News Intelligence Analysis
Bush's Iraq Speech Fails on All Counts
By Gerald Rellick
July 2005
George Bush had a bad week. He gave a major speech on Tuesday in an effort to bolster support for the war in Iraq, but by week’s end, judging from a number of indicators, he clearly failed in this effort.
For starters, it was clear that the public didn’t expect much from Bush. Reuters News Agency reported that Bush’s speech garnered the smallest TV audience of his tenure, 23 million, which was 8.6 million less than his previous low during an August 2001 speech on stem cells. And that was delivered before 9/11 -- before Bush declared himself a “war president.”
And a Zogby poll released two days after his speech found that Bush’s job approval rating (previously at 44 %, an all time low for a newly elected incumbent president), failed to improve, dipping one percentage point to 43%. More striking, the same poll found that “more than two-in-five voters (42%) said they would favor impeachment proceedings if it is found the President misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq.”
In what Zogby called “a more significant sign of the weakness of the President’s numbers,” the poll results showed for the first time “more ‘Red State’ voters…now rate his job performance unfavorably, with 50% holding a negative impression of the President’s handling of his duties, and 48% holding a favorable view.”
A number of major newspapers in the country savaged the president’s speech. The Los Angeles Times called it “a major disappointment,” and criticized Bush for “[rewriting] history by lumping together the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the need for war in Iraq, when, in fact, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda.” On the operational front, said the Times, “Bush spoke of ‘difficult and dangerous’ work in Iraq that produces ‘images of violence and bloodshed,’ but he glossed over the reality of how bad the situation is.”
The New York Times agreed with Bush that the war is “difficult” but disagreed strongly that it is “winnable.” Said the Times, “The Iraqi Army…shows no signs of being able to control the country without American help for years to come. There are not enough American soldiers to carry out the job they have been sent to do, yet the strain of maintaining even this inadequate force is taking a terrible toll on the ability of the United States to defend its security on other fronts around the world.”
And in its harshest criticism, the Times said, “We did not expect Mr. Bush would apologize for the misinformation that helped lead us into this war, or for the catastrophic mistakes his team made in running the military operation. But we had hoped he would resist the temptation to raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, while welcoming Bush’s “belated candor,” quickly added that this is “not going to fix our Iraq policy.” Said the AJC, “This quagmire is the product of badly flawed assumptions and policies, compounded by incompetent execution. And Bush, for the most part, has refused to change either those policies or those who have been entrusted to carry them out. It's hard to ask the American people to keep faith with leaders whose bungling created this mess in the first place.”
Political cartoonists had their say as well, some in the harshest
terms. Pat Oliphant of the Washington Post had Bush wearing his
ten-gallon hat, laughing and proclaiming that the “sacrifice
was worth it,” as he walked atop coffins of the military
dead (http://images.ucomics.com/comics/po/2005/po050629.gif).
John Serffius portrayed a bleak image of a lonely and pathetic-looking
George Bush in a darkened room holding only a dim match. The
title was “Stay the Course.” The message of Bush’s
“dim bulb’” leadership came through loud and clear.
(http://cagle.slate.msn.com/working/050629/sherffius21.gif).
Clearly, the saddest part of Bush’ speech was his effort to conflate the war in Iraq with the tragedy of 9/11. As David Corn noted on his website, Bush deliberately used the term “terrorists” when referring to what everyone else, including the U.S. military, has been calling “insurgents.”
George Bush is clearly wounded, and he appears desperate. Will moderates in his own party keep Bush in check? What will Karl Rove think up next? Should we be frightened? I think so.
Gerald S. Rellick, Ph.D., worked in the defense sector of the aerospace industry for 22 years. He now teaches in the California Community College system.
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