Bush's State of the Union confronts a corrosive ill wind
UNITED NATIONS — In a confident and almost bold address before a divided Congress, President George W. Bush delivered his annual update on the U.S. State of the Union.
The speech presented a well-calibrated attempt to change the tone and tenor of partisan politics between the now dominant Democrat Party and his Republicans. Still with the somber specter of Iraq hanging over the ornate chamber in Washington, much of the otherwise good domestic news about economic growth and enterprise was shadowed by Baghdad.
Referring to the his Republican’s party’s setback in the November elections, Bush stated, “Congress has changed but not our responsibilities … we are not the first to come here with government divided and uncertainty in the air.”
Seeking common ground the President again stressed his longtime policy to reduce American energy dependence on foreign oil. Calling for new technology and alternative fuels to reduce the dependence, Bush called for a 20 percent reduction in gasoline usage over the next ten years. This poses a realistic challenge and moreover a strategic necessity.
Why? In recent years automotive fuel efficiency technology and engine sizes have improved. And even with the plethora of sport utility vehicles (SUV’s) technology has kept pace. Strategically foreign oil dependence has put American over a barrel when it comes to both security and policy. Given that the U.S. imports 1.4 million barrels a day from Saudi Arabia, and an additional 1.4 million combined from Iraq, Kuwait and Algeria, Washington is pulled into the political vortex of the often violent Middle East. Add the growing dependence on socialist Venezuela for 1.4 million barrels daily and you see why it pays to break the cycle of foreign petroleum addiction sooner rather than later.
Naturally violence in the Middle East and especially Iraq pose the greatest challenge for the President. “Our enemies are quite implicit about their intentions. They want to overthrow moderate governments (read Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia etc), establish safe havens (read Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia) from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country…By killing and terrorizing Americans they want our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty.” (read Iraq, Lebanon). Thus his plea to Congress was to support the new Iraq strategy but not offer the Baghdad government an open ended commitment.
Bush beseeched, “This war is more than a clash of arms, it is a decisive ideological struggle, and the security of our nation is in the balance.” Here let me hesitatingly say that the ideological struggle is precisely Washington’s weakest link. I’m not talking about Congressional cold feet about the troop surge in Iraq, I’m not speaking about the pros and cons of the Iraq war, nor whether we should let the UN Security Council rather than the U.S. Constitution set the template for American policy, I’m addressing the lazily indifferent view many Americans take towards the entire war on terror.
The same people who would go ballistic and blame Bush if there were another terrorist attack on New York or Los Angeles tomorrow are often those latte sipping defeatists who claim with a self-righteous smirk that either “there is no threat, we caused the threat, we attacked Iraq, Bush is overstepping his legal authority to fight the threat, or 9/11 was an inside conspiracy.”
So forget the terrorist bombings in London, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, Jerusalem and the World Trade Center atrocity itself, and enter the moral equivalence zone of those on a different political wavelength.
Despite the gripping reality of the world in which we live, there sadly remains a sizable minority in America who sees the calendar as having never been turned from September 10th 2001. This is less a detached indifference, which would bother me less, but rather a simmering schadenfreude that harbors a unique distain for the President and his party.
With every bomb set off in Baghdad’s sectarian violence, the casualties are not only fellow Iraqi Muslims, but the political collateral damage is often a increasingly frustrated American public opinion who is rightly fed up with seeing the U.S. military being caught in the crossfire of a intra-Islamic sectarian conflict. The terrorists and especially Al Qaida are astute enough to know the power of gruesome imagery in Iraq as well as media magnified military causalities in a 24 hour news cycle, and the ensuing partisan political bickering in the U.S. Congress itself.
Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal brilliantly touches another point, “The United States is talking itself into defeat in Iraq. Its political culture is now in a downward spiral of pessimism. … criticism of the American role is not without justification. But the cumulative effect of this unremitting ill wind is corrosive. We are not only talking ourselves into defeat in Iraq but into a diminished international status that may be harder to recover than the doom mob imagines.”
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