Bush Skates Past Iraq
Bush's speech may have been effective and affecting, but it, like all the other Republican speeches, manipulated 9/11 and contained the usual cant on Iraq.
Discarding pleasantries, Bush alluded to 9/11 in his second sentence. He might have been worried that a lot of viewers would fall asleep before he had a chance to maximize the propaganda value of that event. So he brought it up early and often and dwelled on it at the end.
In between, he tried to pawn himself off as Mr. Compassionate Conservative. He reached out especially to working people and to women.
Sounding like John Kerry or John Sweeney, he said, "Government must take the side of working families." But the devil was in the details: He talked about comp-time, which he's trying to let employers use instead of overtime.
Sounding like Hillary Clinton, he said, "Two-thirds of all moms also work outside the home. . . . And government must take your side."
Like a liberal Democrat, he vowed to increase spending on job training, community colleges, affordable housing, and rural and community health clinics in every poor county in America. (On the last promise, my wife, who is a Headstart nurse, said, "I'll believe it when I see it.")
Continuing in this vein, he said he would "enroll millions of poor children" in government health insurance programs and expand Pell grants.
And he reached out to Latinos by saying "no child left behind" in rusty Spanish.
Of course, he pulled out the usual Republican plans to privatize part of Social Security, to require more work for those in welfare reform programs, to reduce regulation on corporations, to limit medical and product-liability lawsuits, and to make permanent his regressive tax cuts.
But he took pains to emphasize his "compassionate conservative philosophy." This worked for him last time, but can people really be fooled twice with the same lure?
He also threw out some bones to social conservatives, but they didn't have as much red meat on them as the rabid ones might have hoped.
On abortion, he said, "We must make a place for the unborn child." He did not say that Roe v. Wade should be overturned.
On gay marriage, he said, "I support the protection of marriage against activist judges." He did not say he favored a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Though he gamely ran down the list of domestic issues, he did not become fully engaged until the halfway mark, when he centered his speech on--and we all knew this was coming--September 11.
"Since that day, I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country," he said.
Maybe he should have been thinking about that in the nine months prior to 9/11.
He talked about what he's done "to protect our homeland." But he didn't say anything about safeguarding chemical plants or nuclear plants, and for good reason. He's left them as vulnerable today as they were on September 10, 2001.
Nor did he mention Osama bin Laden, a name that he won't bring himself to utter. Karl Rove must have told him that until the United States captures or kills bin Laden, his name should not pass their lips.
(Just imagine if Democrats had been in power on September 11. The President would have been pummeled daily on talk radio and Fox for letting the attack happen. And if the President hadn't caught bin Laden three years after the attack, they would have been calling for the President's head.)
But it was on Iraq that Bush was the most disingenuous.
First, he tried, almost like Bill Clinton, to make himself the pitiable object of the story. "I faced the kind of decision that comes only to the Oval Office, a decision no President would ask for."
Come on! You asked for it, George. Admit it: You wanted to get rid of Saddam almost since the first day you came to power. (Richard Clarke's book shows how obsessed the Administration was, from day one, in knocking Saddam off. In March 2002, according to Time magazine, Bush said to visiting Congresspeople in the White House, "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out.")
But Bush kept up the façade that invading Iraq was something thrust upon him: "After more than a decade of diplomacy, we gave Saddam Hussein another chance, a final chance, to meet his responsibilities to the civilized world. He again refused."
Bush said he was faced with the following dilemma: "Do I forget the lessons of September 11 and take the word of a madman or do I take action to defend our country?"
Note how Bush fused September 11 and Saddam together in that one sentence.
But there is another dishonesty here. Bush didn't need to "take the word of a madman."
He could have taken the word of the U.N. weapons inspectors. They were given unprecedented access to sites all over Iraq, and they reported back that they could not find the huge stockpiles of weapons and they needed more time to search. Mohammed el-Baradei, head of the United Nations nuclear inspections, even said flat-out that "we have found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program."
But Bush didn't want to hear those words.
He also could have listened to the words of CIA Director George Tenet, who said that it was unlikely that Saddam would attack the United States or hand off his weapons to terrorists.
But Bush didn't want to hear those words, either.
And he was not content to let U.S. spy planes survey every square inch of Iraqi territory 24/7.
No, he was deadset on war. So much so that, even if Saddam had backed down at the last minute, Bush still would have ordered the invasion. "If Saddam Hussein leaves, we'll go in anyway," Bush said, just days before the launch, according to Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack."
In his speech, Bush also minimized the current chaos in Iraq, referring only to "ongoing acts of violence." That's putting it mildly.
And he said, "The Army of Iraq is fighting for freedom," when it is actually the U.S. Army that is doing most of the fighting.
He gave no hint how long U.S. troops will be there, how many are likely to die or be injured, and what the final cost will be.
He just skated right by.
Bush distorted other situations, as well.
He made the Israel/Palestine crisis out to be the fault only of the Palestinians. And he bizarrely claimed that the United States had aided the rise of democracy in Nicaragua when, in actual fact, Ronald Reagan armed and trained the contras to wreak havoc in Nicaragua.
Bush ended with a few hymns of messianic militarism.
"America is called to lead the cause of freedom in a new century," he said. "We have a calling from beyond the stars." And he repeated a line from his State of the Union address: "Freedom is not America's gift to the world, it is the almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world."
By implication, Bush is just serving as God's delivery boy.
