President Bush ventured out of his bubble yesterday to speak to the midshipmen at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis to deliver what was billed as a "major address" on Iraq. Anyone expecting actual developments, such as a plan for a phased withdrawal, a change in strategy or anything else would have been sorely disappointed. What we instead got was yet another robotic recitation of our "goals" in Iraq, while glossing over the pesky details of just how we are supposed to get there. It was really just more of the same - more macho slogans ("I will settle for nothing less than complete victory"), more false comparisons to World War II ("free nations came together to fight the ideology of fascism, and freedom prevailed") and more dishonest links to 9/11 ("the terrorists in Iraq share the same ideology as the terrorists who struck the United States on September the 11th"). As to why American men and women are still fighting and dying in Iraq two and a half years after we supposedly liberated the place - that one went unanswered.
There was no mention of the increasing sectarian violence, no mention of the insurgent penetration of the fledgling Iraqi army, no mention of the tiny fraction of supposedly trained troops who can actually carry out operations by themselves, no mention of the brewing civil war. Nor was there any mention of former US-installed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's comment that "people are doing the same as [in] Saddam's time and worse," that all Iraqi factions issued a joint call for an American withdrawal, nor their statement that it's permissible to attack occupation forces.
In short, it was a blatant rehash of the same "stay the course" speech Bush keeps delivering. Indeed, he didn't even have to show up to deliver this one; all he really had to do was send a cardboard cutout and a tape player.
Along with this exercise in repetition, the White House also released its "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," inviting questions on why it took so long to come up with a strategy which really should have been done in the first place. In his speech, Bush called it "an unclassified version of the strategy we've been pursuing in Iraq," but there's one problem: it's not a strategy, it's just a hodgepodge of the same old talking points. Among the rhetoric can be found such gems as "failure is not an option," "the terrorists, Saddamists, and rejectionists...can win only if we surrender," and, just to be sure people get it, "our strategy for victory is clear."
(Almost lost in the hoopla over the President's latest playback, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the Pentagon, working with a PR firm called the Lincoln Group, regularly pays Iraqi newspapers to run American-written propaganda stories under their own reporters' bylines. Among such articles are ones titled "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism" and "The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq." In a particularly delicious bit of irony, the scheme was unmasked just as the State Department is training Iraqi reporters in journalism and media ethics.)
The Bush Administration apparently thinks that their poll numbers are in the toilet not because the American people disapprove of what they're doing, but because they haven't made a good enough sales pitch. The detachment from reality this displays is disturbing. How can you convince people to change course when they're so confident in what they're doing they have no idea that it's causing nothing but disaster?
Fortunately, Republicans in Congress are starting to listen even if the White House won't. Even Democrats are starting to timidly show a tiny amount of spine. Contact your Senators and Representative and tell them we won't stand for more of the same. We need to get out of Iraq, and the sooner the better.
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