In his speech yesterday to the Associated General Contractors of America, the president seemed almost desperate to generate support for the war in Iraq. But with no coherent talking points left to defend the U.S. presence in Iraq, Bush played the only card he had left.
Over the course of the hour-long event, the president referred to al Qaeda, by name, 27 times. If you include more oblique references (the “network that attacked America on 9/11”), the number climbs to 31. Given al Qaeda’s actual role in Iraq, that’s probably about 29 too many.
But as Dana Milbank noted, facts don’t necessarily matter here: “It’s time to play the Qaeda card.”
Never mind all that talk about sectarian strife and civil war in Iraq. “The primary reason for the high level of violence is this: Al-Qaeda has ratcheted up its campaign of high-profile attacks,” Bush disclosed.
The man who four years ago admitted “no evidence” of an Iraqi role in the Sept. 11 attacks now finds solid evidence of a role in Iraq by the Sept. 11 hijackers.
“I don’t need to remind you who al-Qaeda is,” Bush reminded. “Al-Qaeda is the group that plot and planned and trained killers to come and kill people on our soil. The same bunch that is causing havoc in Iraq were the ones who came and murdered our citizens.”
This new line of argument would seem to present some difficulty for the White House, and not only because, as the Pentagon inspector general reported last month, al-Qaeda had no ties to Iraq before the U.S. invasion in 2003. More to the point: If the problem in Iraq isn’t sectarian strife, then why is the U.S. military building walls to separate Sunni enclaves from Shiite neighborhoods?
Mr. Milbank is clearly guilty of pre-9/11 thinking.
There’s no great mystery here. If Americans look at the violence in Iraq as a symptom of a Sunni-Shia civil war, they want to withdraw. If Americans look at Iraq as a theater for fighting al Qaeda, they might be inclined to stay.
So, Bush has to play the demagogic cards he’s dealt. He can’t explain why he diverted attention away from al Qaeda in 2002 and 2003, in order to attack a country where al Qaeda had no meaningful presence at all. And he can’t explain that al Qaeda is responsible for about 5% of the violence in Iraq, so he tells sycophants what all war supporters want to hear — by staying in Iraq, we’re taking on the bastards responsible for 9/11. Just don’t look too closely at the fine print.
These awkward truths left White House press secretary Tony Snow with hard work at the podium in his first televised briefing since returning from cancer surgery.
Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier noted: “This morning the president said that al-Qaeda seems to be a bigger problem than sectarian violence. That seems to fly in the face of what we’ve heard in recent weeks and months on the ground in Iraq.”
“Well,” the game press secretary replied, “you’ve got a shifting series of circumstances.”
NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell wasn’t convinced. “Wasn’t the whole point of the surge to quell the capital and really to diminish the sectarian violence? And now he seems to be saying the enemy is more al-Qaeda.”
Snow repeated his view that “there has been some change in status on the ground.”
By the look on Snow’s face, the press secretary seemed tempted to say, “Look, we have a perfectly good lie going here; can you stop bringing up reality? It’s crimping our style.”