The Assassination of George W. Bush

Mark Almond, a lecturer in modern history at Oriel College Oxford, gives his thoughts on what would happen if President Bush REALLY was assassinated.

He fantasizes about the consequences. It is jaw-droppingly disrespectful, not only of President Bush, but of the American people, especially the hundreds of thousands who have died on foreign soil in the cause of freedom.

Almond writes:

In Death Of A President, which has caused outrage in America and will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this month, the shooting is a starting point for a fictional documentary about what happened next. So what would happen if President Bush was assassinated?

Here, a historian looks to the future — and imagines the terrifying consequences.

Allow me to clarify that: Here, a historian expresses his hatred for President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and his cluelessness regarding the sacrifices Americans have made to free oppressed people.

...The assassination of John Kennedy at the height of the Cold War hadn't led to Armageddon in 1963, so why should things spiral out of control now if a president was murdered? That confident view was shattered as global communications networks froze from overload while transmitting round the world the picture of the 43rd President of the United States slumping forward after being fatally shot in the stomach.

The murder of George W. Bush set off a global crisis with which we still live today, ten years after he was killed.

Of course, in retrospect, we historians could see it all coming. In the summer of 2006, there had been the 'proxy war' between America and Iran fought out in Lebanon between their two regional allies, Israel and Hezbollah. That war ended badly for Israel and emboldened Iran to defy the United Nations and, more to the point, the United States over its nuclear ambitions.

George W. Bush's hopes of bringing 'peace through democracy' to the Middle East after his invasion of Iraq had already worn thin by autumn 2006. Anti-war demonstrations had become more numerous and security tightened everywhere.

In other words, Almond declares the Iraq war is lost. He buys into the hopelessness that his fellow radical libs are selling.

The crude dum-dum bullet fired into the President's stomach that November day caused fatal bleeding and the media were reporting the suspected assassin's details within minutes.

Few people in America needed to know more than that the suspected killer of their President was Syrian-born. As the spotlight of blame focused on Syria, regarded by Americans as Iran's poodle, the Iranian Foreign Ministry didn't help its cause by issuing a perfunctory statement expressing regret that the President had 'died in a violent manner' and hoping that the American people would soon choose a new one who would be more peace-loving.

This is Almond's assessment of Americans: They are bloodthirsty and in love with war.

WRONG!

Moreover, what "historian" Almond doesn't consider in his "what if" piece is the supposed intense disapproval that Americans feel for Bush.

Does Almond really think all Americans would be overcome with grief if Bush were assassinated?

What planet has this guy been living on?

It outraged Americans and George W's mother Barbara was overheard at the state funeral telling Cherie Blair: 'It was like what you say to the maid when her dog gets run over. Get a new one, dear, you'll get over it.'

Disgusting!

Imagining the words of President Bush's mother at his funeral is sick, creepy beyond on words, demented!

The American public wasn't interested in the formal regrets from Damascus and Tehran. Television coverage showed scenes of jubilation on the streets of Syrian and Iranian cities.

The new President, speaking from a 'secure location' soon nicknamed Bunker One, announced that 'those who celebrate death will learn to taste it soon enough'. Dick Cheney appeared unfazed by the day's gruesome events.

Again, where does Almond get off assigning words to people?

While America closed ranks and mourned, across the Islamic world Bush's death was greeted with outpourings of joy. American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan got into firefights with local militias shooting in the air. Saddam's trial was suspended as the defendants hugged each other in the dock.

But what hurt Americans most was the Europeans' lack of grief. Officially, Europe, from Brussels to Berlin and Paris, expressed sorrow and outrage, and President Chirac led the EU mourners in Washington.

But there was nothing like the sadness which greeted Kennedy's murder four decades earlier.

Despite Britain's own experience of Islamic terrorism, the public response to the murder of the American president here was muted, at best — and in some quarters, not all Muslim, it was joyful.

The Independent newspaper published its obituary with a front-page collage under the headline 'Latest victim of war on terror'.

A passport-style photograph of the late President was put in alphabetical order between a Marine sergeant, George Urban Bush, killed in Iraq the day before and an Air Force pilot, Ryan Caldwell, killed in a helicopter crash near Kabul on the same day the President was shot.

The BBC played a montage of Bush's malapropisms from 'Don't mis-underestimate me' to 'The nostalgia for my administration will only begin after it's over'.

The book of condolence at the U.S. embassy in London was thin, though the ambassador diplomatically put the short queue waiting to sign down to 'fear of a terrorist attack'.

This makes me sick.

Almond is admitting that he believes Europeans are anti-American and have little respect for President Bush AND Americans.

A thin book of condolences at the U.S. Embassy in London is a disgusting thought.

Those Europeans that owe their freedom to the Americans who saved them from Nazism and Fascism and Totalitarianism aren't willing to rally behind America during a time of crisis.

I guess Almond has a point there.

They are ungrateful. Only a small group, Tony Blair and New Europe nations, understand.

At home and abroad, the gloating over Bush's death soon gave way to a sober realisation that he had actually been a check on Dick Cheney's ruthless way of defending America from enemies at home or abroad.

Executive orders authorising detention without trial of citizens as well as aliens suspected of 'terrorist affiliations' and closing America's borders were signed off with astonishing alacrity, as were military plans to strike regimes that had celebrated Bush's death.

Syria was attacked, but Iran bore the brunt. Mass strikes by bombers and cruise missiles knocked out any capacity Iran had for making modern weapons, let alone nuclear bombs, but at a huge price. A country of 70million cowered under the shadow of burning oil wells and the pollution from devastated petro-chemical plants.

Fighting Iran turned out to be much bloodier than the blitzkrieg against Saddam's Iraq.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards had learned the lessons of Hezbollah's war with Israel. They avoided head-on confrontation with the U.S. Army's armoured columns. Ambush and sabotage were their weapons.

