NOTE: This speech is highly controversial and the debate over it is likely to continue throughout the weekend. So we’re reposting this from yesterday.
On Veterans’ Day, a day when Americans from all walks of life and political parties are asked to unite in honoring veterans and their sacrifices, President George W. Bush delivered a major address defending his Iraq war policy and essentially accusing war critics of undermining the military in the field.
It’ll be interesting to see in coming days if the question is raised: shouldn’t this remain a day of unity that belongs to ALL Americans — for all parties and all beliefs? And couldn’t this particular speech have been given another time…like tomorrow or any other day? From the New York Times:
President Bush lashed out today at critics of his Iraq policy, accusing them of trying to rewrite history about the decision to go to war and saying their criticism is undercutting American forces in battle.
“While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize my decisions or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began,” the president said in a Veterans Day speech in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Bush delivered his aggressive and unusually long speech as part of an effort to shore up his credibility as he faces growing public skepticism about Iraq and accusations by Democrats and others that he led the nation into war on false pretenses.
Those accusations seem to be making a dent in public confidence in him, as public opinion polls show more people questioning the president’s honesty about Iraq and about whether American troops should remain in the fight…
“The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges,” he said. “These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America’s will.”
The Los Angeles Times reports this:
But most of Bush’s remarks were focused on the administration’s broader campaign against terrorism and its relationship to the administration’s decision to invade Iraq and topple Hussein’s government in 2003.
“Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war,” he added. “These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs. They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessments of Saddam Hussein.”
In addition, Bush said, his critics know that the United Nations approved “more than a dozen resolutions” that cited Hussein’s weapons programs.
More excepts from Bush’s speech can be found HERE.
MSNBC notes how Bush’s throw-down-the-gauntlet on Veterans Day speech was received by the Democrats (i.e. divisions accentuated on this special day):
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., quickly returned Bush’s criticism. “Its deeply regrettable that the president is using Veterans Day as a campaign-like attempt to rebuild his own credibility by tearing down those who seek the truth about the clear manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war,� Kennedy said in a statement.
“Instead of providing open and honest answers about how we will achieve success in Iraq and allow our troops to begin to come home,� Kennedy said, “the president reverted to the same manipulation of facts to justify a war we never should have fought.�
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said on Thursday Democrats were insisting that Americans “get the truth about why the White House cherry-picked and leaked intelligence to sell the war in Iraq.�
“The president may think this matter can be swept under the rug or pardoned away, but Democrats know America can do better,� Reid added.
The Bush administration’s main justification for the Iraq war was that it posed a threat because it had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but none have been found.
A few things on this speech:
- Once again White House officials have made a tactical mistake in telegraphing for several days now that a new offensive was going to begin to try and up the President’s poll numbers by going after war critics. From the standpoint of the American public, this speech would have much greater impact if news reports were not now able to couple it with the fact that this is part of a strategy.
- George Bush’s poll numbers are NOT being eaten up by the fact there was faulty intelligence. They’re being gobbled up by the fact the war is not going the way administration officials earlier predicted it would go, news reports suggesting there is no real end in sight — and the Plamegate case.
- The Plame CIA leak case is not hurting Bush because of faulty intelligence. It’s hurting Bush because it suggests that top White House officials knew intelligence was faulty — and didn’t want that fact to come out.
- Bush is not losing support because the information was flawed as much as by a drip-drip-drip of news reports kicking the pegs out from underneath the table that many people who were not hardcore partisans used to support their giving the green light to the U.S. going to war.
So, in the end, going after Democrats as people who are trying to revise history is unlikely to work because this tactic seemingly tries to pretend these other factors — that are hurting Bush and may make Republicans up for re-election run from George Bush like someone with Bird Flu — don’t exist.
And then there is the fact that many Americans who don’t belong to either party will think about: why did he pick TODAY to make THAT kind of speech???
BUT THERE ARE OTHER VOICES ON THIS ISSUE. HERE’S A CROSS SECTION:
–Glenn Reynolds, aka InstaPundit:
The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way — and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politician’s pandering to the antiwar base, that it’s deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad…Patriotic people could — and did — oppose the war. But so did a lot of scoundrels. And some who supported the war were not patriotic, if they did it out of opportunism or political calculation rather than honest belief. Those who are now trying to recast their prior positions through dishonest rewriting of history are not patriotic now, nor were they when they supported the war, if they did so then out of opportunism –which today’s revisionist history suggests.
