President George Bush has made a quiet shift in the arguments he uses to try to shore up support for the increasingly unpopular Iraq War, as the New York Times’s David Sanger points out:
President Bush’s newest effort to rebuild eroding support for the war in Iraq features a distinct shift in approach: Rather than stressing the benefits of eventual victory, he and his top aides are beginning to lay out the grim consequences of failure.
It is a striking change of tone for a president who prides himself on optimism and has usually maintained that demeanor, at least in public, while his aides cast critics as defeatists.
But in his speech on Thursday in Salt Lake City — the first in a series to commemorate the Sept. 11 anniversary — he picked up on an approach that Gen. John P. Abizaid, Vice President Dick Cheney and others have refined in the past few months: a warning that defeat in Iraq will only move the battle elsewhere, threatening allies in the Middle East and eventually, Mr. Bush insisted, Americans “in the streets of our own cities.�
“We can allow the Middle East to continue on its course — on the course it was headed before September the 11th,� Mr. Bush said, “and a generation from now, our children will face a region dominated by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. Or we can stop that from happening, by rallying the world to confront the ideology of hate and give the people of the Middle East a future of hope.�
It is reminiscent of — updated for a different war, and a different time — President Lyndon B. Johnson’s adoption of the “domino theory,� in which South Vietnam’s fall could lead to Communism’s spread through Southeast Asia and beyond. In the case of Iraq, Mr. Bush’s argument boils down to a statement he quoted from General Abizaid, his top commander in the Middle East: “If we leave, they will follow us.�
The parallels to GWB and LBJ have been made before. We’ve made them before and some have respectfully disagreed with us.
But each day we see more of them.
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.