Bush's Big Iraq Speech - Anticipation and Reaction

No chance of that, I'm guessing. And remember, this is the first of six speeches, which I'm sure are also meant to function as de facto campaign speeches as well.

Caption this photo!

http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/24/bush.iraq/top.bush.sunday.ap.jpg

"Heck, don't tell me about torture, them new razors they got now oughta be considered W.M.D.'s. KnowwhatI'msayin'Vern." 

Whoa dude. It totally looks like my hand is melting.

omg my heart skipped a beat twice there as he tried to pronounce Abu Gharib

Muh-na-muh-na

I see he's planning on demolishing Abu Gharib, which seems like a pretty smart gesture.)

Thank you, Senator Obvious...your statement has been duly noted.

can we trade lieberman for either mccain or chuck hagel?

U.S. Seems Ready to Allow Iraqi Militias to Keep Arms
By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: May 25, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 24 — With only weeks to go until an Iraqi government takes over, American officials have failed to disarm the tens of thousands of fighters in private militias deployed almost exclusively along ethnic and religious lines.

In the 15 months since the fall of Saddam Hussein, American officials have declared repeatedly that they would disband the private militias, recognizing that their narrow, sectarian interests could threaten a unified and democratic Iraqi state.

But with the sharp deterioration of the security situation in recent months, American officials appear to have resigned themselves to working with militias in Falluja, Baghdad and elsewhere even as American soldiers die fighting them in street battles in Karbala and Najaf.

Boy, that nation building, I tell ya.

Apparently Bush spent multiple hours rehearsing this speech today. I suspect that he mispronounced this name so many times and his handlers coached him on it so many times that, when he reached Abu Ghraib in the speech all he could do was freeze up. I imagine his brain was scurrying around frantically, thinking - 'oh my god oh my god what was it my mouth was supposed to do again??!?'

Having successfully sweated his way through the Big Pause, he was able confidently to stride onward and immediately forget himself and say "Abu Garam" about three seconds later. I'm sure his speech coaches about wet themselves.

In the big picture, it was nothing. It only stands out because the rest of the speech was so very nearly empty of signifigance that there was nothing there to think about. Bush gave his Iraq policy a resounding vote of confidence.

Seems like a good moment to go back and dredge up a raft full of smug, smirking Bush quotes on the U.N.'s irrelevance. These should be wadded up and hurled at him during speeches on Iraq, in lieu of rotten vegetables.

BBC:

If there was any expectation that Mr Bush would tone down his rhetoric about a broader vision of a democratic and stable Iraq as a central pillar of a more stable Middle East, Mr Bush's actual words, if anything reinforced that rationale.

Perhaps he felt he had to, given that recent opinion polls have suggested a majority of Americans now question whether the Iraq war was worth it.

Iraq, Mr Bush underscored, is central to the war on terrorism, it was to make the United States a safer place, and America and the world would be safer "when all Middle Eastern peoples are finally allowed to live and think and work and worship as free men and women".

One important symbolic announcement from the President was the proposal to demolish Abu Ghraib prison.

But the critics are likely to argue that that is too little, too late.

Madeline Albright via CNN:

Well, he laid out five points, but they raise as many questions as he provided ideas about.

First of all, there's still no guarantee that the Iraqi people will accept whatever interim government -- the sovereignty that we are going to turn over something to somebody -- but we're not clear yet what is what.

The other question is whether the security will really be adequate because [these are] the same points that were made before: the Americans will train the Iraqis. How long will that take?

Will there be help, in terms of the reconstruction of Iraq? Where will it come from? Who will do it? We have to let contracts [go] to somebody other than American companies.

Will there, in fact, be international assistance, generally, on providing a multi-national force? And will these elections really take place?

So there are many, many questions, and I don't think there was anything particularly new. It was a little bit more organized than the ideas that we've heard before. And I'm glad that the president decided he had to talk to the American people.

But there is no timeline. And just because the president says it is so, doesn't mean that it really is based in reality. So I think there are a lot more questions that we still have to answer.

NY Times:

With so much of what is happening in Iraq beyond Mr. Bush's control, the five-part plan for stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq that he outlined Monday night may not unfold in the orderly manner he described.

"Did this prepare the American people for the fact that Iraqis might make different choices, that Iraq could devolve into a civil war, that what we're doing there is much less popular in Iraq than the president implies, and did he look at the downside rather than the upside?" asked Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The answer is no."

Mr. Bush has a plan, Mr. Cordesman said, but "it's very easy to see the plan unravel because it's not so much dependent on the quality of our plan but on the dynamics of Iraq's internal politics."

Mr. Bush made only one concrete concession to the grim reality of the past few weeks, setting out a plan to build a new high-security prison and tear down Abu Ghraib, the jail where some Iraqi prisoners were abused by their American captors and where Mr. Hussein's government had earlier tortured and killed untold numbers of its own citizens.

Otherwise, Mr. Bush stuck to the basic approach he has settled on over the past several months, betting that his steady-on strategy would ultimately be judged resolute rather than inflexible or unrealistic. He again tied what is happening in Iraq to the broader war on terror, and he warned that the attacks in Iraq would not end with the planned handover of sovereignty in five weeks, but he was optimistic about the final outcome.

"There are difficult days ahead and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic," Mr. Bush said. "Yet our coalition is strong. Our efforts are focused and unrelenting and no power of the enemy will stop Iraq's progress."

