About Face

By Keith Boykin, in politics
Sunday, September 7 2003, 10:16PM

Four months after he landed on an aircraft carrier and declared victory in Iraq, President Bush tonight abruptly reversed course in his war plans. Without saying it directly, the president finally admitted indirectly that his Iraq policy has been, in the words of Dick Gephardt, a "miserable failure." Now, the next thing Bush needs to do is apologize.

Bush began his speech by characterizing the Iraq war as another battle in the larger war on terror. In an effort to link Iraq to the September 11 attacks, Bush insisted the war began "two years ago, following deadly attacks on our country."

In the first few minutes of his speech, Bush argued that Saddam Hussein's government "sponsored terror, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction, and for 12 years defied the clear demands of the United Nations Security Council."

Here's what he did not say. He did not say much about weapons of mass destruction. Out of 2,292 words in his speech, he used the words "weapons of mass destruction" exactly once. That's an about face from March when Bush suggested the whole war was about "weapons of mass destruction." In his final speech two days before the conflict began in March, Bush cited the threat of Iraqi chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons seven times as the principal justification for the war.

Of course, there was one phrase the president used over and over again tonight. Bush mentioned September 11 three times in his 15 minute speech. (He mentioned it four times if you count the reference to the deadly attacks two year ago.) Despite all the evidence to the contrary, a recent Washington Post poll shows 69 percent of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was behind the World Trade Center attack. Bush wants us to keep making that link.

With more Americans killed since the war ended than the number who died during it, most Americans are losing faith in the administration's Iraq policy. A CNN/Time magazine poll last Saturday showed less than half of Americans believe the military action was worth the financial cost and the price of U.S. lives. But the brilliance of Bush's speech was that it attempted to turn this liability into an asset.

"Iraq is now the central front" in the war on terror, the president said tonight. What he did not say was that his policies helped make it that way. The "chaos" the president decried in his speech is developing because our military was not prepared to rebuild Iraq after we invaded.

Despite the misleading remarks in his speech, the president did ask for United Nations assistance and did spell out an exact dollar amount in the continuing operations of the war. He said the U.S. would seek a new UN Security Council resolution to authorize the creation of a multinational force in Iraq and he asked the Congress for a staggering $87 billion to fund the war's costs.

The president deserves credit for leveling with us, finally, on these two issues, but he can't escape the legacy he created. Since January 20, 2001, this administration has pursued a unilateral foreign policy with reckless disregard for the rest of the world. The White House pulled out of the Kyoto agreement on global warming, withdrew from the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty, and thumbed its nose at the international community when it could not get its way in Iraq.

Fueled by the right-wing propaganda machine and the media, the administration whipped Americans into a patriotic hysteria with a "go it alone" cowboy attitude, insults about the German and French leaders, and "freedom fries." Now the president expects the rest of the world to forget all that.

"I recognize that not all of our friends agreed with our decision to enforce the Security Council resolutions and remove Saddam Hussein from power," Bush said. "Yet we cannot let past differences interfere with present duties."

First of all, just about everybody on the Security Council wanted to enforce the resolutions. The question was not whether, but how. On one side, the U.S. wanted to invade Iraq and ask questions later. On the other side, most of the world wanted to find evidence that the UN resolutions were being violated before it authorized an invasion.

Second, Bush should know that past differences will interfere with present duties as long as the White House continues to rewrite history. The president said tonight that members of the UN now have "an opportunity, and the responsibility, to assume a broader role in assuring that Iraq becomes a free and democratic nation." Yes, but when they tried to assume that role in March, the U.S. told them to get out of the way.

In his speech to the nation on March 17, Bush told us he did not need the UN. "The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours," Bush said then. Now he wants the same Security Council he condemned six months ago to bail him out from the quagmire that he created in Iraq.

It won't be easy to make the rest of the world forget the American snub in March. The recent Trans-Atlantic Trends 2003 survey showed that only 30 percent of Europeans support Bush's foreign policy. Not surprisingly, his approval ratings are lowest in Germany (16 percent) and France (15 percent).

If the White House is really serious about getting the United Nations Security Council to support the U.S. in Iraq, then President Bush needs to start by apologizing for his lies and his mistakes. It won't be easy for Bush to admit he was wrong, but in his own words, we can't let past differences interfere with our present duties. The security of the world depends on it.

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