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Bush's mission
implausible
By Ian Williams
For
several
years after September 11, 2001, President George
W Bush's major pronouncements were often made in
military bases in front of serried uniformed ranks
unlikely to heckle or catcall. On 
each occasion he usually wore some
military garb, giving rise to the quip that he was
seen in uniform more often than Fidel Castro.
So it was surprising and not very astute
for him to give a major policy speech at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina on Tuesday night. The base
is named after a Confederate general and a year
ago claimed to have assembled a "team to capture
deserters". On this occasion at least, the
president eschewed any visible item of military
uniform.
However, the martial background
of Fort Bragg dangerously recalled the best
backdrop never to be used in a political campaign
–when weeks after the war had started the
president landed in full pilot's outfit on the
aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. The ship
sported a huge banner declaring "Mission
Accomplished". By the time of the election, it was
of course clear that the declaration was more than
a little optimistic. Two years later, it is the
last thing he wants to remind people about.
But the discipline of this military
audience was not matched by the civilian members
of his administration. In the few days before,
Vice President Dick Cheney insisted that the Iraqi
insurgents were on the brink of defeat, while
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was planning for
12 more years of war.
The president's
advisors say he was offering clarity. There is
little sign of it, apart from a depressing
endorsement of Rumsfeld's pessimism. He asked
himself whether the war was worth it, and answered
himself that "it is worth it, and it is vital to
the future security of our country". In contrast,
polls show that Americans are dubious about the
president, about his motivations for the war and
whether it was a good thing.
Even the
polls that show that most Americans oppose an
immediate pullout from Iraq offer scant comfort.
The attitude seems to be regretful, "We broke it,
so it's our job to fix it," a view elaborated by
several veterans' groups who opposed the war, but
do not want to leave ordinary Iraqis to the tender
mercies of the forces the invasion has attracted
and unleashed. That does not amount to ringing
endorsement of the presidential record.
Certainly, voters are in a more
questioning mode now, and they are far less likely
to accept the president's reassertion, or rather
reimplication, that Saddam Hussein was behind
September 11.
His speech was carefully
constructed. If you parse it grammatically, you
will not see a direct statement that Saddam was
behind September 11. But most of the audience are
not grammarians and semanticists. That was
certainly the clear, and essentially dishonest,
reason he offered for the war. However, there was
no evidence then, and he produced none now, to
prove the allegation.
When he said "Our
mission in Iraq is clear. We're hunting down the
terrorists," increasing numbers of Americans are
aware that the "terrorists" are actually flocking
to Iraq because of the American invasion, not
because they were there earlier.
Two years
ago, he could get away with that more easily. In
the run-up to the invasion, the nightly triptych
of the TV screens, the pictures of Osama bin
Laden, the burning World Trade Center and Saddam
all under the title "War on Terror" could persuade
70% of Americans. But it has been a long time
since bin Laden has been shown on television: it
could remind people that he has not been found and
that Saddam is no substitute.
However,
adding to his troubles, the "Downing Street memos"
- the documents from Britain which confirmed the
suspicions of many that the war had been decided
on long before it was launched, have moved from
the Internet readers of the British press into
mainstream American newspapers, with open
discussions.
The speech mentioned weapons
of mass destruction in Libya that were given up
after the war. But no more mentioned the absence
of them in Iraq than it did the strong opinion of
many foreign-policy experts that the war was in
fact the reason why North Korea now has them.
The appeal to the troops did allow the
president to invoke the coming Independence Day
celebrations and appeal to patriotism. "This
fourth of July, I ask you to find a way to thank
the men and women defending our freedom - by
flying the flag, sending a letter to our troops in
the field, or helping the military family down the
street. The Department of Defense has set up a
website - AmericaSupportsYou.mil. You can go there
to learn about private efforts in your own
community."
It does not take too much
cynicism to foresee the Republican media trying to
sweep up a wave of demonstrative patriotism in the
next few days, hoping that an appeal to
"support-our-troops" sentiment will drown out
rational questions about why they were put in
harm's way to begin with.
Perhaps there is
no better gauge than recruitment figures. The
military is losing experienced people who are not
re-enlisting. They are failing to meet their
recruitment quotas, despite widely reported
lowered standards and unprecedented activism by
recruiters in schools and colleges.
Originally coy about carrying the speech,
the networks cancelled some reruns to run it live,
persuaded by the White House press office that
there was a major policy statement coming. There
wasn't. And Bush probably did himself no favors by
broadcasting a pep talk intended for troops
already committed to action to much more skeptical
civilians.
In a way, his most remarkable
achievement, with his social security reform dead
in the water, his United Nations
ambassador-designate held hostage by the Senate,
and the continuing maelstrom in Iraq, is to look
like a lame-duck president only six months into
his second term.
Ian Williams is
author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military
Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books,
New York.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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