iraq comes to mind. *I'll let CNN defend themselves......If they can. *Guantanamo Bay only got better, because what was going on there got exposed to the light of day. ❖You know from experience that in every war there have been mistakes and setbacks and casualties. War is, as Clemenceau said, a “series of catastrophes that results in victory.” *From Senator Jack Reed.....“no one has misread history more” than Mr. Rumsfeld. The LA Times continued: ' He continued, "Can we truly afford to believe that, somehow or someway, vicious extremists could be appeased?" ' Tomorrow Dick Cheney speaks to the NRA on....." Hunter Safety " Straw Man from Think Progress.