# Posted 11:08 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

BUSH LISTENS TO OXBLOG! It might be more accurate to say that Bush listens to Tony Blair. On Monday night, the President told the nation that

Some citizens wonder, "After 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now?"

And there's a reason. We have experienced the horror of September the 11th. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing, in fact they would be eager, to use biological or chemical or a nuclear weapon.

Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Three weeks ago, OxBlog observed that:

The British prime minister is the only hawk who recognizes that the real reason that the United States and its allies cannot tolerate the continuing existence of Saddam's regime is that ever since September 11th we have become aware of the need to preempt terror. As Blair said:

"Suppose I had come last year on the same day as this year -- Sept. 10. Suppose I had said to you: There is a terrorist network called al Qaeda. It operates out of Afghanistan. It has carried out several attacks and we believe it is planning more. It has been condemned by the U.N. in the strongest terms. Unless it is stopped, the threat will grow. And so I want to take action to prevent that. Your response and probably that of most people would have been very similar to the response of some of you yesterday on Iraq. There would have been few takers for dealing with it and probably none for taking military action of any description."

Thus, I say without reservation that Bush's Cincinnati speech was an improvement over his previous efforts in numerous respects. As usual, I agree with more than 80% of what the President says on foreign policy. Now if you have been reading my posts this past month, you might wonder how I can characterize myself as someone who tends to agree with the President on foreign policy, at least since September 11. The answer is this: I criticize the president not because I disagree with him, but because I believe he has demonstrated a certain incompetence in his efforts to achieve objective that he, I and almost all Americans share. Convincing me isn't hard. What I'm concerned about is whether Bush rhetoric and decisions will elicit the right response from our allies as well as our enemies. From that point of view, there were still a number of problems with the Cincinnati speech.

1) Bush said that:

In addition to declaring and destroying all of its weapons of mass destruction, Iraq must end its support for terrorism. It must cease the persecution of its civilian population. It must stop all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It must release or account for all Gulf War personnel, including an American pilot whose fate is still unknown.

By taking these steps and by only taking these steps, the Iraqi regime has an opportunity to avoid conflict.

These steps would also change the nature of the Iraqi regime itself. America hopes the regime will make that choice.

These sentences imply that Bush is moving away from a strict definition of regime change, which entails replacing Saddam's dictatorial order with a democratic one. While disarming, reducing persecution and stopping illicit trade are all good things, none of them demands the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, i.e. the sina que non of regime change.

Such a change of course would be disturbing. In light of the fact that Bush has expended so much of his political capital establishing the legitimacy of regime change -- both at home and abroad -- one wonders why he is backing off from it now. Has something changed? As far as I can tell, his words on Monday night represent a poorly designed effort to reconcile the demands of regime change with the more moderate position of the United Nations, which is only demanding Iraqi disarmament. If Bush wants to cooperate more closely with the UN, however, he should acknowledge his differences with it and agree to collaborate for the purpose of achieving common objective. To do otherwise is to damage his already questionable credibility.

2) Bush also stated that:

Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable. The resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice and it is determined to make the demands of the civilized world mean something.

While I myself have emphasized the importance of a united front, framing the resolution as an effort to achieve a united front seems somewhat deceptive. As I understood, the purpose of the resolution is to respond to the immediate threat to US national security posed by Iraq. In light of such an immediate threat, the President much have the authority to use force without waiting for congressional approval. Yet nowhere in Bush's speech was there an explicit statment that Iraq presents an immediate, i.e. within-the-next-few-months, sort of threat to the US. In fact, the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq suggests that Saddam will not use chemical or biological weapons unless attacked first by the United States. Thus, it seems that the President has finally backed off from his untenable argument that Saddam might attack at any moment. While that decision is for the best, it still highlights the fact that this administration has a lot to learn about establishing its credibility on the world stage. Moreover, if the Iraqi threat isn't immediate, the President could have waited until after the upcoming elections to submit his resolution to Congress, thus avoiding the partisan wrangling that has undermined the President's own efforts to negotiate with the UN.

3) Finally, Bush still hasn't mastered the art of demonstrating that "Iraq is unique". According to the President:

I said that those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves. Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction, and he cannot be trusted.

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, he could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.

It seems to be that if one substitutes the word "Iran" for the words "Saddam Hussein", the above sentence would still make sense. What Bush seems unable to say is that Saddam is unique because he remains in violation of the disarmament accord that ended the Gulf War. He is an international outlaw. And on September 11th the United States learned just how far outlaws are willing to go to destroy us. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion