Ahmadinejad a 'Hitler'

From The Australian, Correspondents in Washington 07sep06 ...

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."

....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