Like many Americans, I was stunned by the President’s speech last night. It was not his call for the additional 20,000 troops to go to Iraq, but all the other material around that call. The president did not unveil a new strategy, but rather reiterated his ideology driving foreign policy.
We had a right to expect a change in the rhetoric and the reasoning. A national election repudiated the President’s policy and performance in Iraq. He fired Rumsfeld and found a replacement who is said to be a realist, not a neoconservative. Generals are being replaced. We waited months for the input of the Iraq Study Group, which recommended a very different strategy going forward. But there was no change in rhetoric. There was no change in reasoning. There will be no change in result.
Instead, the President exhibited the same obfuscation of the last three years: Iraq-9/11, 9/11-Iraq. Because he can’t get over this, we are led to conclude he believes it. No one believes it. If is a false claim. The President seems detached from reality.
The President claimed the mission of American troops was clear, then identified it as an effort “to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.” “Helping” is not a clearly attainable mission; it has no milestones, no indicators of success or failure. It perpetuates an ongoing effort. He committed an additional 21,500 troops to this effort.
Beyond the escalation in Iraq, he escalated the confrontation that has been brewing with Iran and Syria in direct contradiction to the advice of many, including the Iraq Study Group. He said he is sending a naval battle group to be in position to interdict Iran’s support of Shiites in Iraq, and vilified both regimes again. He refuses to change course and consider negotiation toward the common interests we do share with those countries. Apparently, he is trying to prepare Americans for additional military confrontation with Iran, if not all out invasion.
The speech was essentially a statement and reiteration of neoconservative foreign policy, not the much ballyhooed “new way forward.” The President has removed all doubt: His presidency is driven by ideology. His policy has indeologicla blinders on. He cannot see what is in the best interests of America because those blinders tilt all the information in a certain direction. Seeng it displayed this way—so publicly, so directly, and so clearly—many Americans are deeply unsettled. We are inching toward an unavoidable conclusion we’d prefer not to face: The President is a dangerous man.
I say this with all the gravity such words demand. But the President’s speech and his policies all point toward more war, not less; his speech tied together all the pieces.
* Keep the Iraq War going and maintain the American presence there.
* Expand US Army to provide the ability for another fight in the same region.
* Provoke Iran and Syria into that fight.
These ideas are reckless and dangerous, and the President is leading us there.
Anthony Signorelli is the author of Call to Liberty: Bridging the Divide Between Liberals and Conservatives
