Bush and Iraq
I think George Bush must be heartily sick of the bill of goods Dick Cheney and the neo-con gang sold him. Why else would he slink off to a military arena — the Naval Academy — mid-morning to address a captive symapthetic audience about his ‘vision’ for vistory in Iraq? Because he’s afraid that the rest of us may notice that his ‘new’ plan aka ‘National Strategy for Victory in Iraq’ is neither new nor a strategy. He’s either a coward or he’s liar — possibly both because his speech was just more of the same.
The problem remains defining what the victory conditions are. At one point in his speech Bush said that victory is when America has trained enough Iraqis so that they can defend themselves [From the insurrection we stirred up!]. At another he said that victory is no less than the defeat of the Islamists and Saddamists [As if they are one and the same]. These aren’t the same thing. So which is it? If he is so muddled on the basic definition of our knowing when we’ve won, of course he’s muddled on everything else. Which is why there is still no clarity over when the end might arrive.
As an effort in rallying people to his cause the speeech failed. He keeps repeating the same old ‘we will never back down’ stuff as if we believe him. Of course we will back down if enough Republicans feel that they will lose their seats next year. That’s Democracy for you. Bush has still completely missed the notion that he cannot sell the war as a global engagemnet of World War proportions without doing World War kinds of things like instituting a draft, raising taxes to pay for the titanic effort, asking for sacrifices from the general population and generally mobilizing the country and focusing on a single objective: winning the war. He hasn’t done that. Yet he struts around as if he’s Churchill and makes Churchillian statements. It is roughly three years now since this all started: during an equivalent period in the early 1940’s America had destroyed, or helped destroy, two world powers and conquered vast swathes of the several continents. It had put vast armies in the field, equipped not just them but a goodly part of the Allies as well, and turned its industrial base into an unstoppable juggernaut. Bush has only just delivered a plan. He’s a pathetic minnow by comparison to his 1940’s predecessors. A minnow, moreover, who knows damned well why he won’t ask for sacrifice: he sold the country the same bill of goods that Cheney sold him. There was no need for this war. He should have focused on Bin Laden not Saddam.
Still we have no leadership. Still we have no strategy. Still we have no idea. Ah … but we have George Bush. I feel safer already.
