The immediate and furious spinning coming out of the White House in response to his second inaugural — Bush said we’d work to eradicate tyranny around the globe, but argued that’s not a policy shift — sounds eerily similar to one of my favorite Steven Wright jokes…
Wright goes to his local convenience store to get a snack. It’s late, but he knows that won’t be a problem because it’s open 24-7. When he gets there, he sees the clerk locking up. He says, “Wait, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.” The clerk responds, “Well, yeah, but not in a row.”
Unfortunately, the Bush gang’s response is no joke. Bush said, “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.” A day later, asked if Bush meant it, the White House said, “What, you mean now?”
It sure sounded like a change in policy. We have not only ignored oppression and excused oppressors, the U.S. maintained close relationships with many of the world’s most repressive regimes. Bush, in a speech that one might fairly characterize as “high profile,” effectively said those days were over and insisted the “success in our relations” with other countries will be tied directly to their respect for human rights. A day later, the Bush gang was responding to the change in policy by insisting that there is no change in policy.
Bush advisers said the speech was the rhetorical institutionalization of the Bush doctrine and reflected the president’s deepest convictions about the purposes behind his foreign policies. But they said it was carefully written not to tie him to an inflexible or unrealistic application of his goal of ending tyranny.
[…]
“It is not a discontinuity. It is not a right turn,” said a senior administration official, who spoke with reporters from newspapers but demanded anonymity because he wanted the focus to remain on the president’s words and not his. “I think it is a bit of an acceleration, a raising of the priority, making explicit in a very public way to give impetus to this effort.” He added that it was a “message we have been sending” for some time.
Here’s the killer quote:
“Do you want us to be rhetorical or to be effective?” [a senior administration official] asked…
Actually, we want them to be honest, but that may be too tall an order.
It turns out Bush’s new-but-not-new approach to spreading freedom to the world wasn’t about a vision for the future, but rather, an explanation of the past.
White House officials said yesterday that President Bush’s soaring inaugural address, in which he declared the goal of ending tyranny around the world, represents no significant shift in U.S. foreign policy but instead was meant as a crystallization and clarification of policies he is pursuing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and elsewhere.
In other words, when Bush said, “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,” he meant Iraq and Afghanistan, which as far as he’s concerned, are now free. I’m sure they’ll be delighted to hear it.
Bush wasn’t laying out a new doctrine, he was offering a new spin for his last two wars. Never mind all that talk about bio- and chem-weapons, ties to terrorism, and burgeoning nuclear programs; the president is waging — or rather, has already waged — wars because he’s “spreading freedom.”
Ultimately, the second inaugural may have been the best-written, highest-profile rationalization for past behavior in American political history.