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June 28, 2005

President Bush Confounds the Order of Things in the War on Terror

I just finished reading President Bush's speech at Fort Bragg, which the White House entitled "President Addresses Nation, Discusses Iraq, War on Terror." I was unable to hear it but I must honestly say that the President's speaking style drives me crazy and I would have read the speech before commenting on it anyway.

President Bush built the speech around an all too familiar anachronism. The legitimate battle against Al Qaeda is confused with the illegitimate war in Iraq. Before I go forward with my analysis of the speech let's get a few facts straight. First, it was Al Qaeda under Osama Bin Laden that attacked us on September 11, 2001 not Iraq. Second, at the time of that attack, Iraq was lead by a repressive dictator who did not support Al Qaeda and likely had no relationship with him and his group at all. While Saddam used Islam as a tool, he was a secular dictator not a religious fanatic. One could reasonably speculate that he feared religious fanatics but one need not adopt the speculation to understand that he had no relation with those who attached us. As Vice President Cheney told the NBC Today Show on June 18 of 2004, "We have never been able to prove that there was a connection there on 9/11" and as Thomas H. Kean (R), chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States said,

"What our staff statement found is there is no credible evidence that we can discover, after a long investigation, that Iraq and Saddam Hussein in any way were part of the attack on the United States."

As we move forward, remember, both the Vice President and the Commission found no credible evidence that Iraq or Hussein had anything to do with the attack on the United States. This is not a passing observation, it is at the very center of what was wrong with the Presidents speech this evening.

All of that being said the President mentioned September the 11th, 2001 five times in his speech: in the eight sentence (the second or third substantive sentence) and in the third from the last sentence. It was the centerpiece of the speech that was used to motivate every other idea that was presented.

The reason for our efforts in Iraq, according to the latest version as presented this evening was to hunt down the terrorists that are there. Let's be clear there are terrorists, even Al Qaeda, in Iraq today. In fact, it is likely there was a small Al Qaeda presence in the north of Iraq, in that part that Saddam did not control, even before our invasion. However, the terrorists we are now hunting down are there as a result of our invasion not as a cause of our invasion. And the anachronism lies at the very center of this fact: a fact that unbelievably, the administration, at least the Vice President, agrees with. The terrorists are now fighting in Iraq because we are.

So here is how the anachronism played out in President Bush's speech,

. . . foreign fighters in Iraq who have come from Saudi Arabia and Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and others. They are making common cause with criminal elements, Iraqi insurgents, and remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Notice that, except for the "criminal elements" all the others insurgents are a result of our invasion.

I found it interesting that Saddam, mentioned in the last quotation, was mentioned only one other time in the speech. The President said:

Under the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Shia and Kurds were brutally oppressed, and the vast majority of Sunni Arabs were also denied their basic rights, while senior regime officials enjoyed the privileges of unchecked power. The challenge facing Iraqis today is to put this past behind them, and come together to build a new Iraq that includes all of its people.

Two mentions for the man who only a few weeks ago was the whole reason for our being in Iraq. Now we are told that the reason is Onama Ben Laden.

Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate. Hear the words of Osama Bin Laden: "This Third World War is raging" in Iraq. "The whole world is watching this war."

I even think this is true. But remember, we invaded Iraq and Bin Laden and his followers no doubt see their activities in Iraq as defensive. We are the aggressor; with justification or not, we invade a Muslim country.

Those that listened to the speech also heard this,

The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September the 11th, if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi, and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like Bin Laden.

And this,

As German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said at the White House yesterday, "There can be no question a stable and democratic Iraq is in the vested interest of not just Germany, but also Europe."

Again, I think all this is true but whose fault is it that the world is now in this position? Ours.

I would like to address two other items from the speech. First, the President's discussion of why he feels not setting a deadline for withdrawal is important: He claimed that,

Setting an artificial timetable would send the wrong message to the Iraqis, who need to know that America will not leave before the job is done. It would send the wrong message to our troops, who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve. And it would send the wrong message to the enemy, who would know that all they have to do is to wait us out.

Believe it or not, I agree with him. Here's the problem, for all the rhetoric about strengthening the Iraqi forces to defend themselves and the country there does not appear to be any plan to make that happen. At least not any plan with a schedule attached. In all my years as a manager, I was never involved in a successful program that did not have a schedule with clear and understandable milestones. To be sure, those milestones were often missed but at any given time we knew where we were and what was yet to be done. Even if there is risk in making such a schedule known, having such a schedule is an all-important element of the process. I do not see the slightest hint that there is such a schedule for any aspect of the war to win the peace. I admit that the President has a problem in this area, if he told us he had such a plan, no one would believe him but that is the result of not telling the truth about Iraq from every beginning. If his credibility was in tact, he would not need to spell out the details and thereby compromise the plan.

Second, I want to discuss the claim that the President incorporated in these two sentences.

Across the broader Middle East, people are claiming their freedom. In the last few months, we've witnessed elections in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon. These elections are inspiring democratic reformers in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Let's look at the details. Yes, we have witnessed elections in Palestine and Lebanon but both these peoples have a history of holding elections, as does Egypt. The elections have not always been as open and fair as we might like but the traditions of holding elections are not new and are in no way the result of our activity in Iraq. Saudi Arabia has so far to travel that taking ant-sized steps will take generations to get them to anything we would call democracy.

