President Bush's Speech at Fort Bragg: More of the Same

Okay, I know the phrase more of the same isn't original.

Okay, I know it's easy to rip into this president and savage the poor man.

Okay, I know I shouldn't have called him a fucking donkey in a previous article. He's a foolish man, not a fucking donkey.

Now let's consider the title of this article, which is descriptive enough. The commentary on Bush's speech this morning uses the word strategy a lot. People were looking for a strategy from the president: a strategy for winning the war in Iraq, a strategy for winning the war against our enemies beyond Iraq. What did we hear instead? To sum it up, he said: I didn't have a strategy for winning the peace going into this conflict, and I don't have one now. Well I never liked the phrase winning the peace very much, but it seems appropriate enough now. Whatever you call the last two years - it's certainly not peace - it's clear the White House had no strategy for what to do after the first three weeks of fighting. Ever since they removed Hussein's regime from power and replaced it with near anarchy, they have improvised. Improvisation is not always a bad thing, but two things are obvious: the crew in the White House is not good at it, and this conflict does require a good strategy, not improvisation.

I heard a Brit on the radio yesterday. The Brits seem to be the only ones who can analyze this conflict: the debate here seems unable to rise above riffs on partisan bickering. The Democrats and Republicans go at it in Washington, and the rest of the discussion in the media seems to echo what's happening there. We should all go to London for a few weeks and find out what they're saying. I'd like to summarize some of the ideas expressed during the radio show, but I don't have time now.

So let's return to Bush's speech. Why can't this gentleman talk like he has a grasp on reality? The surest sign that he's still out there in fantasy land is his use of the phrase clear path. He actually sees a clear path to success in Iraq? And he thinks his speech showed that clear path to the rest of us? His credibility is low enough to begin with, but clear path is in there with last throes for believability. Can he possibly know how foolish he sounds when he talks like that, after all the other foolish things he has said? Who writes this stuff for him? Do his speechwriters know how bad they're making him look? We expect a president's remarks to be grounded. This president is oddly practical in what he says: figure out what's likely to go over well, and say it as seriously as possible. But you can't keep treating people like idiots and expect to get away with it over and over again. After a while people understand that you actually don't have anything valuable to say.

One thing did come out in the president's speech. He still thinks that the best way to defeat Al Qaeda is to defeat them in Iraq. From the evidence in the speech, he has given no thought whatever to the prosecution of this war after the conflict in Iraq is over. Democracy and stability in Iraq will lead to democracy and stability in the entire region. With freedom throughout the Middle East, the swamp, as we say, will dry up, and Al Qaeda won't be able to survive. So if we can win the war in Iraq, we'll win the larger war. Conversely, if we lose the war in Iraq, we'll lose the larger war.

This argument doesn't hold. President Bush said in his speech, "When people write the history of our time...." Well that's not a bad way to think. The president said that future generations will be grateful that we stood for freedom in Iraq, that we held our ground against the terrorists. I believe on the contrary that the president led his country into the largest strategic mistake it has ever made. Future generations will see this war as the turning point: the point when our irreversible decline began. That's not to say that Al Qaeda will win the war. We may well win it eventually. But if we do win the war, it won't be because we went to war in Iraq. Even if democracy spreads from Baghdad to Islamabad in the east and to Tripoli in the West, Al Qaeda can still do fine. What Bush really means when he refers to democracy in the Middle East is a regional consensus about basic values that are friendly to the West. And he's not going to get that by doing what he's doing in Iraq.

The last point is that if even if we win the war in Iraq, and win the war against Al Qaeda, we'll still lose our position of leadership in the world. It took nearly two generations to recover from our Vietnam debacle, and at that time the poor Soviet Union was our only competitor. Now we are involved in a debacle much worse than Vietnam - not in terms of lives lost but in terms of our position of leadership - and our primary competitor is China. China is a wealthy country now, and getting wealthier. China is a powerful country now, and getting stronger. China is a respected country now, and becoming more admired with each passing month. While our soldiers get blown up by roadside bombs, picked off by snipers, ripped to pieces by car bombs, and become altogether demoralized because they don't see a clear purpose to what they're doing, China's waiting patiently. It'll take our place without ever having to fight us.

President Bush said that in the past, whether during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 or the Civil War, we have prevailed because we were steadfast in the fight and did not lose our way. We lost our way in the war against Al Qaeda when we invaded Iraq. President Bush will not recognize that he's responsible for that. He will not recognize that future generations will blame him for a huge misjudgment, no matter how the war in Iraq turns out in its particulars. Nothing President Bush does can redeem this mistake. The speech he made last night confirms that: it confirms that he has no clear vision of the future, no practical goals or realistic plans to reach them, no feel for the kind of situation we're in, and no ability to think outside the categories he's constructed for himself. Failure doesn't mean anything for someone like that. It doesn't lead him to rethink his actions in the past, his policies in the present, or his plans for the future. He just insists that he's been doing the right thing, and that's that.

