Bush's Military Speech

If there was one theme to the speech Bush gave tonight, it is that he has no clue. That goes both for what is happening on the ground in Iraq and what is coming out of his own mouth. If there were two themes, the second one is that he is going to do whatever he wants to do and we will not leave Iraq as long as he is president.

It was nice to hear Bush admit that the mistakes lie with him, but it appears that will not stop him from perpetrating more of them. He spoke out of both sides of his mouth when he said that we cannot continue to stand in stead of the Iraqis and they must fight for Iraq but then countered that we cannot abandon them; to do so would be to feed the cycle of violence. I can see he is already getting ready to pin the blame on whomever - probably a Democrat - finally withdraws our troops from Iraq. Only then will the entire American newsmedia fully report the extent to which Iraq is fucked up, and Republicans will blame Democrats.

Bush continued to place a large part of the blame on Al-Qaeda. He does not understand that Iraq is already in a civil war and, while he may not be totally oblivious to the Sunni/Shi'a nature of the conflict, he does not grasp the more global implications of the policies he is pursuing. He willfully ignored the will of 88% of the people and his top military commanders. And yes, he invoked 9/11.

The two most disturbing things I saw were the unintentional but glaring comparisons he made to Vietnam. First was the escalation. Bush claimed that the mistake we made was wiping out the insurgents and then leaving the areas, as opposed to sticking around to make sure they were gone. This is eerily similar to President Johnson's call for more troops in Vietnam. It only struck me so vividly because I watched the speech Senator Kennedy gave yesterday, in which he laid out the same exact parallel and Johnson quote. Second was the need to secure Iraq's borders, specifically in regard to Syria and Iran. This smacks straight out of Kissinger's Cambodian playbook - yes, Bush was meetingly with Kissinger very recently - except make no mistake that expanding the war to Iran is countless times more dangerous and stupid than Cambodia. VC are crossing the border into Cambodia! We have to stop them there too! I will check in for a blog roundup tomorrow, but I am fairly certain I am not the only one who caught this.

As an aside, he seems to have picked up a little lisp since the last time I heard him speak. I wonder what gives.

Update: The most gratifying part of the speech was where Bush mentioned building bipartisan support and Joe Lieberman right next to each other. I know Bush still thinks of Lieberman as a Democrat, but someone should remind him that Lieberman can no longer claim to speak for Democrats. Even though we lost the general in CT, we accomplished a great feat by kicking Joe out of the party. It is already paying dividends.