Bush's desperation

Now the server gremlins have been exterminated, let's resume with Bush's speech of last week; an attempt to rally public support for the disaster in Iraq, which is currently in freefall (45% of Americans in a new poll say that the US will never succeed in Iraq). Here's some links to various reactions to the speech and the issues surrounding it.

First stop, as always, is Juan Cole, who gives us a detailed dissection of the main points. Then there's Iraqi blogger Riverbend's account of how the speech played in her Baghdad living room. Mark LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture, and Islamic studies at the University of California, gives a short reaction here (and here dispels some myths on the consequences of US withdrawal, a subject I’ve discussed previously here). Paul Woodward of the excellent resource War in Context, sees the speech as not so much characteristic of a strong leader as of one suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. Daniel Ellsberg notes some uncanny similarities between Bush's speech and those delivered by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon during the Vietnam era. At the ever-brilliant TomDispatch, Tom Engelhardt and Paul Rogat Loeb give us their view on the speech and the sacrifices Bush continues to demand from others. Finally, drawing back for some wider perspective, Tom Engelhardt describes the lying, manipulative amorality that the Republicans have been deploying with increasing desperation in the face of the disaster.

When one day the Vice-President is saying that the insurgency is in its "last throes", only for the Defence Secretary a few days later to admit that those "last throes" could last 12 years, you know the Bush administration is in deep trouble. When the greatest military power in all history, after two years of the showcase battle in its self-proclaimed new world order, still hasn't conquered a crippled third world country when faced only with rag tag militias equipped with light arms, you know US expansionism is in tailspin. And when the US president is forced to wheel out the comprehensively discredited excuse that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, then you know the neo-imperialists are desperate and panicking.

With the fact of the US/UK's pre-war lying now proven, and the Iraq colonisation all over bar the retreat, we may now leave the pro-war camp to its own "last throes" of resistance and move to a discussion of how the US defeat can be transformed into a victory for the Iraqi people, and kept out of the hands of a minority of local extremists.