The media reports on the president’s speech last night seems to have a common thread. The AP complemented the president for “drop[ping] rosy Iraq scenarios”; the WaPo said Bush adopted an “almost conciliatory manner”; the NYT said Bush was “more humble” in describing progress and conditions in Iraq. There are at least two problems with analysis.
First, it’s giving enormous credit to the president for a minimal degree of appreciating reality. Talk about your soft bigotry of low expectations, Bush won praise for acknowledging that the “work has been especially difficult in Iraq,” and for recognizing that there are a more than a few Americans who disapprove of his handling of the war. It’s as if there was an expectation that the president would, once again, tell us how great everything in Iraq is, facts be damned. It’s frustrating; we seem to have reached a point in which the president’s willingness to concede a few obvious facts is so unusual, it’s literally front-page news.
Second, a closer reading of the speech shows that it wasn’t really conciliatory at all. The president was willing to address some concerns raised by his critics in a less combative tone, but as TNR’s Ryan Lizza noted, the responses were aimed at some of the same straw men the White House has targeted for months.
[…Bush] delivered a familiar rhetorical punch, attributing to opponents a preposterous argument. Addressing what he called the “important” question of whether “we are creating more problems than we’re solving” in Iraq, Bush said that “the answer depends on your view of the war on terror.” How did the president describe his opponents’ views of that war? Well, according to Bush, the debate over how to deal with terrorists is between his steely resolve to crush them everywhere and those who “think the terrorists would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them.”
This is an absurd characterization. Nobody argues that leaving Iraq will make “terrorists” more “peaceful.” Certainly, it’s not Bush’s job to present the strongest case for withdrawal, but it’s hard to take seriously his call for national unity when he makes such a bad-faith presentation of his opponents’ arguments. The speech was as much about ridicule as it was about rebuttal.
In this sense, the speech was politically clever — he convinced the pundits he was being conciliatory by acknowledging that critics’ concerns exist, while simultaneously bashing those same critics by labeling them “defeatists” whose ideas would bring “recklessness and dishonor.”
If this was an olive branch, it was filled with thorns.
Post Script: On a related note, Bush ended his remarks by citing some poetry.
“We pray for the safety and strength of our troops. We trust, with them, in a love that conquers all fear, in a light that reaches the darkest corners of the Earth. And we remember the words of the Christmas carol, written during the Civil War: “‘God is not dead, nor [does] He sleep; the Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, with peace on Earth, goodwill to men.'”
This is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells,” and Bush was rather selective in the part he shared with his audience. For example, the same carol reads, “And in despair I bowed my head; ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said.”