Too Little, Too Late

After months of inexplicable and devastating reluctance to defend his administration’s policies against a growing tide of opposition, President Bush has come out swinging.

In a televised address to the nation on Sunday night—the first speech that the President has given from the Oval Office since the war in Iraq began in 2003—Bush made what is perhaps the clearest and most honest case for the war that anyone in his administration has yet presented. He rightly touted the success of the recent elections and other accomplishments of the reconstruction effort. He reminded Americans that regardless of one’s position on the war itself, immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be strategically disastrous.

But in a stark departure from his customary practice, he was also unusually forthcoming about his administration’s faulty expectations concerning the reconstruction and the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush is well aware that his trumpeted “political capital” is losing value faster than a marc in the Weimar Republic, and he is desperate to repaint himself as a more realistic leader.

And that is precisely the President’s problem. Rather than maintain his myopic façade of absolute optimism, he should have given this speech months ago, if not over a year ago. That he did not deliver it until now, as he teeters on the brink of a political abyss, demonstrates how truly feeble his leadership has been.

The President did not deliver an Oval Office address after the first historic Iraqi general election. Nor, for that matter, did the President deliver an Oval Office address following the symbolically significant two-thousandth American casualty in Iraq. When his opponents seized coalition chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer’s final report as conclusive evidence that the justification for the war had been a farce, the President did not speak up to set the record straight. When Cindy Sheehan haunted the gates of his Crawford ranch and precipitated a flood of anti-war sentiment, the President remained silent. Amidst ever-accumulating incidents of roadside bombs killing American troops and the resulting public discontent with his administration’s war policy, the President responded only by regurgitating stale party lines during press conferences and minor speeches.

Bush, in short, has missed every major opportunity to reclaim prominence in the heated debate over the Iraq War. He only crawled out of his shell within the past month, delivering four major policy addresses prior to his nationally televised speech. By then, however, his credibility had already withered into a diminutive skeleton of what had been a formidable force at the time of his reelection. A leader who starts to fight only when his approval rating flirts with the 40 percent mark is no leader at all.

Perhaps President Bush did come out swinging on Sunday night, and perhaps he even landed a good strike or two. But the larger picture for the remainder of his presidency is far grimmer: he has allowed his opposition to back him into a corner, and it will take far more than a few speeches for him to emerge from this position of insignificance.



Drew M. Trombly ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, is a philosophy concentrator in Eliot House.