Iraq

Bush’s speech. When we listen to the contrast between hawks & doves (roughly republicans and democrats, especially as seen by matched pundits post-speech), we see them arguing past one another. As irritating as the democrats’ political spin may be to a hawk, the narrow & superficial approach is understandable if we assume, as many of them do, that this is only a “war.” Indeed, since it isn’t real, it is best analyzed as political ploy. Dots going back to, what, 1983 in Beirut and moving on to the German hostages today do not cohere to them. Nor do they read the fatwas, listen to the speeches in Iran or watch the celebrations in Gaza – these are not parts of one implacable foe. Hawks see a pattern; doves do not. That the doves’ arguments fall into the cheapest of partisan arguments arises from the fact that they do not see this as, well, important. So, they fall back on old cliches – speaking of offering peace rather than war without feeling a need to define who that peace would be with and how it would be accomplished. Bush recognized that difference, but made his own stance clear:

September 11th, 2001 required us to take every emerging threat to our country seriously, and it shattered the illusion that terrorists attack us only after we provoke them. On that day, we were not in Iraq, we were not in Afghanistan, but the terrorists attacked us anyway – and killed nearly 3,000 men, women, and children in our own country. My conviction comes down to this: We do not create terrorism by fighting the terrorists. We invite terrorism by ignoring them. And we will defeat the terrorists by capturing and killing them abroad, removing their safe havens, and strengthening new allies like Iraq and Afghanistan in the fight we share.

He further distinguishes between these two points of view.

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I think the speech was very good but that’s a detail. The main thing is, Bush should give these talks every few weeks (and should have been doing so for the past three years, but never mind).

He has given several speeches on Iraq lately, so perhaps he now realizes what he has to do. Nonetheless he appears to be going against his own nature in speaking frequently and repeating himself and in responding to hostile and often inane criticism. In this regard he should not see himself as an executive, making and briskly executing plans, someone who expects to be listened to the first time and who doesn’t suffer fools. He is now, rather, a marketing man who must respond quickly and cheerfully to critics, even those for whom he has disdain, and must repeat his pitch until it sinks in throughout a diverse population. I hope that he will continue in marketing mode, and that he will not revert to executive type once his popularity recovers from the effects of the recent anti-war offensive in the press.

Our enemies, in tacit alliance with Bush’s political opponents, fight fiercely in the media because that is the field of combat where they are most effective. Bush & Co. have been much too slow to appreciate this fact and to fight back. Indeed it isn’t obvious that they fully understand it even now. The crazy thing about it is that they have by far the strongest arguments on their side if only they will make them, as Bush did tonight and as I fervently hope he will continue to do. There really is no choice if we are to win the war.

UPDATE: In the comments, Rizalist makes some subtle points about the content of Bush’s speech. See also this post on his blog.

RELATED: Ginny posts her take on the President’s speech.

Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, wants the USA to withdraw from Iraq:

“I’ve seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, ‘just another year, just stay the course, we’ll have a victory.’ Well, we didn’t have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening.”

In 1975 the US Congress cut off military aid to South Vietnam, which was soon overwhelmed and conquered by the North Vietnamese army. Communist forces rolled through Cambodia and Laos. The communists killed millions of people. Is this scenario — our abandonment of an ally followed by mass-murder and tyranny — also one that Dean wishes to avoid? It would be nice if someone asked him.

Instapundit links to Bush’s strategy statement. (Executive Summary below; it concludes quite sparely: “Our mission in Iraq is to win the war. Our troops will return home when that mission is complete.”) Today’s speech at Annapolis.
Meanwhile, Tigerhawk annotates (with respect) Steven Den Beste.

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The only sense in which OIF would have diminished both the nuclear and chemical weapons threats to America was to the degree in which it succeeded in sending a deterrent signal to states considering supporting terrorist groups. This is the consideration which is not only explicitly missing from the pre-war intelligence estimates but largely absent from the subsequent discussion about whether “Bush lied and people died”. The strange omission of geopolitical goals from the story of OIF will continue to have unfortunate results, because the measure of the war’s success or failure never lay in its ability to neutralize atom bomb manufacturing facilities — those are by all accounts operating day and night in North Korea — but the degree to which it has deterred ‘rogue states’ from sponsoring terrorist organizations.

–Wretchard