Did Bush misspeak or did he speak the truth?

President Bush and his handlers are saying that he misspoke when he told a tv interviewer, “I doubt that you can win” the war on terror. As far as I see it, Bush was not misspeaking, but was revealing the truth about his approach to the war on terror, or at least to the war in Iraq, that I have been pointing to, over and over, for the last year. I have been saying that the war is a fraud, because we have no strategy or capability in place to defeat our Islamist and terrorist enemies, and therefore will have to stay in Iraq for an endless number of years in order to prop up the new government which, because of the ongoing presence of the enemy whom we have no plans to defeat, is not sustainable on its own.

Curiously, the president’s wife inadvertently revealed the same miserable truth in her speech to the convention Tuesday night. She compared the birth of Iraqi democracy with the birth of American democracy. Just as it took America a long time to give women the vote, Mrs. Bush said, it will take a long time to institute real democracy in Iraq. Mrs. Bush was thus equating the absence of the women’s franchise in America with ongoing suicide bombings, kidnappings, and beheadings of innocent civilians in Iraq! If we take Mrs. Bush at her word, it would mean that since it took 130 years for America to go from the ratification of the imperfectly democratic Constitution to the granting of the vote to women, and thus to “true” democracy, it will take 130 years for jihadist bombings and beheadings to stop in Iraq and for normal self-government to become possible. Which means that our troops will be in Iraq until the year 2133.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 02, 2004 02:02 AM | Send