Watching the president’s speech last night, I was reminded of a de-motivational poster I saw a couple of years ago: “Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never quit and never win are idiots.”
Bush’s White House address wasn’t just unpersuasive and dishonest — though it was both of those — it was also a bad joke. He demands that we reward failure. He insists that his record of getting every aspect of this conflict wrong thus far justifies more faith in his judgment. He implores us not to believe our lying eyes.
Indeed, last night’s speech represented a digression on the president’s part. In January, when his escalation strategy was unveiled, Bush emphasized a series of benchmarks and insisted that the U.S. commitment to Iraq is not “open-ended.” As of 12 hours ago, that rhetoric is gone, replaced with fictional claims about non-existent “progress.”
We did, however, get a new catchphrase. Joining a pantheon that includes “Mission Accomplished,” “stay the course,” “freedom is on the march,” “new way forward,” and “turning the corner,” we now have “return on success.”
“The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq is ‘return on success.’ The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home. And in all we do, I will ensure that our commanders on the ground have the troops and flexibility they need to defeat the enemy.
Even by this White House’s standards, it’s a pretty pathetic selling point. The idea is, we’re making this enormous investment in blood and treasure, and once the investment produces results, it will create dividends, which in this case means troops coming home. It sounds perfectly nice until one realizes that it’s entirely speculative — if the policy works, then some U.S. troops can come home. Well, we knew that. The problem is that the policy doesn’t work.
This was particularly offensive in relation to the end of the surge build-up. Bush insisted, of course, that he’ll be bringing an unstated number of troops home next summer, as part of this “return on success.” We already know that’s patently false — some troops are coming home because Bush doesn’t have a choice. Gen. Petraeus admitted as much on Monday.
In one of my all-time favorite Bush lies, the president said last October that he and his administration have “never been” about “stay the course.” It was absurd then, but it’s even more ridiculous now. Last night was the quintessential stay-the-course, more-of-the-same speech.
Here’s the nut paragraph:
“General Petraeus also recommends that in December we begin transitioning to the next phase of our strategy in Iraq. As terrorists are defeated, civil society takes root, and the Iraqis assume more control over their own security, our mission in Iraq will evolve. Over time, our troops will shift from leading operations, to partnering with Iraqi forces, and eventually to overwatching those forces. As this transition in our mission takes place, our troops will focus on a more limited set of tasks, including counterterrorism operations and training, equipping, and supporting Iraqi forces.”
Now, Bush said this last night, but he also could have said the exact same thing earlier this year. Or last year. Or the year before that. Or even the year before that. Either the president hopes we all have very short memories, or he just doesn’t have anything else to offer. I suppose it’s probably a combination of both.
Slate’s Fred Kaplan described last night as “the worst speech he’s ever given on the war in Iraq, and that’s saying a lot. Every premise, every proposal, nearly every substantive point was sheer fiction. The only question is whether he was being deceptive or delusional.”
His fact-checking was fairly devastating, as was Tim Grieve’s and the AP’s, all of which dissected a speech in which the president managed, over the course of 17 minutes, to say almost nothing that was true.
And for what-it-all-means analysis, the NYT editorial summarized the fiasco nicely.
The White House insisted that President Bush had consulted intensively with his generals and adapted to changing circumstances. But no amount of smoke could obscure the truth: Mr. Bush has no strategy to end his disastrous war and no strategy for containing the chaos he unleashed.
Last night’s speech could have been given any day in the last four years — and was delivered a half-dozen times already. Despite Mr. Bush’s claim that he was offering a way for all Americans to “come together” on Iraq, he offered the same divisive policies — repackaged this time with the Orwellian slogan “return on success.”
Mr. Bush’s claim that things were going so well in Iraq that he could “accept” his generals’ recommendation for a “drawdown” of forces was a carnival barker’s come-on. The Army cannot sustain the 30,000 extra troops Mr. Bush sent to Iraq beyond mid-2008 without serious damage to its fighting ability. From the start, the president said that the increase would be temporary. That’s why he called it a “surge.”
I’m not sure what’s more disconcerting — the notion that the president believes what he said last night, or the notion that he expects us to.