Quote of the Day

"What stunned me [during the President's address Monday night] was that instead, with just a few chilling sentences, Bush painted a portrait of war without end, amen. 'The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict,' Bush declared. 'It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation. Our nation is being tested in a way that we have not since the start of the Cold War.'

Think about that presidential prediction. Bush is saying that 50 or 60 years from now, when today's children are worried about cosmetic surgery and their retirement homes, we will still be on the battlements worldwide against an enemy whom we might call al-Qaida, the terrorists, violent Islamic radicals, the evildoers or, simply, them. This is not merely a war like Vietnam that will come to an abject end after it destroys two presidencies. No, in the Bush version of the future, a dystopian epic that might be called 'It's an Awful Life,' peace is a blessed oasis that might not be reached until the era of 'a bridge to the 22nd century.'

Equally hyperbolic is the president's claim that the nation's current struggle represents a time of testing unmatched since the days of the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills in elementary schools. Do Bush and his advisors seriously believe that al-Qaida, scattered terrorist cells and the last-throes dead-enders in Iraq constitute a threat graver than the Cuban Missile Crisis?...

...As the president said, 'We are now in the early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom.' He was, of course, trying to fit World War II and Cold War imagery into a modern context. But Bush could have also been describing the long, twilight struggle here at home between the democratic values of Athens and the militaristic ethos of Sparta."
--Walter Shapiro, on the 'never-ending war'