The "Surge" Speech: Reaction from the Corner

I'll cover the right's reaction to Bush's speech in more depth tomorrow - in my TWICO post - but here's a quick roundup of opinion from the Cornerscenti:

Michael Ledeen dug it:

I liked a lot of the specifics of the speech ... [I]t sounded like our soldiers will get Rules of Engagement that haven't been neutered, that are not PC, but ROEs that are appropriate to winning a war rather than avoiding casualties. Maybe...

In a couple of other posts, Ledeen speculates (rather giddily) on whether the subtext was that we might finally get to attack Iran and Syria:

[Bush:]"And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

I've read that last sentence maybe ten times. Those "networks providing advanced weaponry and training" certainly are based in Iran and Syria. It sounds like he said we are going after terrorist training camps and the IED assembly facilities, doesn't it?

A follow-up post quotes a reader letter that "pretty much sums up the reaction I'm getting":

"My bet is that it's Bush threatening to authorize hot pursuits over the border and Cambodian-style incursions, along with air strikes, to destroy the enemy's sanctuaries. If so, finally we're getting down to fight a better war. The 1970 Cambodian Incursion ... [blah, blah, blah, fap-fap-fap]"

Other NROistas, though, are slightly less engorged with blood. George Conway wishes Bush would stop digging and go back to clearing brush:

Frankly, as he has over the past few weeks, Bush looked like a man who is in way over his head, which he is. The man who got the country into this hole, and whose neglect and incompetence dug us deeper into into it, looks like a man who would like nothing more than to get back to Crawford. We'd all be better off if he would.

And John Derbyshire was having none of it: "a snow job," he calls it:

The central and most glaring contradiction is the implied threat to walk away... Yoked to the ringing declaration that, of course, we can't walk away. We seem to be saying to the Maliki govt.: "Hey, you guys better step up to your responsibilites, or else we're outa here." This, a few sentences after saying that we can't leave the place without a victory. So-o-o-o:

—-We can't leave Iraq without a victory.

—-Unless Maliki & Co. get their act together, we can't achieve victory.

—-If Maliki & Co. don't get their act together, we'll leave.

It's been a while since I studied classical logic, but it seems to me that this syllogism leaks like a sieve.

As for Iran and Syria, Derbyshire finds the President's words almost incoherent:

The President: "Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria." We haven't been doing this? We haven't been doing this? How many of the the 21,500 troops of the "surge" will be assigned to these operations? Leaving how many for Baghdad and Anbar? Shall we have a "hot pursuit" policy?

And, returning to the issue of sticks: What, exactly, do Iran and Syria have to fear from us, whatever they do?

I tell you what, though - at least Cliff May has a solution in mind:

I wish Bush were sending in at least a couple of brigades of Ethiopians.

Don't we all, Cliff...

Labels: "surge", Bush, Cliff May, George Conway, Iraq, John Derbyshire, Michael Ledeen, NRO, The Corner

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:36 AM 0 comments

  Look on this man, this Dubya...

Brad at Sadly, No points us to David Ignatius's nauseating attempt to paint President Bush as some kind of tragic figure, straining heroically against the burden of history.

Sample quotes:

The stress of the job — so well hidden for much of the past six years — has begun to show on Bush’s face. He often looks burdened, distracted, haunted by a question that has no good answer....

Bush is not a man for introspection. That’s part of his flinty personality — the tight, clipped answers and the forced jocularity of the nicknames he gives to reporters and White House aides. That’s why this version of reality TV is so poignant: This very private man has begun to talk out loud about the emotional turmoil inside. He is letting it bleed....

Bush says he doesn’t care what happens now to his poll numbers, and I believe him. He broke through the political barriers a while ago. I sense that, as he anguishes about Iraq, he has in mind the judgment of future historians....

What makes reality TV gripping is that it’s all happening live — the contestants make their choices under pressure, win or lose.

This is Beltway douchebaggery of the highest order. I never cease to be amazed at how Washington pundits have projected onto this President - for whom mediocrity would be an improvement - so many grand and heroic narratives. There's a real need to see Bush as a towering figure, and only over the past year or so has the commentary class finally begun to give up on this affinity.

The answer, of course, is that the pundits themselves are trapped in, and probably demoralized by, their own thorough mediocrity. They are superfluous creatures of a shallow ecology, and their role in American politics is to cycle between syncophancy and a fashionable, substance-less contrarianism, all while congratulating each other on their relevance to imperial American democracy. It must be a depressing existence. So you can see why they would be desperate, now and then, to hitch themselves to some historical star, to believe that their place in the universe involves an intellectual connection to truly epoch-changing people and events. And so they'll build a mythology around the most cretinous of political stalking horses and indulge themselves in the fantasy that they really are the consiglieri to history.

Having embarassed himself with this myth-making in the days before every sentient being could see what a disaster the Iraq war was, Ignatius has passed through a brief phase of confused reflection, only to emerge stronger on the other side: he may no longer be riding along with the President's men, but, thank the gods, Ignatius can record for us commoners the great Tragedy of Bush. No, this isn't just the ugly result of cheap politics, stupid decisions, and a government run by hacks and thieves. It's not just some idiotic idea carried along on the acclaim of pundits playing make-believe.

It's epic, man.

(Paul)

Labels: Bush, David Ignatius, Iraq, pundits, Sadly No

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:54 AM 1 comments

  The God-Like Prince

Yet another "signing statement:"

Hours after signing an agreement yesterday on cooperation with India on civilian nuclear technology, President George W. Bush issued a "signing statement" insisting that the executive branch was not bound by terms of the agreement approved by the House of Representatives and Senate, RAW STORY has learned.

Bush is not the first president to push the line on prerogative power, but he has taken it the furthest and done so while he and his supporters call themselves "conservatives." What's interesting is that I think that they genuinely are conservatives, not in the traditional American sense whereby one refers to Hamilton (or, conversely, to Madison - a contradiction we'll tease out over time). This is something different, and, in a perverse way, new.

The American founders had read their Montesquieu. Madison quotes him approvingly in Federalist #47: "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person." This is Madison defending the Constitution against critics who claimed it did not feature enough separation of powers.

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system.

Let no one say that the Bush crowd are "not conservatives." They are, in fact, ur-conservatives, conservatives of a sort alien to the American political tradition.

They are the new American Tories.

(Paul)

Labels: Bush, conservatism, conservatives, signing statements, Tories

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:58 AM 0 comments