The president’s State of the Union was effectively divided into two halves: domestic concerns and foreign policy. If Bush’s body language and tone of voice are any indication of his personal interests, he went through the motions on the first part, and seemed a little more engaged on the second.
Of course, engagement and coherence are very different things. From the address:
“Our foreign policy is based on a clear premise: We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace. In the last seven years, we have witnessed stirring moments in the history of liberty.”
Except in Gaza’s free elections, when people were trusted to vote against Hamas. And in Lebanon, when people were trusted to vote against Hezbollah. And in Pakistan, where Bush has praised Pervez Musharraf as someone who “truly … believes in democracy.” And in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where Bush abandoned his “freedom agenda” altogether.
“In the coming months, four additional brigades and two Marine battalions will follow suit. Taken together, this means more than 20,000 of our troops are coming home.”
To hear the president tell it, these troops’ return is evidence of success. That’s transparently false, and the White House surely knows it. The 20,000 Americans were sent into Iraq as part of the surge, and now their tours are up. With no brigades left to replace them, the troop drawdown was going to happen, regardless of the conditions on the ground. For Bush to pretend otherwise is to hope Americans just aren’t paying attention to reality.
“We are grateful that there has not been another attack on our soil since 9/11. This is not for the lack of desire or effort on the part of the enemy. In the past six years, we’ve stopped numerous attacks, including a plot to fly a plane into the tallest building in Los Angeles and another to blow up passenger jets bound for America over the Atlantic.”
First, there was another attack on our soil — someone killed Americans with anthrax in 2001. Second, the examples Bush cited as thwarted terrorists plots both appear dubious under scrutiny.
But perhaps highlighting specific errors of fact and judgment is the wrong way to go. Slate’s Fred Kaplan takes a step back and is amazed at that the president “seems to have learned so little about the crises in which he’s immersed his nation so deeply.”
His first words on foreign policy in tonight’s address reprised the theme of previous addresses: “We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace.” He cited, as “stirring” examples of this principle, the “images” of citizens demanding independence in Ukraine and Lebanon, of Afghans emerging from the Taliban’s tyranny, of “jubilant Iraqis holding up ink-stained fingers” to celebrate free elections.
One waited for the president to invoke the lamentable flip side of these images, the retreats and retrenchments that followed (perhaps the “challenges” ahead?)—but he didn’t. Is he still living in the dream world of the spring of 2004? It’s a pleasant world, but it had gone up in smoke by that summer. If we were truly serious about promoting freedom, it would be useful to explore the lessons of those hopes as they were not only stirred but then crushed. As with his previous State of the Union addresses, this was not seen as a time to face reality.
The president, once more, depicted the complex conflicts of our time as one-dimensional struggles between the forces of light and darkness. In the war on terror, he proclaimed, “there is one thing we and our enemies agree on: In the long run, men and women who are free to determine their own destinies will reject terror and refuse to live in tyranny. That is why the terrorists are fighting to deny this choice to people in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Territories.”
The question comes to mind, as it has come to mind in all of these speeches when Bush recites this argument: Does he believe what he’s saying? Does he believe that the violent battles for power in these lands really come down to freedom vs. tyranny? If so, no wonder this government has had such a hard time getting a handle on these dangers, much less trying to engage them.
That’s really the biggest take-away from last night’s address. Much of the audience tuned in hoping to get a sense that the president understood something about the global stage — whether it involved the economy, the war in Iraq, America’s standing in the world, or the nature of the threats against us.
Instead, like Kaplan, we’re left to wonder if Bush even believes his own remarks. A full seven years after taking office, it’s not a good sign.