What Bush seems to be saying, and what he’s really saying

In a speech in Salt Lake City, President Bush said, “We will accept nothing less than total victory over the terrorists and their hateful ideology. Iraq is a central front in the war on terror.” But in the same speech,

Mr. Bush reiterated that American soldiers will come home when Iraqi security forces are capable of defending the country against the terrorist insurgency.

“As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down,” the president said. “And when Iraqi forces can defend their freedom by taking on more and more of the fight to the enemy, our troops will come home with the honor they have earned.”

Oh. So we’re not going to defeat the terrorist insurgency in Iraq. We’re just going to hand this unfinished job over to the Iraqis. Furthermore, the unfinished job we’re handing over to the Iraqis is not the unfinished job of defeating the terrorist insurgency, but the unfinished job of “defending” Iraq from the undefeated terrorist insurgency.

So: Bush calls Iraq a central front in the war on terror. Bush vows “total victory” by the U.S. in this war. But the actual steps Bush outlines do not add up to U.S. victory over terror but U.S. retreat before terror, or, at best, a holding of the line by our Iraqi surrogates, backed by us. We are not engaged in an effort aimed at the total defeat of terror. We are engaged in a complex, duplicitous process of managing terror.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 23, 2005 08:44 AM | Send