OxBlog

# Posted 11:38 PM by Ariel David Adesnik

NOT EVERYONE LIKED THE SPEECH: Josh and I may have liked what the President said, but I think it's only fair to post some critical views here as well. For example,

The speech was Mr. Bush's first extended address about Iraq since he declared an end to major combat operations in a May 1 speech. He was more triumphal then, asserting that "the United States and our allies have prevailed."

But 149 Americans have died in Iraq since then, compared with the 138 in the invasion itself. The United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was bombed last month, a low point in the United States' now five-month-old occupation...

In his 18-minute speech, Mr. Bush did not mention Osama bin Laden, who has so far eluded American capture in Afghanistan. He also did not mention the failure so far to find any unconventional weapons in Iraq, the major stated reason that the United States went to war. Nor did Mr. Bush dwell on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which he once predicted would abate if Saddam Hussein was ousted from power in Iraq. That conflict has worsened."

Despite sounding like something out of The Nation, the quotation above is actually from a straight news piece in the NYT written by Elisabeth Bumiller. While I'm still not enough of a Times-watcher to differentiate all that effectively between its correspondents' individual biases, I've long considered Bumiller one of the most biased.

Of course, when it comes to outright ridiculousness, no one can match Howard Dean. While I may have been defending the man just over a week ago (and still stand by what I said), the good Doctor isn't going to score any OxBlog points by saying that Bush's speech is

"beginning to remind me of what was happening with Lyndon Johnson and Dick Nixon during the Vietnam War."

Asked to explain the analogy to Vietnam, Dr. Dean said: "The government begins to feed misinformation to the American people in order to justify an enormous commitment of American troops, which turned out to be a tremendous mistake."

So it looks like Dean has bought into the quagmire myth hook, line and sinker. His first comment demonstrates that he has very little ability to distinguish between "nation-building" in Vietnam and nation-building in Iraq. However, his second comment shows that he isn't exactly ready to go public with that view. Instead of actually commenting on the supposed failure of the occupation, Dean's responded with a non sequitur about Presidential deception. Yes, yes, we've all heard about the uranium. But tonight's speech wasn't about uranium. From context, it seems clear that Dean's initial use of the Vietnam analogy concerned the President's decision to commit ever more resources to a failing cause. But he didn't have the guts to follow up that line of criticism.

Now, you might ask, why do I invest so much effort criticizing a candidate whose foreign policy I already know I don't like? Because I still haven't made up my mind what I would do if it were Dean vs. Bush in November '04. It's a question Josh keeps putting to me: What incentive does Dean have to be responsible about national security if even the most security-minded Democrats (e.g. me)will vote for him on domestic grounds?

With comments like the ones he made tonight, Dean has come that much closer to persuading me that I just can't trust him on national security. I may not like Bush's instincts or truly, truly trust him. But it seems that Dean's instincts are even worse.

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