May 25, 2004
Speech Roundup
To start, read the transcript of Bush's Army War College speech. Read it? Good. Now on to the reactions.
Phil Carter breaks the speech down into its five points and analyzes each one, praising a couple and pointing out the problems with the others.
Andrew Sullivan unsurprisingly gives the speech a B+, but also points out that Bush seemed overly defensive.
Salon provides the reactions from a number of different analysts. Most of them criticize Bush's disingenuous conflation of Iraq and al-Qaeda as well as question what sort of sovereignty Iraq will have with 138,000 foreign troops in the country.
Matthew Yglesias writes that the speech "sounded good," but that our "actual foreign policy is rather shabby and threadbare." In other words, he doesn't think Bush is as committed to stable, liberal democracy in Iraq as his rhetoric implies.
Outside the Beltway does an extensive roundup of the major new media reactions while snarking a little along the way.
Pejman Yousefzadeh thinks the speech won't change anyone's mind and also adds a few snarks of his own.
That's it for now, but I'll be updating this post throughout the day as others weigh in.
UPDATE: William Saletan sees the speech as another example of Bush's inability to admit mistakes or learn from the past.
2ND UPDATE: Kevin Drum thinks Bush is setting us up for disappointment by trying to fool "a hundred million people" that "we're handing over 'full sovereignty'".
3RD UPDATE: Noam Scheiber thinks Bush contradicted himself by both calling Iraq a front in the War on Terror and then apologizing for Abu Ghraib. He also thinks the admissions of minor mistakes weren't enough.
Okay, I'm just getting started on reading the speech, and already I was dumbfounded by this construction: "We've also seen images of a young American facing decapitation."
He wasn't "facing" decapitation, in the sense that, say, a poor family might find themselves "facing" eviction and have to fight their way out of it. Well, he was "facing" decapitation for a few minutes, and then he was fucking DECAPITATED. Just absurd obfuscation.
Wait, I take it back, that's just a minor obfuscation relative to what follows immediately:
". . .Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror. And we must understand that, as well." - yeah, because you made it the central battlefield, douchebag.
". . . some of Saddam's elite guards shed their uniforms and melted into the civilian population." - Well, maybe if you'd only dissolved the Fedayeen Saddam, this would be a fully truthful statement, but instead you dissolved the whole army, including rank-and-file soldiers who didn't even resist the U.S. invasion. Now, it's not just the Fedayeen who make up the resistance, it's a bunch of other soldiers who never should have been let loose in the first place.
I'm sure these are being covered in the articles that you link, and I'm not gonna go on a play-by-play spree as I read, I just need to vent.