A grim war went on year after year in the lunar landscape which was much of Iran. As America struggled to find a replacement for the Ayatollahs' regime, even the willing support of Iranian émigrés from America wanting to wipe away the stain of the assassin's crime could not build a stable pro-U.S. government in Tehran.

Good God, Almond hates Dick Cheney.

And he believes that the world hates America.

In Britain, America's strike against Iran set off protests from East London to Yorkshire. Islamic radicals declared emirates in Blackburn and Bradford. Petrol bombs flew as the police tried to restore order.

Tony Blair decided he couldn't retire in a crisis. Instead David Cameron's Tories joined him in a National Government as endemic disorder in some urban areas was compounded by a dramatic increase in attacks on British troops in Basra and in parts of Afghanistan.

When Tony Blair stepped down in 2009 to join President Cheney's Anti-Assassination Commission, it was David Cameron who won the election, attacking Gordon Brown as out of touch with a world in crisis.

UNBELIEVABLE.

Blair joins Cheney's "Anti-Assassination Commission."

Almond's dream just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

Oil prices went on climbing steadily, and no one needs reminding that petrol today is still £3 a litre here and that David Cameron's 'green is the colour of national security' government only lets you buy 30 litres a week.

But for America, it was crises closer to home following George Bush's murder that shaped events.

Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon 'Those who celebrate death will learn to taste it soon enough' A grim war went on year after year in Iran seemed rejuvenated.

SICK!

Rumsfeld was rejunvenated by war.

Almond is sick! And stupid!

How many years does he think Rumsfled would continue to serve?

Is he so clueless that he believes Cheney would run for the presidency in 2008?

An assassination of a U.S. president doesn't change the schedule for an election of a U.S. president.

Even as U.S. planes and cruise missiles struck at targets across Iran, American naval power went into action against Iran's ally Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela. A wave of protests swept Latin America. Chaos engulfed much of Mexico, sending waves of refugees north to the American border.

US troops tried to keep them out and 'suspect types' were shipped to Guantanamo Bay for screening.

The Guantanamo Bay camp was enlarged to accommodate the internees. Castro's regime protested. The ailing Fidel wasn't really in charge any more and his brother, Raul, tried to boost his own public image by organising a mass march to the U.S. base.

Whatever the younger Castro meant to happen, the carefully orchestrated crowds began to pull at the fences around the camp and then to try to climb it.

Almond's view of Armageddon at the hands of America includes an expanded Gitmo facility.

What happened next is disputed. The U.S. Marines guarding the camp claimed Cuban secret policemen shot at the people trying to climb into the base to stop them escaping from communism. The Cuban authorities said their security forces opened fire to defend the protesters, who were being attacked by the Yankee soldiers. Soon 113 people, including women and children, were dead.

The 'Guantanamo Massacre' provoked outrage in Havana. Cheney told Rumsfeld to 'swat' Castro's regime once and for all. Another war of liberation broke out.

Again, CHENEY WOULDN'T BE THE PRESIDENT. There is no scenario that Cheney would be president past January 20, 2009. Almond is a very dim "historian."

Of course, Almond has U.S. Marines slaughtering women and children, 113 of them. Americans are the bad guys.

The details that Almond comes up with, like that precise death toll, are truly bizarre.

The backlash from these attempts to resolve America's foreign problems with decisive military strikes overshadowed the domestic impact of Bush's death. Iranian and Arab Americans weathered the wave of revenge pogroms set off by the assassination, but the bureaucracy of Homeland Security extended its surveillance over them, and pretty well anyone else.

Almond is an absolute disgrace.

Did Americans take revenge on Americans of Middle Eastern descent when militant Muslims murdered nearly three thousand people by hijacking our civilian airliners, destroying the World Trade Center and crashing into the Pentagon?

NO!!!

There was no backlash. If anything, we've bent over backwards to remain politically correct, refusing to racially profile, etc.

Cheney's re-election campaign in 2008 was conducted in a virtual state of emergency, with him addressing the Republican convention by 3D video link from a secure location. The mood of ongoing crisis, combined with the choice of Jeb Bush as his Vice President, widely seen in America as a tribute to the slain President, ensured him a landslide.

This is so strange.

CHENEY WILL NOT RUN IN 2008.

JEB BUSH WILL NOT RUN IN 2008.

For a man with a history of heart problems, Cheney's survival for almost ten years as president during what the New York Times called 'Our Time of Troubles' was remarkable.

'I thrive on crisis,' Cheney explained, 'it was peace that got me tense.' Occasionally he was short of breath, but Cheney even turned this to his advantage. Images of President Cheney in a wheelchair at Thanksgiving 2010 were carefully choreographed to recall Franklin Roosevelt in charge of the war effort 70 years earlier.

Despite the mayhem since Bush's murder, most Americans had preferred to stick by Dick Cheney. His no-nonsense manner reassured, even as crises kept recurring.

For an embattled America and its allies, this endless war, with its relentless suicide bombings, anarchy in countries all over the globe and brutal reprisals, became known as a 'clash of civilisations'. But how much worthy of the name civilisation remained to be defended?

"It was peace that got me tense."

"It was peace that got me tense."

SICK!

I think it's unfair to assume that "historian" Almond, via his little fantasy, speaks for the majority of Europeans. However, European anti-Americanism cannot be denied.

America isn't the root of the world's problems. The Bush administration hasn't created a global mess.

It's trying to solve it.

What would Europe and the world look like without America?

Tyranny would reign.

"Historian" Almond doesn't seem to realize that.


"The danger with America today is not that they are too much involved. The danger is that they decide to pull up the drawbridge and disengage. We need them involved. We want them engaged."

--Tony Blair