Posted on 01/09/2007 8:46:18 AM PST by Reagan Man
Whenever a president in crisis or near crisis goes on television or stands before Congress to deliver a State of the Union address that is destined to be all but forgotten in a matter of days or weeks, commentators almost reflexively and usually inaccurately describe the pending performance as “the most important of his presidency.”
Well, they’re describing this week’s George W. Bush speech that way, and this time they’re dead right.
The future of his presidency and his ability to take the steps he believes essential to fulfilling his obligation to protect and defend the people who have twice elected him will be on the line. Bush will have to convince a skeptical nation that the Iraq war makes sense from the standpoint of this nation’s vital security interests; that those young Americans who have died or will die before this war ends have been placed in harm’s way for sound reasons; and that the sacrifices they are making will in some way enhance the safety of this country.
In other words, when he’s finished, people are going to have to turn to each other and say that terrible as it may be, the Iraq war is worth fighting: that our enemies must be stopped there now because it will be far costlier to fight and stop them somewhere else later. Citizens will have to believe Bush is being straight and to conclude from his words that he, his advisers and the U.S. military can beat our enemies on the ground in Iraq without having to contend with suicide bombers and snipers for years or, as he has hinted in the past, for decades.
This will be no easy task—even if Bush does have such a plan—because he has little credibility left on Iraq itself. The American public has heard too many different and conflicting reasons for our initial invasion. They no longer know whether blood is being shed there as part of the so-called “war on terror,” because the late Saddam Hussein was a thug whose people we somehow had to liberate, or because the United States is responsible for bringing “democracy” to the region.
Sure, the average voter is glad Hussein is gone and would be delighted if the Iraqi people opted for democracy, but the man on the street can’t see any reason why Americans should suffer to make Iraq safe for Iraqis. They’re far more interested in hearing how the sacrifices Americans are making there are making the world safer for Americans. And that’s something they haven’t been hearing.
The bottom line is that few Americans can really say who or what we’re fighting in Iraq and it just doesn’t matter all that much what the outcome is when we’re simply being ground up as part of a civil, religious or sectarian war, the outcome of which might be important to Iraq and even her neighbors, but doesn’t matter all that much to us.
The president this week has to connect the dots for a skeptical public. He has to convince them that success in the Middle East will matter and that the cost of failure may be unacceptably high. If he manages that, he’ll be half way home.
Then he has to explain why shipping even more Americans into war is going to make a difference. The way in which the so-called surge has been fairly or unfairly portrayed almost forces one to ask why dumping more young men and women into a disastrous mess will do anything but make it worse. He has to not only convince the public that he has a plan, but that it makes sense and might even work because right now most Americans don’t think anyone in the White House or anywhere else has anything that could even pass for a plan.
As commander-in-chief, Bush can and will commit more troops as he has been saying he will. The Democrats on the Hill will yell and scream about him doing it, but they won’t make any real effort to stop him because they know that if he ups the ante in Iraq and fails, he and the party he leads are in more trouble than they’ll be able to handle. Moreover, if Bush happens to be right about the consequences of a failure in Iraq, the Democrats don’t want their fingerprints on that failure.
In staking his future on committing still more troops in an incredibly unpopular war, President Bush is a little like the poker player who finds himself losing gradually and decides to stake everything on the next card he draws by going “all in.” If the right card comes up, he’ll go home a winner, but if it doesn’t it’s all over.
George W. Bush better hope he draws the card he’s going to need to win, because he is “all in.”
[David Keene is the chairman of the American Conservative Union and a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a Washington, D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm.]
I've heard this "most important" speech so many times my ears are glazed over.
By the time this is all over I suspect the Bush administration will have done such a thorough job wrecking its credibility that Osama bin Laden will be able to win the White House as a Democrat in 2008.
Yea OK and after this last chance President Bush will have just as much last chance time as the Democrat's 100 hours.
I expect that Bush will offer a little something for everyone. The so-called "troop surge" is doing a great job politically by "bringing on" the fight over defunding the troops and forcing the Democrats to "cut and run" just like Republicans always said they'd do.
Most people on the left wants him to fold his hand and walk away. Ain't gonna happen because he's hold all the aces and the Iranians are looking for cards up their sleeves. In fact, the joker card is the only one left for Iranian president and when the chips are down, he loses big time.
When is the State of the Union address? I know it's coming up any day now.
When the GW has to counter all of the disinformation from the press about the war it makes his job alot harder. I do think he should always make the point of the terror connection that was strong in the old Iraq. The meetings that were had with the Iraq intelligence and Mr. Atta were not for tea and biscuits. The terrorist training facilities in Iraq were not movie sets.
The liberal media, Democrats, and pro-Muslim groups here have all undermined Bush's confidence and weakened his ability to wage a full-scale war.
Don't forget the ones on the right who want him to fail; in fact, they're hoping he fails.
You can see who they are on this forum; a lot of them post nothing except threads detrimental to the president and the GOP.
Gonna have to wait for the second 9/11 to get that. Or maybe the third.
Sorry, hope you and yours aren't at ground zero....
We will know if the president is serious if his proposal for a " new way forward" contains observable measurable goals, milestones, and timelines to assess if the new plan is working. The White House credibility on Iraq is mighty thin judging from the Midterms and Iraq was primarily the cause. The reason, at least in my view, is the WH oversold the war and kept painting rosy scenarios that never materialized. The electorate has grown justifiably cynical.
Personally,I am not hopeful about the situation in Iraq. The difference between what the White House is saying and what I am hearing from troops returning from Iraq is too large a gap to be bridged. Candidly, I think some fundamental mistakes were made early on that now make the situation irretrievable. Anything being said now is more likely to be a domestic political solution than a military geopolitical solution.
We all know the most important speech from the previous president: "I did not have..."
In Howlin-speak, "the ones"=conservatives.
BS; I'm a conservative, too; just not one that is willing to cut off my nose to get Hillary and liberals elected like you apparently are.
I've always had several issues with the Bush administrations handling of the post invasion phase. For starters, the US military exists to fight wars. The US military should not be employed as policeman to the world, nation builders/nation rebuilders, or to spread democracy to the Islamic world. And that segues into my biggest bone of contention. As a nation, the Iraqi`s have proven they don't believe in a future of freedom and liberty for their country. Therefore, the major failures in Iraq do not fall on the US military. The Iraqi people have failed themselves.
Here are the three things Bush needs to emphasize in his speech to have any chance of convincing America that he is right:
1. The American soldiers and marines, the majority of whom have been saying that we are winning in Iraq and that it would be a very big mistake to leave now.
2. The Leftist Press, and it's propaganda drum-roll of pro-enemy defeatism, and how they have been ignoring the message that's out there, from the soldiers and marines, available to anyone who is really interested.
3. A detailed list of the terrorist connections to Saddam and to the current death-squads in Iraq.
He won't bring any of these points into his speech in any meaningful way.
His speech will fail.
However, the policy will not be abandoned, because the rats know in their hearts that Bush is right on this one, and we will get the extra troops and we will continue kicking ass on the Iraqi front in the WOT.
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