For all the talk earlier this week about the president using the State of the Union to “change the subject” away from Iraq and onto domestic policy, Bush addressed the war in Iraq quite a bit last night. Unfortunately, he didn’t have much to offer.
There were the three key sentences on what Bush wants.
“We went into this largely united — in our assumptions, and in our convictions. And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure. Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq — and I ask you to give it a chance to work.”
Allow me to take a moment to translate.
Sentence 1: By saying the president and Congress were “united…in our assumptions,” the president is telling lawmakers, “I was wrong, but so were you, so we should share the blame.” This is wrong, of course, because lawmakers and the president didn’t see the same intelligence, and Congress hasn’t been responsible for bungling every major decision for the last four years.
Sentence 2: By saying lawmakers didn’t “vote for failure,” Bush is telling all those Democrats who voted for the 2002 war resolution, “You gave me the green light to start this thing, so you can’t complain now that I’ve screwed everything up.” But the president’s argument misses the point — Congress may not have voted for failure, but the president has delivered it.
Sentence 3: By asking that everyone give Escalation 5.0 “a chance,” Bush is effectively telling the nation, “Please, baby, don’t leave. I can change.” Of course, the argument was fundamentally flawed — the president wouldn’t accept responsibility for having gotten into this mess, and couldn’t explain why we should give his strategy yet another chance.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan explained very well that the president “still doesn’t understand the war.”
“I ask you to give it a chance to work,” the president (uncharacteristically) pleaded tonight. In service of this support, he proposed to set up a “special advisory council on the war on terrorism, made up of leaders in Congress from both political parties,” to “share ideas for how to position America” to meet today’s challenges and to “show our enemies abroad that we are united in the goal of security.”
The thing is, there already are advisory councils. They’re called the congressional committees on foreign relations, armed services, and intelligence. President Bush had his chance with the ideas of a bipartisan council, the Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton. He dismissed them out of hand. Now he has to deal with the normal constitutional arrangements. That’s democracy.
What is most head-shaking of all is that, after four years of this war, the president once more fell short of making its case. As in the past, he said that it’s very important—”a decisive ideological struggle,” he called it, adding, “nothing is more important at this moment in our history than for America to succeed.” And yet he also said that America’s commitment to the war is “not open-ended.” How can both claims be true? If nothing is more important, it must be open-ended. If it’s not open-ended, it can’t be all that important.
One reason he can’t argue for it is that it’s not clear he understands it. “The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat,” he said. “Whatever slogans they chant … they have the same wicked purpose. They want to kill Americans, kill democracy in the Middle East.” He still seems to view the ever-mounting violence as reflecting a struggle between good and evil, freedom and tyranny. He fails to grasp the sectarian nature of the fight. (Does he really believe that the Shiites and Sunnis are the same — or that, besides the small minority of al-Qaida, they’re “totalitarian” in nature?)
Nearly all of the portions of the SOTU about foreign policy and national security left the reality-based community shaking their heads. Bush pointed to the British hijacking plot from August as proof of his successes, without pointing out that the threat wasn’t quite what it was cracked up to be. He noted that Iraq has created a series of “benchmarks,” without noting that nothing happens when those benchmarks aren’t met.
Bush touted the role of “law enforcement” in stopping attacks, without mentioning that he ridiculed Kerry for saying the same thing in 2004. He said the bombing of the mosque at Samarra started the sectarian violence in Iraq, without noting that the sectarian conflict actually started 15 months prior. He said bringing democracy would solve the region’s problems, without noting that his administration has, and continues to, promote stability over democracy, and that Bush’s democracy-building programs have been largely neglected or ignored.
This was Bush’s chance to demonstrate that he fully appreciates and understands the global challenges we’re facing right now. Alas, he doesn’t.