For the last two major election cycles, 2002 and 2004, Republicans made electoral gains on the assertion that Democrats were weak on defense and only the Big, Bad, Republican Party could save the nation from the evil terrorists and their nefarious dreams of mushroom clouds over American cities.
Now, Bush is saying that he can’t be criticized by Democrats because Democrats were with him all along?????
Great logic there, George.
—Michelle Malkin: “Better late than never. I hope this is a sign of renewed intestinal fortitude. The GOP needs it.”
—The Left Coaster’s Steve Soto:
A day after National Security Advisor Steve Hadley started the White House pushback against Iraq war critics with a conveniently forgetful argument that masked his own culpability for withholding contrary intelligence, President Bush carried forward with his own attempt today in a Veteran’s Day event. He did this on a day when a new AP/Ipsos poll found that 57% of those polled don’t think he is honest.
People saying Bush is back in his groove. Bush called the democrats on rewriting history. He counteracted the democrats lies that intelligence was manipulated, and that the American people were lied to. The democrats had the same intelligence, and voted to remove Saddam out of power. Bush sets the record straight. Bush says we must stay the course and win this war on terror.
He also states that these terrorists are not freedom fighters, or resistance, but evil men. He called it like it is, adding that its time for responsible Islamic leaders to step up and denounce the evil that is going on around them. In his 50 minute speech this Veterans day, he stated that the best way to honor our vets is to stay the course.
–The always excellent The Heretik has a content-heavy post that MUST be read in full. Here’s a tiny part of it:
THE HERETIK NOTES the White House leaked they would attack Democrats as though it were a campaign. It is. But the Democrats obviously are going to counter charge on the same point. The Republicans haven’t beaten the Dems on this badly in the past. Speaking in front of living soldiers in uniform as props grows old when Bush won’t go to the funerals of the dead soldiers lost. People are weary of the war and weary of the tone with which its selling is prosecuted. Bush can only blame himself for that. If he ever gets around to it.”
I just watched Bush’s speech, on CNN. Basically he said that Democrats who acted patriotically when asked to stand alongside their President — who said we had an urgent “imminent” “mushroom cloud” threat to the country — and trusted what the Bush Administration told them, are to blame for the mess we’re in. I guess he’s saying they should have known better.
I think we all know better now.
—INDC Journal points to several other issues to argue that the Democrats are equally divisive on Veterans’ Day.
—Think Progress points to a slew of specifics to argue that Bush’s speech was highly inaccurate on Congress receiving the same intelligence.
—Betsy Newmark: “”Rewrite history” – that’s an euphemism for lying. And that is what these politicians are doing. And they need to be called on it.”
—Kevin Drum: “However, there’s been steadily growing evidence that the Bush administration suppressed official dissents about the WMD evidence before the war, and the fact that we now know this seems like a pretty good reason for even the most patriotic among us to suspect that Bush did, in fact, mislead the American public. There’s undoubtedly political calculation going on as well, but that happens on both sides of the street and is hardly evidence of non-patriotism.”
—The Brad Blog:
In a response just issued by OpTruth.org, “the nation’s first and largest organization for Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” their Executive Director Paul Rieckhoff expressed disappointment in George W. Bush’s just-completed Veterans’ Day speech to troops in Pennsylvania.
“Those of us who fought in Iraq deserve to know why we became Veterans in the first place,” Reickhoff said in a statement that went on to call for a “real investigation into prewar intelligence.”
—Dean Esmay offers 13 specific ways people can know when they’re unpatriotic and writes:
For the longest time I was one of the few people in the blogosphere willing to openly call some people unpatriotic. I heard the “don’t question my patriotism” line at least hundreds of times more often than I ever saw anyone question someone’s patriotism, but I admit to doing it–and unapologetically so. I’ve also explained, hundreds of times, what constitutes unpatriotic dissent from patriotic dissent.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.