Pres. Bush gave an interview on CBS 60 Minutes broadcast Sunday night. Tuesday evening, another interview was broadcast, this time with Jim Lehrer of PBS NewsHour, both high profile interviews targeting different audiences. The President gave the impression of the Godfather explaining trade-offs. He also made an interesting statement about a draft army versus the volunteer army, responding to Lehrers reference to his own military service. Body language was more controlled than in the past but semantics were disjointed, again.
011407 CBS Going For Broke with Troop Surge http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/13/60minutes/main2358754.shtml <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/13/60minutes/main2358754.shtml> 011607 PBS NewsHour Pres. Bush Defends New Iraq Strategy http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/politics/bush-interview_01-16-0 7.html <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/politics/bush-interview_01-16- 07.html> In both of these interviews, I was struck by how often Bush used the phrase I decided, thats why I decided, etc. No its in our best interests to control the sectarian violence, no reference to the common purpose of Congress, the Baker-Hamilton report, the American people, no we all want this great sacrifice by our military to work, we just have different ideas how that should happen. It always comes back to the personal: I am the Decider. Bush does not cultivate the power of the presidency to embrace all of the public, it is etched in stone for him that you are with me or against me. The line he used about the Old Plan not working (not enough troops) as slow failure also struck me as discrediting, given the resounding public support he gave Rumsfeld in 2006, whom he discharged the day after a historic midterm election defeat, and the replacement of two command generals who told him that new troops at this late date was not the solution they would choose. Two exchanges: LEHRER: Mr. President, do you have a feeling of personal failure about Iraq right now? PRESIDENT BUSH: Im frustrated at times about Iraq because I understand the consequences of failure . Look, I had a choice to make, Jim, and that is - one - do what were doing. And one could define that maybe a slow failure. A little further on LEHRER: Is there a little bit of a broken egg problem here, Mr. President, that there is instability and there is violence in Iraq - sectarian violence, Iraqis killing other Iraqis, and now the United States helped create the broken egg and now says, okay, Iraqis, its your problem. You put the egg back together, and if you dont do it quickly and you dont do it well, then well get the hell out. BUSH: Yeah, you know, thats an interesting question. I dont quite view it as the broken egg; I view it as the cracked egg where we still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg. (italics mine) Afterwards, NewsHour political analysts David Brooks and Mark Shields weighed in. Brooks, who for years has supported Bush, described him as trying to sell something very difficult as very easy, trying to absolve himself from judgment. Shields once again hammered the point that the president refuses to ask all Americans to sacrifice, individually and collectively, and by refusing to do so reduces himself to a tax-cutter instead of inspiring confidence and inspiration in a war on terrorism that could, by his own declarations, could last generations. Pres. Owes Public More Information At the end of this, Looking for More Answers: DAVID BROOKS: Well, I do think they knew there had to be a change before the election. And they just waited until after the election to announce it. I found -- one of answers I found interesting was on, again, going back to this issue of 17,500 troops in Baghdad. You asked him, will that be enough? And he said, I'll do what the generals tell me to do basically. Well, that was his answer for three years when they told him they didn't commit enough troops, as he now acknowledges. So why should we believe him now? And which generals are these? And what he's trying to do is absolve himself from having to make a judgment and give us the reasons for the judgment, because there are all different generals and colonels and everybody else giving different analyses of how many troops it will take. And he doesn't give us any military reason. And when pressed, he always gives you a personal reason. "Well, I trust this guy, General Casey. I like that guy, General Abizaid." Well, they're good guys, but the president has to have made -- has to have heard the different arguments and have a substantive reason why this number of troops will work and that number of troops won't work. And he never really answers on that. He just says, "I defer to the generals." Again, that's not good enough anymore. I haven't heard that many other plausible arguments. And I'm willing to give this policy a chance, as other people who know more about the military situation, more than me, are willing to give it a chance. But you've got to ease the skepticism based on three years of failure. And, again, that involves granularity; that involves evidence; that involves treating people like adults and not talking down to them. JIM LEHRER: Mark? MARK SHIELDS: I can't argue with anything that David said there. I would just add that I thought the president's explanation of the successes in Iraq, getting rid of Saddam Hussein and that, I was fascinated by his use of the term "kind of a revenge killing." I mean, there are millions of people who think that capital punishment is a revenge killing, it's an institutionalized revenge killing. But when the president talked as he did about the successes, I don't think they have created a unity government. I don't think anyone really believes that. It's a sectarian government, and that's one of the real problems that we're dealing with right now. And so maybe he just wants to believe that, but it's not true. Saddam Hussein is gone. The other thing that just amazed me was that he said we have to stop al-Qaida from getting a foothold in Iraq. That was in the resolution to go to war in the first place, that al-Qaida did have a foothold in Iraq. So, I mean, here we are, five years later. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june07/sb_01-16.html <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june07/sb_01-16.html> As to the economic issues of spending $1.2 TRILLION on the Iraq war, it has been suggested that a Victory Tax be passed on the very rich, until US troops are sent home. The reasoning is that the war would end much sooner.
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