-- Matthew Rothschild
Bush's speech may have been effective and affecting, but it, like all the other Republican speeches, manipulated 9/11 and contained the usual cant on Iraq.
Discarding pleasantries, Bush alluded to 9/11 in his second sentence. He might have been worried that a lot of viewers would fall asleep before he had a chance to maximize the propaganda value of that event. So he brought it up early and often and dwelled on it at the end.
In between, he tried to pawn himself off as Mr. Compassionate Conservative. He reached out especially to working people and to women.
Sounding like John Kerry or John Sweeney, he said, "Government must take the side of working families." But the devil was in the details: He talked about comp-time, which he's trying to let employers use instead of overtime.
Sounding like Hillary Clinton, he said, "Two-thirds of all moms also work outside the home. . . . And government must take your side."
Like a liberal Democrat, he vowed to increase spending on job training, community colleges, affordable housing, and rural and community health clinics in every poor county in America. (On the last promise, my wife, who is a Headstart nurse, said, "I'll believe it when I see it.")
Continuing in this vein, he said he would "enroll millions of poor children" in government health insurance programs and expand Pell grants.
And he reached out to Latinos by saying "no child left behind" in rusty Spanish.
Of course, he pulled out the usual Republican plans to privatize part of Social Security, to require more work for those in welfare reform programs, to reduce regulation on corporations, to limit medical and product-liability lawsuits, and to make permanent his regressive tax cuts.
But he took pains to emphasize his "compassionate conservative philosophy." This worked for him last time, but can people really be fooled twice with the same lure?
He also threw out some bones to social conservatives, but they didn't have as much red meat on them as the rabid ones might have hoped.
On abortion, he said, "We must make a place for the unborn child." He did not say that Roe v. Wade should be overturned.
On gay marriage, he said, "I support the protection of marriage against activist judges." He did not say he favored a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Though he gamely ran down the list of domestic issues, he did not become fully engaged until the halfway mark, when he centered his speech on--and we all knew this was coming--September 11.
"Since that day, I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country," he said.
Maybe he should have been thinking about that in the nine months prior to 9/11.
He talked about what he's done "to protect our homeland." But he didn't say anything about safeguarding chemical plants or nuclear plants, and for good reason. He's left them as vulnerable today as they were on September 10, 2001.
Nor did he mention Osama bin Laden, a name that he won't bring himself to utter. Karl Rove must have told him that until the United States captures or kills bin Laden, his name should not pass their lips.
(Just imagine if Democrats had been in power on September 11. The President would have been pummeled daily on talk radio and Fox for letting the attack happen. And if the President hadn't caught bin Laden three years after the attack, they would have been calling for the President's head.)
But it was on Iraq that Bush was the most disingenuous.
First, he tried, almost like Bill Clinton, to make himself the pitiable object of the story. "I faced the kind of decision that comes only to the Oval Office, a decision no President would ask for."
Come on! You asked for it, George. Admit it: You wanted to get rid of Saddam almost since the first day you came to power. (Richard Clarke's book shows how obsessed the Administration was, from day one, in knocking Saddam off. In March 2002, according to Time magazine, Bush said to visiting Congresspeople in the White House, "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out.")
But Bush kept up the façade that invading Iraq was something thrust upon him: "After more than a decade of diplomacy, we gave Saddam Hussein another chance, a final chance, to meet his responsibilities to the civilized world. He again refused."
Bush said he was faced with the following dilemma: "Do I forget the lessons of September 11 and take the word of a madman or do I take action to defend our country?"
Note how Bush fused September 11 and Saddam together in that one sentence.
But there is another dishonesty here. Bush didn't need to "take the word of a madman."
He could have taken the word of the U.N. weapons inspectors. They were given unprecedented access to sites all over Iraq, and they reported back that they could not find the huge stockpiles of weapons and they needed more time to search. Mohammed el-Baradei, head of the United Nations nuclear inspections, even said flat-out that "we have found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program."
But Bush didn't want to hear those words.
He also could have listened to the words of CIA Director George Tenet, who said that it was unlikely that Saddam would attack the United States or hand off his weapons to terrorists.
But Bush didn't want to hear those words, either.
And he was not content to let U.S. spy planes survey every square inch of Iraqi territory 24/7.
No, he was deadset on war. So much so that, even if Saddam had backed down at the last minute, Bush still would have ordered the invasion. "If Saddam Hussein leaves, we'll go in anyway," Bush said, just days before the launch, according to Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack."
In his speech, Bush also minimized the current chaos in Iraq, referring only to "ongoing acts of violence." That's putting it mildly.
And he said, "The Army of Iraq is fighting for freedom," when it is actually the U.S. Army that is doing most of the fighting.
He gave no hint how long U.S. troops will be there, how many are likely to die or be injured, and what the final cost will be.
He just skated right by.
Bush distorted other situations, as well.
He made the Israel/Palestine crisis out to be the fault only of the Palestinians. And he bizarrely claimed that the United States had aided the rise of democracy in Nicaragua when, in actual fact, Ronald Reagan armed and trained the contras to wreak havoc in Nicaragua.
Bush ended with a few hymns of messianic militarism.
"America is called to lead the cause of freedom in a new century," he said. "We have a calling from beyond the stars." And he repeated a line from his State of the Union address: "Freedom is not America's gift to the world, it is the almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world."
By implication, Bush is just serving as God's delivery boy.
-- Matthew Rothschild
posted by BLONDIE at 1:34 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home