President Bush said in the speech that he told us shortly after the September 11 attacks that the road would be hard: the fight would require much sacrifice and take a long time, with the outcome uncertain while we are in the midst of it. Then he made the connection between the war against Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq even tighter than ever. The current war is an essential phase of the larger war he talked about when he addressed the nation after September 11. I think some people still believe that. They won't accept that their president could make such a gargantuan mistake. But he did. What if Franklin Roosevelt had declared that December 7, 1941, was a day that would "live in infamy," then had sent an invasion force across the Rio Grande to overthrow the government in Mexico City? What would future generations say about that? They could not understand incompetence on that scale. The march of folly, Barbara Tuchman called it. President Bush isn't the first leader in history to do something so foolish, but he's the first American leader to do it.

The Brit on the radio said we need to realize how much is at stake here. We could have a civil war in Iraq that makes the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s look like a "picnic for teddy bears." If you want to see how bad it can get, look to the warfare in Zaire that ensued shortly after the genocide in Rwanda. The Shia and the Kurds still have armed militias that can contest the authority of the forces we are training. Syria, Iran, Turkey, Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, and Sunnis in and out of Iraq all have a high level of interest in the conflict that's developing in the central, northern, and western provinces of Iraq. We could easily become spectators to a civil war that our government argued would occur only if we left. The Brit on the radio is correct: we have a lot to lose here, and we've only seen the beginning.

So the people who call for a reasonable, realistic plan for Iraq are correct. We need a plan that meets the requirements of the situation. Instead we hear two extremes in the debate in Washington. In one corner is President Bush's position: stay the course until the Iraqis can take over security for themselves. In the other corner is the Democrats' position: set a timetable for withdrawal, which really means: tell us you'll begin drawing down our troops in 2006, and once you've started, pull out most of them as quickly as you can. These two positions do not represent a useful debate about our future policy. Focusing on when the troops come home doesn't do us much good now. Our focus has to be on what we want our troops to accomplish over there, and how are they going to accomplish it. To suggest that our goals are clear and our methods effective is just stupid. No one who looks at our government's record of performance in Iraq over the last two years could argue that. The government has improvised, and the results speak for themselves.

So here's the first thing we have to do to resolve the mess, and to bring about an end to the civil war that has already started in Iraq. We need to go to the international community and say that we made a terrible mistake when we invaded Iraq. We need to explain openly why it was a mistake and apologize for it. And we need to ask for assistance to overcome the consequences of our mistake. A big part of our mistake was to go our own way, without the international community. If we acknowledge that mistake openly, we'll get some tentative support from countries that have withheld it. They won't send troops to Iraq, but they will help us.

We need to say these things in the United Nations, the forum for the international community. We need to ask for help from the United Nations in Iraq. In fact, we need to turn the entire civil war in Iraq over to the UN. The standard reply to that suggestion now is that doing such a thing would be worse than defeat. The United Nations is corrupt: the oil for food scandal proves it. Well, I can write more on the United Nations another time. Right now, I'll hold with the argument that the United Nations is the only body that can bring about an end to the civil war in Iraq in a way that serves the aspirations of the Iraqi people - the well meaning citizens of Iraq who want to live in peace and freedom from fear.

Naturally President Bush is not going to do such a thing. That's why the election last November was so discouraging. It assured four additional years of speeches like the one we heard last night. The end of our difficulties and the beginning of success is new leadership. That was our hope before the presidential election, and it's our hope now. The difference now is that we have three and a half years to go in President Bush's second term. That's a long time.

Meanwhile, it does seem we've come closer to a tipping point here. As Secretary Rumsfeld and General Casey give ever more frequent press conferences, it's a sign that they're concerned about the opposition they face here in the United States. That opposition needs as much vigor as it can muster. Everyone who opposes the government's policy in Iraq has to press the advantage now. Hearten your congressmen. Give them a good reason to speak for you on this issue. Make them see that you regard this issue as the most important one on the government's agenda. Make them see how much is at stake here. We should not be steadfast in a mistaken war in Iraq, but we should be steadfast in the love we have for our country. In this time of great trouble, when we are losing brave men and women every day in Iraq, we have to stand by our country and help her find her way again. That means we have to show President Bush that we reject his leadership. We'll find our own way.