Fire from a burning bush

Yesterday I was interested in hearing the latest spin on Bush's speech so I turned to a U.S. propaganda . . . I mean, uh . . . news station. On Scarborough Country, the two people they chose two interview about Bush's speech were an active-duty soldier and a retired general. When asked a series of leading questions, the active-duty soldier nervously provided the "right" answers, as if being grilled before a promotion board. The retired general, after a couple of verbal jabs at Rumsfeld, also pretty much repeated the standard administration line. And then it was off to Aruba for the latest distraction--a story with no connection with the speech. Although the subtext was similar (Innocent white people are being killed by evil brown people) with the unspoken conclusion that something decisive (and hopefully violent) must be done! I really think news is dead in this country. So-called "news" has become a disjointed editorial that periodically interrupts advertisements. This is bad news. At least you'd expect the editorial writers to be entertaining. They aren't.

Since we can't rely on help from the clerks in the Ministry of Propaganda and Disinformation, we'll have to sort out the Bush speech on our own. The speech begins with the oft-repeated lines about how Shrub's War in Iraq is an essential part of the "War on Terror." We Americans are at this point so confused by the litany of excuses for attacking Iraq that we can't keep them straight. Was it WMDs or UN resolutions or attacks on sovereign nations or 9/11? Fortunately, we won't have to take a quiz at the end. The President's speech doesn't go into why Iraq has become so dangerous and such an ideal haven for terrorists. A thinking person might conclude that the current situation has something to do with the U.S. invasion of the country, but we aren't being forced to think, so as Ram Dass said, we should live in the moment.

In his speech, Bush kept referring to the tremendous support that the U.S. is receiving from Iraqis and the "international community." If there's so much support, one has to wonder why the occupation relies so heavily on U.S. troops and money. Isn't Bush being a bit loose with the logic? Are ten or twenty troops from some island somewhere a major contribution by the "international community"? If academic researchers were allowed to make the same sort of weak claims, economists would be blaming fluctuations in the U.S. housing market on the rising cost of vanilla in Madagascar.

Bush and others (e.g., Biden) have talked a lot about training Iraqis to defend their own country. I'm a bit skeptical about the idea that this is really the problem. If there were significant numbers of Iraqis wanting to put down the insurgency and defend the U.S. occupation, it would be happening. The Chinese Communists, after all, put together an invincible army out of ignorant peasants with pitch-forks. I'm sure these peasants all lacked training (not to mention, a steady supply of the latest high-tech weapons).

Bush at least had the sense to not push for higher troop levels. Even had he wanted to do so, there's the question of where the troops would come from. But more than that, the increased presence would strike many as an admission that things were going wrong. And there's one thing about being a scion from a wealthy and powerful family: being rich means never having so say you're sorry.

P.S. Rob's Blog has a good post on the speech, criticizing Bush's continued conflation of the 9/11 hijackers and Iraqi insurgents.

Think Progress had the following interesing observation: "On the same day President Bush will use the soldiers at Fort Bragg as a backdrop for his address on Iraq, conservatives in the House have voted to underfund veterans’ health care by at least $1 billion."