The Road Ahead

Stolen from: The Daily Brew

Tne great task of wartime leadership, said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, "is not only to communicate resolve and determination and will, but to explain what you are doing and why you are doing it".

Hmm. Where do you think he is going with this one? Think he is impressed with Dubya's "wartime leadership"?

"I think thus far that is not quite what we have seen", he said. "We have seen a tremendous pulse of staunchness, but we have not seen the more intellectual side of war leadership, making the case for what we are doing and laying out the arguments for what we do next."

The normal way to "lay out the arguments for what we do next" is to give a speech, but so far, we haven't seen it. Which is strange, because if there is one thing Bush has shown us that he can do, it is to read a speech. In fact, about the only time Bush looks comfortable with whatever it is that he happens to be saying, is when he is reading something someone else wrote for him from a teleprompter. To hear the chattering celebrity spokespeople tell it, he comes off like Reagan, Churchill and Eisenhower, all rolled into one. The Peggy Noonan quote on this point is just too funny.

"He was magically transformed before our very eyes. Transformed into a man, a man who no longer needed the teleprompter."

Her knees grew week. She fell in love. Give me break.

The contrast between Bush talking in his own words and Bush reading the words of his staff is stunning. If there was ever a guy who gained from reading someone else's writing off a screen, it's Bush. He gains so much stature from the teleprompter, the GOP should give the guy who invented the thing the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Of course, the problem with having "teleprompter George" give a great speech is when "off the cuff George" has to answer a question with a camera pointed at him, he inevitably comes off sounding like one of the Duke boys from Hazard County. So it usually isn't Bush who makes the case for Bush's policies. It is his minions. Which brings me back to "what we do next".

The past few days have seen a non-stop parade of Republican operatives on the cable channels giving us the hard sell for a war against Iraq. You don't need a Phd. in political science to understand why this is happening. Bush has already decided what he is going to do. He is going to clean up his dad's legacy. If Don King were promoting it, it would be titled "The Son of Bush v. Saddam Hussein" But watching Bush's minions make the pitch to the American public for a war against Iraq tells me that the White House polls must not be showing support for expanding the turkey shoot in Afghanistan.

This isn't too surprising. After all, support for the war on bin Laden comes naturally; he attacked us, and hit us with a pretty solid blow. All Saddam ever did was take over a corrupt monarchy called Kuwait. And it isn't as if he didn't get punished for it. We were so worried that he would take over another corrupt monarchy, Saudi Arabia, that we mobilized the whole world to attack him.

The irony of this is that one could argue that Saudi Arabia is actually a much bigger threat to America than Iraq. After all, both Osama bin Laden and most of the rest of the guys who blew up the World Trade Towers were Saudis. The Saudi government allows millions of dollars to flow out of the country to fund fundamentalist mosques, where they teach young Muslims to hate America. Millions more are given to groups like Al Queada, to train those young Muslims in the arts of hijacking planes, building car bombs, and filling out student visa applications. No one has made the case that Saddam does any of these things. Nevertheless, the Saudi Royal family seem to have a special relationship with the Bush family, and Saddam clearly doesn't, so the White House's permanent campaign for now is directed towards building support for what seems to be a grudge match between the Bush family and Saddam.

So, if you waste your time listening to the corporate media spout White House propaganda for the next couple of weeks, plan on hearing a lot about what an evil man Saddam is, and how he gassed his own people, and how he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and how he is a threat to us, and how we better get him before he gets us. You will know that the White House ad campaign has succeeded in swinging public opinion the minute it starts raining ordinance in Baghdad, and the speechwriters write some stirring words for Bush to read to us from the teleprompter.