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RUEHBR/AMEMBASSY BRASILIA PRIORITY 6807
RUEHRI/AMCONSUL RIO DE JANEIRO PRIORITY 7421
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TAGS: KMDR OPRC OIIP ETRD BR
 
SUBJECT: MEDIA REACTION: GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR:  FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF 
9/11; SAO PAULO 
 
 
The Worst Five Years of America 
Lead editorial  in center-right  O Estado de S. Paulo (9/10) states: 
"Not even in his most glorified fantasies (...) could Osama Bin 
Laden have imagined the series of disasters in politics, diplomacy 
and the military arena and to the image of the United States 
overall, that would be perpetrated by the most near-sighted, 
authoritarian and unprepared head of government to come to 
Washington in memory, with much worse consequences for international 
relations and the safety of the nations than those left by the 
failure of the U.S. in Vietnam.... President George Bush, 
Vice-President Dick Cheney, political operator Karl Rove, Secretary 
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and [then] National Security Advisor 
Condoleezza Rice, backed by an assortment of ideologues, high-level 
officials, congressmen, republican leaders and opinion makers, 
pulverized the enormous solidarity movement that embraced the U.S. 
after the barbaric attacks...[The] president...took advantage of the 
outrage to attack a former ally, dictator Saddam Hussein. Whatever 
his many crimes, he never had anything to do with Islamic extremists 
in general or with the 9/11 perpetrators in particular and neither 
did he have nor was he about to have the weapons of mass destruction 
invoked to justify the "war of choice...." The worst is that the 
shot backfired enormously. At the cost of dozens of thousands Iraqi 
lives and over 2,600 Americans, the country once oppressed by Saddam 
became an arena for a stupid war of everyone against everyone.... 
But nothing seems to shake the White House's cynicism, where history 
keeps being rewritten...the unbreakable Bush, with the strength of 
the righteous, leads-on the Iraq front and wherever else Good faces 
Evil-the great 'ideological war of the 21st Century.' It is 
surreal. 
 
 
Another 9/11 
Liberal Folha de S.Paulo (9/11) editorializes: "In light of the 
catastrophe that the U.S. unilateral military intervention in Iraq 
has turned into, and the need to tirelessly fight this dangerous 
form of irrational politics that Islamic terror engenders, we must 
seek inspiration in the teachings of recent history. Instead of 
recreating regimes-without any previous offense to justify military 
reaction-it is desirable that the only superpower that is left 
exercise restraint and pragmatism when dealing with other nations, 
and go back to valuing the UN. If it insists on its current policy, 
Washington will isolate itself even further, instead of isolating 
terror. 
McMullen