Hitler V Lenin?Follow

US PRESIDENT George W. Bush has branded Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a tyrant and compared the Tehran leaders to al-Qa'ida terrorists who cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
In a speech before the Military Officers Association of America, Mr Bush abandoned his practice of not mentioning Osama bin Laden, repeatedly quoting the al-Qa'ida leader to highlight the group's "totalitarian" aims, which he said recalled the evil ambitions of Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler.

He said al-Qa'ida wanted to transform Iraq into the capital of an Islamic caliphate spanning much of the globe, and that Shia Muslim extremists, including the leaders of Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, had similar goals.

"Like al-Qa'ida and the Sunni extremists, the Iranian regime has clear aims," he said.

"They want to drive America out of the region, to destroy Israel, and to dominate the broader Middle East.

"America will not bow down to tyrants," Mr Bush said in the second of a series of election-year speeches defending his handling of the war on terrorism and Iraq.

"The world's free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon."

Last night Dr Ahmadinejad hit back at Mr Bush, saying the President was "nothing" compared to the will of God.

"I am telling (Mr Bush) that all the world is threatening you since the general path that the world is taking is towards worshipping God and divinity," he told a conference ahead of a major festival on Saturday marking the birth of the "hidden" 12th Shia Imam Mahdi.

"This massive stream is moving and you are nothing in comparison to God's will."

The US President said Shia extremists had done something al-Qa'ida could only dream of doing - taking over Iran in 1979 and "subjugating its proud people to a regime of tyranny, and using that nation's resources to fund the spread of terror and to pursue their radical agenda".

"The Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies have demonstrated their willingness to kill Americans, and now the Iranian regime is pursuing nuclear weapons," he said.

In the speech and an updated national security strategy report on combating terrorism, Mr Bush renewed a push to bolster support among Americans weary of the war in Iraq by portraying the conflict as part of a more expansive war on terrorism.

White House officials denied the President's security report and speech were driven by election-year politics - in which Mr Bush is accusing Democrats of being soft on terrorism - and said the report had been the product of months of work.

But the remarks came less than a week before the nation observes the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and two months before mid-term elections in which the Bush administration's national security strategy and competence loom as pivotal questions.

"Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?" Mr Bush said, adding that at the White House, "we're taking the words of the enemy seriously".

He said Islamic radicals would like to obtain nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction to "blackmail the free world and spread their ideologies of hate and raise a mortal threat to the American people". "If we allow them to do this, if we retreat from Iraq, if we don't uphold our duty to support those who are desirous to live in liberty, then 50 years from now, history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity and demand to know why we did not act," Mr Bush said.

"I'm not going to allow this to happen, and no future American president can allow it either."

The updated White House counter-terrorism strategy outlined yesterday in a 23-page report says significant progress has been made against a degraded but still dangerous al-Qa'ida network, but states: "The enemy we face today in the war on terror is not the same enemy we faced on September 11. Our effective counter-terrorist efforts in part have forced the terrorists to evolve."

AP, AFP, Reuters

Lenin was following a spin-off branch of socialism (actually led to the split of socialism in 1917) called "communism".

Lenin was following a spin-off branch of socialism (actually led to the split of socialism in 1917) called "communism".

While Bush's statement would have fit better if he'd used Stalin instead of Lenin, I think he (his communication staff actually) decided to use Lenin instead because the point is to look past the "evilness" of the indivual and look at the danger represented by the movement itself. The point is to show that things that may not seem so bad *today* can become disasters down the road if they aren't delt with.

You went to such great lengths to try and justify the comment made by Bush, reading so far between the lines that you were practically reading a different page. This begs the question whether you were defending it because you actually agree with Bush, or because you feel obliged to justify anything that he happens to say.

You're missing the forest for the trees. My whole point was that the reason Bush lists Lenin instead of Stalin is to make the observation that horrible consequences can result as a direct consequence of well-intentioned causes.

He's not being obscure at all. Everyone knows that while Stalin was the super-evil bad guy of the Soviet Union, Lenin was the revolutionary that created the soviet state. I don't think it's a stretch at all to assume that people will "get" the idea that you need to fight against bad ideas and bad movements *before* they become monolithically powerful and evil.

That's why you remove Saddam from power *before* he rebuilds his WMDs and hands them to terrorists to use against us.

That's why you should deal with North Korea *before* they develop a nuke (but thanks to Clinton, we can't do that now).

In the early 1990s, the CIA concluded that North Korea had effectively joined the nuclear club by building one or possibly two weapons from plutonium it produced before 1992.
[...]
CIA, untitled estimate provided to Congress, November 19, 2002. According to the estimate, "The U.S. has been concerned about North Korea's desire for nuclear weapons and has assessed since the early 1990s that the North has one or possibly two weapons using plutonium it produced prior to 1992."

Thats one thing about Clinton I suppose. We know he wasn't impotent.

Please tell me that people still don't think that Lenin is evil???
He was a revolutionary who thought he was overthrowing a corrupt system to allow the people to live a freer and more prosperous life.

In fact rather than comparing Lenin to Hitler, he has closer ties to George Washington who was also fighting against a corrupt monarch.

In all the women he was with it was always the same, he got sucked off and never did it normal.

I understand your point perfectly. I just don't think that Bush meant anything of the sort. You see if he wanted to make a statement about the fact that "horrible consequences can result as a direct consequence of well-intentioned causes", then why would he bring up Hitler as part of the same example.

Not really the greatest way to make such a point is it. I am sure Hitler was not always as screwed up as he turned out to be (although having read Mien Kampf It is quite a stretch), and I am sure that he only behaved the way he did, in the early days anyway, because he thought what he was doing was right. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. But irrespective of Hitler’s early intentions he has become, and rightly so, the image of the very worst things politics can achieve. As has Stalin. So why avoid Stalin in an effort to illustrate noble ideas gone wrong and then mention Hitler?

I thought that we went to war with them because we thought they already had them.....

Clinton was president from 2001-2005 when Korea finally announced it had a nuclear weapon? Who knew?

Or are you saying that Bush spent those four years utterly impotent and unable to do anything about Korea?