If the five-point approach he set out covered all the bases on paper, it still risked appearing detached from the violence and chaos that has threatened to engulf Iraq and extract a heavy political price from Mr. Bush and his fellow Republicans at home. Coming into the address, Mr. Bush was clearly under pressure from within his own party as well as from Democrats to go beyond his usual counseling of patience and fortitude.

LA Times:

President Bush offered Monday the most detailed explanation of his plan for moving Iraq from chaos to independence, increasing the pressure on his Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry, to fill in an alternative vision for stabilizing the troubled country.

Bush did not offer any new initiatives — apart from a largely symbolic promise to tear down Abu Ghraib prison, where American soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners — or set a date for the withdrawal of American troops.

But he presented, step by step, moves for vesting sovereignty in a new Iraqi government and ending the American-led occupation.

The address clearly seemed aimed at what polls show is one of Bush's principal threats in the election: the growing sense among Americans that he does not have a clear plan for success in Iraq.

Tom Shales, wearing a TV critic/political hat:

It is doubtful Bush changed millions of minds with last night's speech, which was delivered in the extremely friendly surroundings of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., but without much energy or urgency. Bush didn't look terribly convinced by his own argument that the situation in Iraq is improving, nor did he appear all that thrilled by his five-point plan to bring about "Iraqi freedom" in the future.

"We're makin' progress," Bush said in his colloquial way. "You're makin' speeches," a skeptic might justifiably have retorted.

--

While Bush's oratorical prowess has never been awe-inspiring -- he's inferior even to his father as a galvanizer -- he has still, to a large degree, mastered the basics of TV speechmaking -- short, punchy sentences for the most part, with clarity given precedence over emotional eloquence. Last night's speech was clear enough but also dry and dispirited. Not even the military audience gave the impression of being enraptured, and the speech was interrupted only a few times for applause -- once when Bush praised the work of the coalition troops, mostly American, once when he said "terrorists will not determine the future of Iraq," and so on.

Bush appeared to be using three prompting devices: one to his left, one to his right and one in the center, mounted on the camera used for the head-on shot. Bush was best when relying on that camera. When he looked to his right or left to read the speech, he seemed to be peering far into the distance, certainly not making contact with viewers at home. It's not as if the hall is so cavernous that Bush had to reach people in remote mezzanines and balconies.

Besides, it's the folks at home who matter, the audience Bush really needs to impress. It's unlikely he did that last night. In addition to a generally lackluster delivery, Bush stumbled over the crucial name Abu Ghraib, the now infamous prison where grisly torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops has become an international scandal as well as an enormous embarrassment to the Bush administration.

Bush pledged to build a nice new prison and tear down Abu Ghraib when it's completed.

Fox News:

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said the president had done a great job laying out a vision that the country can get behind. He also admonished Republicans who have been backsliding in their support for the president.

"This is important enough for Americans to die for, it's important enough for us to stick together as a party and support our commander-in-chief," King told Fox News. "Any Republican who was not won over really wasn't listening or didn't want to listen."

Now is a pivotal time in Iraq and the direction it heads may determine the president's re-election. Bush's approval ratings have sunk, according to some polls, to the lowest point of his presidency. Skepticism, mixed with fear of moving down an untraveled path in Iraq, has been rising among Iraqis and Americans.

But at least one analyst said that Bush's performance and his plan may give some perspective for perspiring observers.

"One of the very important messages that he was trying to send to American voters was patience and perseverance. You heard him warn: 'There will be more chaos, there will be more violence, stick with me, stick with this,'" said Washington Post national correspondent Ceci Connelly.

"I thought the president really did lay out his plan very well, and I think those critics who said he didn't have a plan knew he had one, they just didn't like that plan," said Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes. But Barnes said Bush needs to do more to answer the security questions.

More to the point, who thought it was a good idea to promise Iraqis a new prison? I know, I know, trying to recover from the scandal, but what a fucking tone-deaf clueless way to do it: "Don't worry, we will no longer detain you for unspecified periods of time in Saddam's grotty old moldy dungeon. We will accord you the same fluorescent lighting, steel bunks, and persistent odor of bleach unsuccessfully trying to mask the stench of shit, vomit and horrible cafeteria food that are already enjoyed by prisoners across America!" Knocking down Abu Ghraib is all well and good, but it's hardly something to be crowing about under the circumstances.

What an ass.

With a bit of luck, 90% of the Coalition of the Killing will be serially voted out this year.

In effect, the president said his current plan is good enough to win, and he set out to rally Americans to his cause with rousing language that placed the conflict in Iraq in the context of the larger, more popular battle against terrorism.

"Our terrorist enemies have a vision that guides and explains all their varied acts of murder," Bush said. "They seek to impose Taliban-like rule, country by country, across the greater Middle East." He asserted that extremists now see Iraq as "the central front in the war on terror."

Still, the questions left unanswered last night could continue to make the administration vulnerable to criticism. "The more explicit and precise, the better. A lot of rhetoric without altering the substance will not do," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, who has been critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. "What's involved is basically American credibility."

The president's soothing recitation of policy particulars offered few benchmarks or specifics on the most sensitive issues, such as the relationship between the Iraqi government to be installed July 1 and the U.S.-led coalition troops that are scheduled to remain in Iraq to provide basic security -- and what happens if Iraqis do not want foreign forces to launch new offensives. That issue underscores the potential controversies even after the occupation ends.

I wonder why :-/

I actually fell asleep around the middle of Bush's speech.

And to think, this shining moment occured six months before an election when US voters had the opportunity to vote Bush out of office, and we didn't! Our national shame is a bottomless pit.