It’s not that I was surprised by Bush’s sorry-I’ve-been-blowing-you-off speech today at the United Nations; I wasn’t. A lot of political figures were calling on Bush to acknowledge that his administration was wrong to proceed with a war without U.N. consent or cooperation, but I assumed that would never happen. Bush isn’t about admitting mistakes.
After going over the speech a couple of times, his remarks intentionally avoided all of the points most of the U.N. had hoped to hear. Bush was not conciliatory, he was almost arrogant. To hear him tell it, the war in Iraq was necessary and successful. He practically treated the event as a victory lap.
In explaining why the U.S. went to war without U.N. consent, Bush once again made the case that our Iraqi invasion was part of the war on terror started on Sept. 11.
“All governments that support terror are complicit in a war against civilization,” Bush said. He added, “[A]ll nations that fight terror as if the lives of their own people depend on it will earn the favorable judgment of history. The former regimes of Afghanistan and Iraq knew these alternatives and made their choices.”
Again, for Bush, “Afghanistan and Iraq” are two sides of the same coin. He seems intentionally unaware of the fact that the two countries and their despotic regimes had virtually nothing in common.
Worse, he once again tried to make his case for war.
“The regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction,” Bush said.
It’s as if he is hoping that no one has been paying attention for the last year. Ties to terror? What ties to terror? Weapons of mass destruction? What weapons of mass destruction?
Bush went on to try and paint a positive picture on post-war Iraq. We’re training an Iraqi police force, he said. We’re rebuilding Iraqi schools. We’re reopening hospitals. We’re “rehabilitating” infrastructure such as power plants and bridges.
I can almost hear the U.N. audience thinking to themselves, “OK, George, if you’ve done such a great job, why are you here with your tail between your legs looking for help?”
In fact, Bush did not make — never even tried to make — the case that the U.N. can and should send troops and resources into Iraq, saying only that the U.N. can help out in eventually conducting Iraqi elections.
I’m not sure what Bush hoped to accomplish today, but if his remarks were intended to rally international support for the effort in Iraq, I seriously doubt the president made any progress.