In what was billed as a “major speech” coming at time of multi-pronged crises and controversies for his administration, President George Bush says the U.S. has thwarted 10 terrorist plots and is committed to see out the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq through to successful conclusion.
Overall, the United States and our partners have disrupted at least ten serious al Qaeda terrorist plots since September the 11th, including three al Qaeda plots to attack inside the United States. We’ve stopped at least five more al Qaeda efforts to case targets in the United States, or infiltrate operatives into our country. Because of this steady progress, the enemy is wounded — but the enemy is still capable of global operations. Our commitment is clear: We will not relent until the organized international terror networks are exposed and broken, and their leaders held to account for their acts of murder.
The Washington Post quoting Bush and his aides, reports:
The reported plots aimed to strike a wide variety of targets, including the Library Tower in Los Angeles, ships in international waters and a tourist site overseas, the White House said last night. Three of the 10 were directed at U.S. soil, officials said. The government, they added, also stopped five al Qaeda efforts to case possible targets or infiltrate operatives into the country.
Most of the plots were previously reported in some form; a few were revealed for the first time yesterday. The White House had never before placed a number or compiled a public list of the foiled attempts to follow up the Sept. 11 attacks, but it offered scant information beyond the location and general date of each reported plot — making it difficult to assess last night how serious or advanced they were or what role the government played in preventing them.
Bush cited the disrupted plans in a speech yesterday intended to shore up sagging public support for the war in Iraq and address more extensively than ever before the philosophical framework undergirding Islamic extremism. The radical movement, he said, goes beyond “isolated acts of madness,” animated by a coherent philosophy akin to Soviet Communism and Nazi fascism with the goal to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.
The full transcript of the speech can be read here.
One AP report put the speech’s timing in the current context:
In a speech designed to revive flagging public support for the war in Iraq, the president also said the U.S. and its partners have stopped at least five more efforts by al-Qaida to case targets or infiltrate operatives in the United States…
Bush said Islamic radicals are seeking to establish a “radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia” with Iraq serving as the main front. He singled out Iran and Syria as “allies of convenience” for Islamic radicalism.
The White House initially would not give details of the 10 plots that Bush mentioned in his morning speech before the National Endowment for Democracy, saying some information remained classified. But in the evening, the White House released a fact sheet with a brief, and vague, description of each.”
The terrorism news hook is what has gotten the most play. Why? Because much of the rest of the speech seemed familiar even though it was a good, solid statement of U.S. policy not to give in to terrorism and the contention (vehemently disputed by anti-war critics) that the U.S. war in Iraq is linked to it.
A fact of life that’s unseemly to mention is this: the Bush administration’s terrorism warnings and statements have begun to generate some cynicism in some quarters (the irony is that a terrorist attack would erase the cynicism pretty quickly).
Critics began charging during the campaign that administration officials accelerated warnings and speeches about terrorism at times during the campaign when poll numbers began to sag or otherwise to solidify public support via terrorism warnings — which seem to generate a “fight-or-flight” mechanism with the U.S. public…mostly “fight” and a rallying-around-the-administration impact.
Some also noted that, after the elections, the color code warnings largely vanished. Given the events of the past few weeks — including the controversy surrounding Bush Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, who is being sold by some administration officials as critical because she understands the role of the courts in the terror war — these charges that there is a political connection in the terrorism theme’s timing are likely to surface again.
But there’s no proof that is the motivation. And even though the speech could be dismissed as more of the same declarations of resolve, some analysts consider it to be an important policy statement.
For analysis, we defer to one of the most content-heavy analysts in the blogosphere, former military man Donald Sensing here in Part I of his analysis of the speech. Read it in full because he takes pieces of Bush’s speech and then recaps parts of his previous, specific posts on the terrorism issue. A small sample… Summarizing the Bush speech he says:
This is not the same as saying, “stay the course.� This is an affirmation that the United States will not be “the weak horse� that Osama bin Laden promised Muslims it would be. War is, as has been endlessly noted, a contest of wills. The president affirmed that our will is and will be unbroken. The rest of the speech he explained why it must be so.
Then he recounts one of his own past posts:
There are only four basic possible outcomes of this (terrorism) war:
1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in the Islamic lands, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. …
2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamicization of the entire Middle East, the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans.
3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and total war erupts between the US and several Islamic countries.
4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.
Read Sensing’s analysis in full. He is required reading. We’ll post a separate item on Part II of his analysis when he puts it up.
Note: Watch the blogs and news wires on this story. The Bush administration has damaged its credibility on a host of issues (the latest Bush’s claim that his lawyer Miers is the best person in the whole country he could find to fill the Supreme Court seat: sure…). Such credibility problems could damage how its pronouncements on terrorism are received. You’ll get a sense of where the administration’s credibility is now by seeing how this speech is played here and abroad in coming days — if there’s a “ho-hum” response or if, like Sensing, it’s taken as a serious statement in fact and intent versus an exercise in imagery and political recovery.