One of the things that disturbed me most about the President’s press conference yesterday is the outright fearmongering that he engaged in throughout. Obviously, September 11, 2001 was invoked when he talked about the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but he went on to refer to it many more times in reference to going to war with Iraq, by basically stating that going to war with Iraq would prevent future attacks of that kind. He also bluntly preyed upon our fears with this statement:

We are determined to confront threats wherever they arise. I will not leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons.

If you break that second sentence down, it states unequivocally that we are currently at the mercy of Saddam Hussein. Think about that for a minute. Right now, we have hundreds of thousands of troops on the border of Iraq, and we use the excuse of patrolling the no fly zones to bomb targets in Iraq with impunity and have been doing so for years. We have subjected Iraq to brutal economic sanctions for over a decade. Yet our President would have us believe that we are at the mercy of Iraq. Does that make any sense to you? Further consider how well people who have relied upon Saddam Hussein’s mercy have fared in the past. The real question in my mind is whether Bush believes this himself or whether it’s just a bill of goods he’s trying to sell the rest of us.