Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Free-falling in the polls, Bush stayed with the same tough-guy message. But Michael Lind, Karen Kwiatkowski, Ruy Teixeira and others say he landed with a splat, while AEI's Michael Rubin says the speech was "a good start."
May 25, 2004 | Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics."
George W. Bush began and ended his speech with a brazen lie. He claimed that the United States is in Iraq to fight al-Qaida.
Before the war, Bush, Cheney and the neoconservatives did all they could to convince the American people that there was some link between Saddam Hussein's tyranny in Iraq and al-Qaida. They succeeded in deceiving a large number of Americans. Now Bush is trying the same trick again. He is trying to justify his failed and unnecessary war in Iraq by parading, once again, the corpses of those murdered by Osama bin Laden and his followers in New York, Washington and Bali. The shamelessness of George W. Bush is matched only by his contempt for the intelligence of the American people.
Near the beginning of his address, the president claimed: "Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror." The United States must prevail in Iraq to deny "the terrorists" a "base of operation" -- a reference to al-Qaida, presumably, with its need for bases for worldwide operations. As if to underline the implication that Iraq, like Afghanistan, had been a "base" for al-Qaida, Bush said: "This will be a decisive blow to terrorism at the heart of its power."
Bush repeated this lie at the end of his address. He accurately described al-Qaida as totalitarian and seeking to impose Taliban-like regimes throughout the Middle East. But then, with breathtaking cynicism, he linked the U.S. war in Iraq to al-Qaida once again, following a recitation of al-Qaida attacks in Tunis and Bali with a recitation of places in Iraq where American soldiers now are fighting and dying.
Karen Kwiatkowski, lieutenant colonel, U.S. Air Force (ret.), served in the Pentagon's Near East South Asia directorate headed by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Bill Luti, who also led the Pentagon's secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans. Salon published her insider account, "The New Pentagon Papers," in March; she currently teaches at James Madison University.
President Bush has a five-step strategy toward Iraqi deoccupation. The soldier-scholars in the Army War College audience must have been wondering, "Wheres the rest of it?" No mention of deoccupation, only the mush of "We went to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power." And more troops will go to Iraq, more violence will be committed, and we will build a brand-new, American-style maximum security prison for the Iraqis. Afterward, we'll have a photo op as we bulldoze the cursed Abu Ghraib and build a city park in its place.
The other American audience watched from the nation's living rooms. They've been recently occupied with high gas prices, a slow economy, bankrupt state legislatures, a skyrocketing federal debt eating away at their financial security and the lack of mission clarity that threatens daily the lives and sanity of our men and women deployed in Iraq. Bush told these Americans that he wants "freedom, independence, security and prosperity for the Iraqi people." I don't know if that resonated. I do know that he has come a long way from his campaign promise that America would no longer nation-build around the world, or seek gratuitous feel-good interventions.
The president tonight sounded strangely Brezhnevian, circa 1978 -- 138,000 American troops are staying in Iraq indefinitely, but Iraq is promised imminent "sovereignty" and "democracy." Pay no attention to the men with guns. Bush mentioned our work to eliminate any residual reluctance of Iraqi security forces to fire upon their fellow citizens, er, terrorists. Ah, the exquisite challenge of bringing freedom and self-rule to an ungrateful people.
The Soviet invasion and subsequent puppetry in Afghanistan lasted 10 years, and four changes of leadership. Monday night, President Bush again asked the American people to be patient. After listening to his vacant, unrealistic and uninspired presentation to a controlled military audience, I think I understand why.
Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration; senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
I think the first thing Bush has done, interestingly enough, is what the Army War College has complained about: He's conflated all terrorists together. On Monday night he talked about Iraq a lot and somehow linked that again to what happened on Sept. 11. Secondly, he never admitted, as again the Army War College study said, that he was ill-prepared when he went into Iraq, did not have enough troops on the ground when Saddam fell, did not provide the troops with any guidance. That's how we got into this mess.
He again brought up with the whole domino theory for the Middle East, that if you make Iraq into a democracy, then you'll have democracy all throughout the Middle East. I mean, what about Saudi Arabia? We're not going to make it a democracy. We're trying to get oil from the country. Or Egypt, Pakistan.
Bush also said that [the occupation will end June 30], but we're still going to have the same number of troops there, and they're going to be under American command. How is that complete sovereignty? I mean, if you're completely sovereign you can't have foreign troops in your country unless you can give them orders and command them.
Who can be opposed to handing over power, providing security, rebuilding the infrastructure, getting more international help and having national elections? Nobody can be opposed to that. The problem is, "OK, who are you handing over power to?" Can you imagine -- you know, in our country, we have an election in November, we wait two months to hand over power, we used to wait four. Here we're going to be handing over power in less than five weeks -- and we don't know to whom, how much support they'll have or what power they'll have.
My central concern is that the president has not yet recognized the mistakes he has made and therefore does not have a basis on which to improve the situation. He played fast and loose with the number of troops. (I think we're going to have to put more troops in Iraq to provide the security necessary to rebuild the infrastructure.) Then he talked about how he's going to go to NATO and thank the 15 countries that provided support and, as he said, almost 20,000 troops. Well, 10,000 of them are British. That means you have to divide up 14 other countries to account for the other 10,000. The president is trying to give the impression that we have a lot of international support when we don't.
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