Have you ever written a paper in a word processing program and had the damn thing tell you that you were writing in the passive voice? Well, Mr. Bush’s speech the other night would have brought the ‘passive voice’ flag up often. “Where mistakes have been made the responsibility rests with me.” That is the cleverest use of the passive voice that I may have ever heard. He appears to take responsibility; while, in fact, pointing the finger at unknown others. What is he saying? That others have made mistakes; and he is magnanimously stepping up and accepting responsibility even though, mind you, he didn’t make the mistakes. Of course, if he had said, “I have made mistakes,” he would have been taking the blame, but only grown ups do that.

In this administration, no one takes responsibility. Advancement is based on who one knows, not what one knows. Diligence is punished, and incompetence is rewarded. Americans going to Iraq to work in the interim government were vetted by their allegiance to the Republican Party and the agenda of the religious right. People were questioned on who they voted for and whether or not they supported Roe V. Wade. This is the same administration, remember, that has been trying to disembowel the civil service in the U.S. in order to return to a spoils system in bureaucratic appointments. But, I stray from the point of Mr. Bush’s speech.

In his speech Mr. Bush made many claims. Let’s look at just a couple:

First of all, if Iraq is a part of the ‘War on Terror’ it’s because we started a war of choice there. Before we arrived to topple Saddam, Al Qaeda was present only in the Kurdish-controlled north. Al Qaeda would not truck with Saddam as Bin Laden considered Saddam as apostate. Saddam was not an observant Muslim, he was a convenient Muslim. Basically, Saddam believed in strong central government. That is, all power emanating from him. If he were anything, Socialist would come the closest to describing him. His religious convictions were opportunistic, at best.

Further, Iraq is only one theatre in the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the whole Horn of Africa, and the Philippines (not to mention the rest of the ‘Stans) are all playing important roles. As to our safety ‘here at home,’ we’re nowhere near being safe. So far, we’ve been lucky. Also, we’ve created more Jihadists in Iraq and around the world by our bungling aggression in the Middle East.

What Mr. Bush is asking of us is another chance for him to win at this crap shoot. It’s typical of any addict-enabler situation. He has lost at every throw of the dice, but he wants one more chance because he just ‘knows’ that this time he can win. We are the enablers if we are willing to go along with his folly. Blood and treasure have been spent on this mirage in the desert. Reasons for continuing have changed more often than we can count: WMD morphed into Democracy morphed into fighting Al Qaeda morphed into ‘stay the course’ morphed into:

Actually, in the main, the fight in Iraq is between Sunnis and Shi’ahs. Recruits for ‘radical Islamic extremists’ are fighting American troops. If Americans weren’t there the Sunnis and Shi’ahs could go back to their schism of 1300 some odd years. As to the ‘moderate’ governments in the region, could you point one out? Even the most advanced enlightened governments in the region cannot be considered moderate by American standards. Creating chaos in the region? Sorry, we’ve done that already. Finally, oil revenues will always fund someone’s ambitions. What we’ve assured with our adventurism is that the ’someone’ who ends up with those revenues will probably not have our best interests in mind. And you know what? There’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

Let’s get some historical perspective here. In the 1950s the U.S. had an incredible brother team running the State Department and the CIA. John Foster and Allen Dulles convinced Americans that their ‘Domino Theory’ was real and that the Soviets were a direct and equal threat to the West. The Domino Theory was used to pursue the war in Vietnam. We were told that the consequences of South Vietnam falling were a Communist takeover of all Southeast Asia. Did you hear that the other day, as Mr. Bush was giving his speech, Vietnam was joining the WTO? No, dominos fell. As to the power of the Soviet Union it was always a sham built on a pretense. But, the bigger you build up your opponents, the more you can commit to fighting them. It was during the Dulles brothers’ reign that President Eisenhower gave his speech warning us of the growing strength of the Military Industrial Complex. We’ve been feeding this beast ever since. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

There were more false dichotomies and outright lies and obfuscation in the speech that Mr. Bush gave on Wednesday night. There was an excellent parsing of the speech in the op-ed section of the New York Times on Friday. It’s worth your time to read it. So, here’s the bottom line: will Georgie “make his bones” roll him a win or will he roll ’snake eyes’ yet again? Either way, we lose. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).

And, of course