Even the President's reference to Libya having given up its chemical and nuclear weapons programs are not related in any direct way to our invasion of Iraq. Qaddafy was well on his way to reconciliation with the US at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

So what should we do now? If it were politically possible, the President and the Vice President should be impeached for getting us into this and a manageable plan to save the situation should be put in place. Because I do not believe this is politically possible, I believe that we need to bring every bit of our collective political strength to making sure that the President and his cohorts stop lying about the situation in Iraq and its falsely alleged connection with 9/11 and present a plan for our complete extradition from Iraq in a way that will not precipitate a civil war. As Collin Powell is reported to have said, "You break it, you own it." We have broken it, we now have two obligations to the Iraqis and to the world with regard to Iraq. First, we need to admit to the world that the invasion of Iraq was one of the greatest errors in our history. Second, we need to spend a good deal of our wealth and manpower to make life save and peaceful for the country we violated.

I plan to update this post tomorrow with the opinions of other voices.

Update June 29, 2005 - Other Voices

There were so many people that commented on the President's speech last night that I can only offer a sample here.

President Bush's pep talk to the nation Tuesday night was a major disappointment. He again rewrote history by lumping together the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the need for war in Iraq, when, in fact, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda.

[snip]

Bush might be right to now put Iraq at the center of the "global war on terror," but it didn't have that status before the invasion. Al Qaeda flocked to Baghdad after the invasion and used Iraq as a rallying point for Muslims outraged by the U.S. invasion of an Arab nation. [Los Angeles Times editorial]


Iraq is broken and Bush owns it. As last night made clear, he will almost certainly have to fight the insurgency and American popular opinion over shifting sands for the remainder of his presidency. [Peter S. Canellos in the Boston Globe]
We did not expect Mr. Bush would apologize for the misinformation that helped lead us into this war, or for the catastrophic mistakes his team made in running the military operation. But we had hoped he would resist the temptation to raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks. We had hoped that he would seize the moment to tell the nation how he will define victory, and to give Americans a specific sense of how he intends to reach that goal - beyond repeating the same wishful scenario that he has been describing since the invasion. [New York Times editorial]
PRESIDENT BUSH sought last night to bolster slipping public support for the war in Iraq by connecting it, once again, to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to the war against terrorism. That connection is not spurious, even if Saddam Hussein was not a collaborator of al Qaeda: Clearly Iraq is now a prime battlefield for Islamic extremists, and success or failure there will do much to determine the outcome of the larger struggle against them. But Mr. Bush didn't explain how a war meant to remove a tyrant believed to wield weapons of mass destruction turned into a fight against Muslim militants, a transformation caused in part by his administration's many errors since Saddam Hussein's defeat more than two years ago. The president also didn't speak candidly enough about the primary mission the United States now has in Iraq, which is not "hunting down the terrorists" but constructing a stable government in spite of Iraq's sectarian divisions and violent resistance from the former ruling elite. It's harder to explain why Americans should die in such a complex and ambitious enterprise than in a fight with international terrorists, but that is the case Mr. Bush most needs to make. [Washington Post editorial]
ABC's Terry Moran just reported that the only time Bush got applause was in the middle of his speech when a White House advance team member started clapping all on their own in order to cajole the soldiers into clapping, which they dutifully did.

So even the applause was fake. [Americablog]

Hey, how about that Bush speech on Iraq? Lots of new stuff. I was stunned when he told us he thought Cheney was "off his rocker" (was that an age-ist crack?) for saying that insurgency was in its "last throes." And that bit about Rumsfeld and the Pentagon exaggerating--he didn't even say "overexaggerate"--the numbers of Iraqi troops that have been trained and equipped--damn powerful. He cautioned that Iraq might devolve into sectarian violence and that there "ain't much we can do about that." He said he would be happy to sit down with those Democrats and Republicans who have asked to set a timetable for withdrawal and hear them out. [Sarcastic take by David Corn on The Huffington Report, see his more sober analysis on The Nation]
President Bush took his magic act on the road last night. Unfortunately, the big finale–where he draws a curtain over September 11, and out pops Iraq–didn’t wow everyone. [The American Street]
"The central thrust of Bush’s argument last night for the war in Iraq was that "Iraq is the latest battlefield" in the war on terror. He stated the same case later in the speech: "Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate."

The fact that Iraq has BECOME a terrorist training ground is true. It wasn’t one before the invasion of Iraq." [emphasis in original, Think Progress]

And from a different prospective:

As I expected, the die-hard Bushies are patting GWB on the back for giving a "great speech," whenever they pause for a moment from congratulating themselves for electing such a superb President.

It was a horrible speech. In fact, it was a veiled announcement of surrender to terror, at least for the rest of Bush's so-called "watch." (Can the blind "watch" anything?) I will have considerably more to say on this sometime tomorrow. First hint: we will be doing nothing about Syria, Iran, or Saudi Arabia as long as Bush is President. So terrorists will continue to have access to regime-sponsored training, financing, shelter, operations experties [sic], leadership, and weapons, all the way up to WMD and even nuclear technology. [Daily Pundit]

Posted by DuaneSmith at June 28, 2005 09:25 PM | Read more on Current Events |

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