STAYING THE COURSE
Bush's latest speech offers more questions than answers

By Jeffrey Monty
RAW STORY COLUMNIST

Stay the course. Look forward, never behind. And as any good cowboy knows, if you fall off your horse, you must dust yourself off and get back up.

Such is the mantra of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy, and even during his recreational time, the President leads by example. On Saturday, ten miles into a 16-mile mountain biking trek on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, the President took a nasty fall, emerging with scrapes on his hands and face. Unphased, he reportedly got back on his bike and finished the final six miles of the trail. That’s right, the President fell off his horse, but he got up and finished the job at hand. Karl Rove couldn’t have dreamt it better himself.

(On a side note, as Democratic challenger John Kerry had his own bicycle mishap a couple of weeks ago, America must deal with the new reality that neither the incumbent nor the challenger in the upcoming presidential election apparently knows how to ride a bicycle).

There are those who might jokingly suggest that the scrapes on the President’s face are more a product of his falling off the wagon than falling off of a bicycle, but even that was the case, a guy could use a stiff drink in times as bleak as these.

It must be a dark place when you’re 6 months away from the election and pollsters are suddenly using the phrase “all-time low” to describe your approval rating. Almost immediately after it was known that the Bush intended to run for reelection as a “wartime” President, the war that he was presiding over in Iraq disintegrated into violence and chaos. April was the bloodiest month for U.S. troops since the occupation began, which was already causing rifts in the “coalition of the willing” put together to fight this conflict. When you add to that last week’s fall from grace by Amhed Chalibi and the ubiquitous Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, it’s no secret that democrats and republicans alike were expecting a lot from the President last night as he delivered the first of several promised speeches on Iraq prior to the June 30 transfer of sovereignty.

Unfortunately, those hoping for a nuts-and-bolts illustration of how Iraq might look and function after June 30 will have to wait. While the speech was a well-meaning, coherent assertion of the ideological future of Iraq, several glaring questions were left unanswered. Speaking only vaguely about the new government’s structure and what authority it will have (if any) over coalition forces, there remains no answer to the question of how U.S.-supported Iraqi “sovereignty” will be much different than the occupation. The five aptly-described “broad” steps toward the transfer of sovereignty that Bush presented last night are hardly new – what the world is waiting for is a plan of how those steps might be executed

Not surprisingly, one of the few things that the President did address specifically was a symbolic step in getting past the nastiness of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, promising that upon the completion of a new maximum security prison, Abu Ghraib will be demolished.

“Under the dictator,” he said, “prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” It’s great that President finally seems to grasp the importance of token gestures when it comes to “winning hearts and minds”, but the President’s insistence of blaming the abuse scandal on “a few” might not be enough to satisfy even the desire of both Iraqis and Americans for seeing justice done to those responsible. It’s also unfortunate that in delivering this particular section of the speech, he pronounced the words “Abu Ghraib” approximately 437 different ways. Hopefully more Iraqis will get the speech in print rather than from radio or television.

While destroying a prison can help Iraqis more quickly forget the sins of both the tyrant and liberator alike, it will take much more than bulldozers performing a symbolic gesture to finish that job. For a President who has always governed as if an ideological bulldozer could solve all his problems because of his good intentions, this is a troubling sign. Agreeing to vague principles like “establishing security” and “encouraging international support” — two of the actual “broad steps” that were outlined — is one thing, making those things happen is quite another. While last night’s speech might have been the most coherent assertion of the United States’ noble intentions and desire to truly let the Iraqi people self-govern, with so little time until the transfer of power, moral clarity can no longer be a substitute for coherent policy..

The disconnect between these lofty goals and the realities of making them happen is troubling. Even as Bush promised to seek greater international support, CNN was reporting on a “serious rift” in the U.S./U.K. partnership that spearheaded this war. While the Iraq resolution that the two nations presented to the United Nations Security Council yesterday was long overdue, its passing doesn’t necessarily mandate a sizable international force to relieve the burden for the overextended American military. Countries would first have to decide to contribute troops to an effort, and then that force would have to be trained. In other words, as the level of violence increases (as the President last night promised that it would) with the transfer of sovereignty, it will continue to be American troops absorbing the casualties. At some point, he’s going to have to level with the American people about this.

Hopefully, in the speeches that the President has promised over the next couple of weeks, these and other questions will be answered. Hopefully, having been in office for more than 30 months of wartime, he has a sense of what it will take to get more international support for the cause, or is at least willing to defer to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s underutilized abilities in that realm. Hopefully, the Administration is better prepared for the post-occupation period than it was for the occupation itself.

Hopefully, the President understands that if you keep falling off your horse, it won’t be long until you’re unable to get back up.