The Times on Bush’s speech

Here’s a once-in-a lifetime event: I agree with almost every word of today’s New York Times editorial about President Bush’s speech on Iraq. Below is a sample. I especially like the line about Americans not needing to be convinced of Bush’s commitment to his idealized version of the war:

It has been obvious for months that Americans don’t believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn’t need to be convinced of Mr. Bush’s commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.

Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you’d have to have been watching cable news at midmorning on a weekday to catch him.

The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq,” which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can’t figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush’s speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything’s going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 01, 2005 08:32 AM | Send