Bush's Speech

I watched the President's television address tonight, and I have to say, I had a very different reaction than Jonathan Chait did. Chait (with whom I agree on most things) posted the following at the New Republic's blog:

I am not, to say the least, a fan of President Bush.
But a portion of his speech tonight genuinely
moved me and made me think more highly of
him. It was the part where he addressed
opponents of the Iraq war, said he understand
their passion but asked that they think of the
stakes of defeat now that the war had happened
and asked that they not give in to despair. I
cannot remember this president ever speaking to
his political opponents except to mischaracterize
their views and use them as a straw man.

Is this the part of the speech Chait is referring to?

This loss has caused sorrow for our whole
Nation and it has led some to ask if we are
creating more problems than we are solving.
That is an important question, and the answer
depends on your view of the war on terror. If you
think the terrorists would become peaceful if only
America would stop provoking them, then it
might make sense to leave them alone.

Or maybe this?

September 11th, 2001 required us to take
every emerging threat to our country
seriously, and it shattered the illusion that
terrorists attack us only after we provoke
them. On that day, we were not in Iraq,
we were not in Afghanistan, but the
terrorists attacked us anyway, and killed
nearly 3,000 men, women, and children in
our own country. My conviction comes
down to this: We do not create terrorism
by fighting the terrorists. We invite
terrorism by ignoring them.

This is, of course, the granddaddy of all straw man arguments. In just a few sentences it manages to mischaracterize entirely the views of all serious-minded critics, to conflate Saddam's regime with Al Qaeda, and to ignore the basic realities of terrorism. In typical fashion, Bush even implies that his critics opposed the invasion of Afghanistan (which almost none of them did). As Bush damn well knows, no one is seriously advocating ignoring the problem. We all agree that Islamic terrorism is a threat to our national security and needs to be countered aggressively. The debate is over how best to do that. Moreover, Bush's argument here is transparently stupid. He points to 9/11 as evidence that terrorists wanted to harm us even before he decided to invade Iraq, that they did not need any further provocation. The implication here is that Bush's policies couldn't possibly have made the situation worse. This, of course, is ridiculous. It assumes, among other things, that there are a fixed number of terrorists in the world, an assumption that is patently absurd. New terrorists are recruited every day and pretending that our policies don't have any effect on that recruitment is entirely dishonest. As Bush has admitted on other occasions, we are fighting a war of ideas.

Bush's argument also implies, yet again, that Iraq was a hotbed of terrorism prior to our invasion, that we invaded Iraq for the very same reasons we invaded Afghanistan. That's just a flat out lie. Many people had many different reasons for wanting to invade Iraq, but "getting the terrorists" was never one of them.

And no Bush speech about Iraq would be complete without the President's favorite ludicrous talking point:

And if we were not fighting them in Iraq,
in Afghanistan, in Southeast Asia, and in
other places, the terrorists would not be
peaceful citizens; they would be on the
offense, and headed our way.

This, of course, is the so-called "fly trap theory," an argument that has been widely-mocked even by the pro-war crowd. Though I'm not going to rehash it now, in a previous post I discussed why I think Bush continues to invoke this rather silly talking point despite being ridiculed by even his strongest supporters.

Long story short, I was underwhelmed by the speech. Nothing about it struck me as being a serious attempt to address any real criticisms being leveled against the administration. It was just more of the same stale rhetoric. More straw men and fly traps.