It was probably a throw-away line, but as I was taking notes during last night’s State of the Union, there was a comment about the near future that stood out.
“[B]ecause democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace. That advance has great momentum in our time — shown by women voting in Afghanistan, and Palestinians choosing a new direction, and the people of Ukraine asserting their democratic rights and electing a president. We are witnessing landmark events in the history of liberty. And in the coming years, we will add to that story.” (emphasis added)
We will? In the coming years? Bush probably just meant through further diplomacy, more countries will hopefully hold more elections. On the other hand, maybe Bush intends to start a few more pre-emptive wars under false pretenses. He seems to have a penchant for that sort of thing.
Officials in Syria, for example, might not want to make long-term vacation plans.
“To promote peace in the broader Middle East, we must confront regimes that continue to harbor terrorists and pursue weapons of mass murder. Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region. You have passed, and we are applying, the Syrian Accountability Act — and we expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror and open the door to freedom.”
If the old Bush doctrine — we’ll make no distinction between terrorists and countries that harbor terrorists — still holds true, we’re already justified in the president’s mind in attacking Syria based on the case he briefly laid out yesterday.
Which leads us to Iran.
“Today, Iran remains the world’s primary state sponsor of terror — pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve. We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing, and end its support for terror. And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.”
So, Iran is pro-terror, pursuing nukes, and anti-freedom? Bush had far less than this before invading Iraq, which suggests this is another war that’s on the White House wish list.
And what did Bush mean by telling the Iranian people that we stand with them? It harkens back to rhetoric from his second inaugural, but as Fred Kaplan noted, it sounds like Bush was encouraging a popular insurrection.
Is he telling the Iranian mullahs he’s got them in his crosshairs? If not, what is he telling them? And if the rebels of Tehran did rise up tomorrow, what is President Bush prepared to do for them? It’s dangerous to engage in this sort of talk without having a real plan. Ask the Hungarians who rose up after our urgings and got plowed down in 1956, or the Shiite Iraqis who did the same in 1991.
Indeed, Bush’s talk about Iran was oddly inconsistent. Despite the president’s claims, for example, we’re not working with European allies on Iranian negotiations (Sidney Blumenthal makes a good case that we should be).
Bush was at his strongest and most confident last night when discussing foreign policy, but even cursory analysis shows a president who’s not nearly as sure about the world as he seems. Bush offered a vision in which American troops will stay in Iraq for a very long time (how long will it take for Iraq to be “democratic, representative of all its people, at peace with its neighbors, and able to defend itself”?), a bogus claim about American involvement in negotiations with Iran, a new round of saber-rattling with Syria, and another bogus claim about non-existent talks with North Korea.
If there was a coherent approach to foreign policy in the speech, it was hiding well.