| Subject: For the Bush team, rose-colored glasses |
Author:
Betty
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Date Posted: 04:06:04 06/29/05 Wed
Was that Condoleezza Rice standing in City Hall Park yesterday? Could it have been?
Sure looked like her in a white blouse, crisp beige suit and single strand of large white pearls. But when this woman in the park began to speak, I was sure I must be mistaken. She was talking - not about the war in Iraq - but about the 2012 Olympic Games.
Could it really be that things in Iraq are going so splendidly, the United States' secretary of State doesn't need to pay attention anymore?
You see, that's the trouble, right there, with these rose-colored glasses they've all been wearing in the Bush White House. No one can see the problems anymore.
And 2012, mark down that date. In 2012, the war in Iraq will have only another five more years to go. That's assuming Donald Rumsfeld's latest estimate (12 more years to beat the Iraqi insurgency) is not overly optimistic, like the Defense secretary's last six or eight assessments of the war's progress have been.
"Not everything we've done has been popular," said the woman in the park, whoever she was. But "America and Americans are well-respected and well-loved around the world."
Well, OK.
I'm sure George W. Bush could take last-minute cheer from that as he was striding toward the big podium last night at Fort Bragg. God knows Bush didn't sound remotely ready to face the ugly facts on the ground.
In his prime-time talk, the president did finally acknowledge a growing public distaste for his war: "I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it? It is worth it, and it is vital to the future."
But he pinned his defense of the war policy almost entirely on a single, discredited connection, the claim that Iraq was tied to Sept. 11.
He cited the terror attacks repeatedly. He even quoted Osama bin Laden, who had about as much connection to Saddam Hussein's Iraq as Pancho Villa did to Imperial Japan.
"We are fighting against men with blind hatred - and armed with lethal weapons - who are capable of any atrocity," Bush told 750 soldiers and airmen in the base gymnasium. "They are trying to shake our will in Iraq - just as they tried to shake our will on Sept. 11, 2001. They will fail."
They? Well, you know, whomever.
The polls say Bush has been losing the political argument back home, and last night's rhetoric was unlikely to change that. But you didn't need polls to tell you any of this. The signs of reassessment have been popping up for weeks.
No longer is it just the activist Democrats, the human-rights groups or the reporters on the ground saying this whole thing is a mess. Doubts have been rising straight from the president's base.
It started at the margins. Walter Jones, the Georgia Republican who'd demanded the House cafeteria rename its French fries to "Freedom Fries," is now pressuring the administration to set a timetable for withdrawal.
Paul Harvey, the home-spun radio broadcaster, has been floating Vietnam comparisons. In that war, he said, we were told that if we pulled out, the Communist dominoes would fall clear across Asia.
"We did, and they didn't," Harvey said with his famous pith.
Over at the Fox News Channel (my TV employer), Linda Vester, host of the "DaySide" program, polled her studio audience the past two days, asking if the war was worth the cost. Vester didn't count hands. But the clear majority both days called out, "No!"
Even conservative icon William F. Buckley has been sounding wobbly on Iraq. He gave Bush a firm poke from the right.
"A point is reached," Buckley wrote recently, "when tenacity conveys not steadfastness of purpose but misapplication of pride. It can't reasonably be disputed that if in the year ahead the situation in Iraq continues about as it has done in the past year, we will have suffered more than another 500 soldiers killed. Where there had been skepticism about our venture, there will then be contempt."
It'll take a day or so for the speech to sink in. But if Bush has lost Harvey and Buckley, it's hard to guess exactly who he might have left.
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