Mayday!

Doubts cast on success of speech in halting slide against conflict

Leading Democrats yesterday reacted angrily to President George Bush’s address to the nation, accusing him of “exploiting the sacred ground” of September 11 by attempting to link the Iraq war with the terrorist attacks.

In his prime-time speech at Fort Bragg military base, the president mentioned September 11 five times in 30 minutes as he argued that withdrawal from Iraq would leave the US open to more terrorist attacks.

The twitchy mood in Washington was underscored yesterday when the White House was briefly evacuated - and Mr Bush moved to a safe location - in the latest aviation alert to hit the capital. The all-clear was rapidly sounded when the airspace rogue proved to be an innocuous private aircraft.

Instant polls after Mr Bush’s speech suggested that he might have solidified support among the largely Republican audience who watched the performance, but it was unclear whether he had made headway against a steadily advancing tide of scepticism about the justification for the war.

Democrats argued that he had offered no new ideas on how to beat the insurgency.

They pointed to the administration’s lack of credibility over Iraq in the wake of post-war inquiries that found no weapons of mass destruction and no substantive prewar links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, said Mr Bush was trying to “exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq”.

In his speech, Mr Bush did not repeat his administration’s prewar claims of a direct Iraqi role in the September 11 attacks. Instead, he suggested that the insurgents shared a common “totalitarian ideology” with al-Qaida, and that if they were not defeated in Iraq they could use the country as a base from which to launch terrorist attacks on the US homeland.

Senator John Kerry, Mr Bush’s opponent in last November’s election, said the speech represented the administration’s third rationale for the 2003 invasion.

“The first, of course, was weapons of mass destruction. The second was democracy, and now, tonight, it’s to combat the hotbed of terrorism,” he told CNN.

“But most Americans are aware that the hotbed of terrorism never existed in Iraq until we got there.” […]

Comment: Of course, the simple fact that should, by now, be patently clear to all sane individuals is that the “insurgency” in Iraq is largely made up of ordinary Iraqi men and ex-Iraqi army men who are fighting a US force of occupation in the same way that countless other indigenous populations have done in the face of imperialist agression. The juicy irony then is to found in the fact that it is the Iraq “insurgents” that are fighting for true freedom and representative Democracy while the Bush regime andits US military thugs, despite the lies and propaganda, are the real totalitarian ideologues and murderous terrorists