Dear Rummy

by Eric Margolis

I know the President’s new buzzword is "Islamofascist." It focus-groups well in the Bible Belt and Miami. But I’m deeply disappointed you would stoop to such cheap, insulting, Dr. Goebbels-style propaganda.

As an educated man, you know fascism is a phenomena of western industrial states in which racists and militarists join hands with conservative parties and the military industrial complex to form the fascist, corporate state.

Fascism is unknown in the Muslim World. Mussolini and Hitler were Christians. The real closet fascists are in North America. "Islamofacist" is as meaningless as that favored term of anti-Semites, "Judeo-Nazi."

Brainless slogans like "stay the course," and "we won’t cut and run" bring applause at Legion conventions, but they are a recipe for military defeat. It was precisely Hitler’s monomaniacal refusal to allow his 6^th Army to retreat from encirclement at Stalingrad that brought Germany its greatest defeat.

Your $300 billion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are going nowhere. As a Vietnam-era vet who enlisted in wartime to serve his country, I can tell you that pulling out of Vietnam, however painful and humiliating at the time, was also absolutely the right decision.

By refusing to withdraw from the lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, what you are doing is sacrificing soldier’s lives, and $6.5–7 billion a month, to save the skins of your political masters who lack the courage and patriotism to admit the failure of their foolish imperial dreams.

Forget WWII and face facts. The US is not fighting Hitler, George Bush is no Winston Churchill, and Muslims are not Nazis in turbans.