The Speech

I missed all but the first few minutes of Bush's speech last night, but caught a replay later. Turns out I could have missed the replay and learned nearly as much. I only had a few questions he could have answered, well stated by Jesse Berney at Kicking Ass.

How long will our troops be in Iraq?

Who will be in charge of the new Iraqi government after June 30?

What kind of control will the new Iraqi government have over U.S. military forces?

How much will our continuing commitment in Iraq cost American taxpayers?

Of course, having heard the speech, I still don't know the answers. The really disturbing thing is that I don't think Bush himself has the answers, and I don't think he's even considered the questions. To ask them would be to consider the idea that our present course is imperfect, and that seems to be beyond his grasp. As the New York Times editorialized following the speech,

It's regrettable that this president is never going to admit any shortcomings, much less failure. That's an aspect of Mr. Bush's character that we have to live with. But we cannot live without a serious plan for doing more than just getting through the June 30 transition and then muddling along until the November elections in the United States.

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The president still has a number of speeches left to deliver before June 30. We hope he will use them to come up with a more specific plan, to stop listing the things we already knew needed to be done and to explain to us how he intends to do them. An acknowledgment of past mistakes would be nice.

Nice, but not likely. It's come to the point that I believe the man is clearly delusional. I don't think he's lying, I think he has actually come to believe that, despite the absence of any evidence whatsoever, that Iraq is indeed the main front of the 'war on terror.'

TVNewsLies.org kept track of the number of times he invoked 'terror' or 'terroist' during the speech. It came to nineteen. They offer up some other interesting numbers as well.

Number of times George Bush explained how the invasion of Iraq was even remotely connected to the war on terror: ZERO

Number of Americans hurt or killed by an Iraqi terrorist prior to the US invasion of Iraq: ZERO

Number of Iraqis involved in the 1st attack on the World Trade Center: ZERO

Number of Iraqis involved in the attack on the USS Cole: ZERO

Number of attacks on US embassies around the world by Iraqis: ZERO

Number of Iraqis who are part of the top leadership of Al Qaeda: ZERO

Number of Iraqi hijackers on September 11th, 2001: ZERO

Iraqi relevance to the 'war on terror' is apparently another of Bush's 'faith based' programs.

Although the speech was remarkably uniformative, I can't really say that there was nothing in it that caught my interest. As low as my expectations were, even I was taken aback to hear Bush intone that

On June 30, the coalition provisional authority will cease to exist and will not be replaced. The occupation will end and Iraqis will govern their own affairs.

Can he really believe that the occupation that has created so much bloodshed in Iraq and international controversy is the presence of his band of Young Republican desk workers at the CPA and not the 135,000 + troops on the ground in Iraq? The occupation won't end until the military is withdrawn, and whatever happens on June 30, it doesn't seem likely to hasten that withdrawal by a single day. In fact, if the new Iraqi government turns out to be as unpopular and ineffective as many people expect, it's likely to extend the need for an external security force considerably.

As retired USAF Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a veteran of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, told Salon, "Iraq is promised imminent "sovereignty" and "democracy." Pay no attention to the men with guns."

To assert that closing the CPA offices in exchange for a 1,000 person embassy staff and 135,000 soldiers represents an end to the occupation isn't a lie.

It's madness.