The President's Big Speech

Here's a link to the speech, if you missed it (as I did). A couple of random thoughts.

The President continues to link 9/11 to Iraq. Obviously nobody's proven a direct link, and it's very frustrating to some to hear the president making this connection. But, if I understand him correctly, the President may not see a direct link, but an indirect link.

Still, given what we know about the build up to this war, it's clear that the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq regardless of what happened. Kind of like that old saw about Bush's economic policy ("We have a surplus and the economy is going great; thus we should give out tax cuts." "We have a deficit and the economy is stalling; thus we should give out tax cuts.")

There's also the question of how much sovereignty the new Iraqi government is going to have if we continue to occupy that country, and they have no control over our comings and goings. The real power of the new Iraqi government will not be the support of the people, but ability to influence the American occupiers. Which is, in the long term, going to drain legitimacy from the new government like a sieve.

The New York Times has a good assessment I think.

"It's regrettable that this president is never going to admit any shortcomings, much less failure. That's an aspect of Mr. Bush's character that we have to live with. But we cannot live without a serious plan for doing more than just getting through the June 30 transition and then muddling along until the November elections in the United States. Mr. Bush has yet to come up with a realistic way to internationalize the military operation and to get Iraq's political groups beyond their current game of jockeying for power and into a real process of drafting a workable constitution."

There were things to like in President Bush's speech, but there were far more generalities than specifics. One might argue that this contrasts more or less equitably with his democratic rival, John Kerry. The difference is that Kerry has provided more specifics, and, more to the point, he's not the President now. Whatever we may think of President Bush as a candidate, he is, in fact, the current president. And therefore he's responsible for running our campaign against terrorism. So it's more of a problem when he fails to provide specifics.