Simon Tisdall

George Bush’s speech to the country from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was an opportunity to show he knows what he is doing in Iraq. It was a chance to demonstrate that, despite past mistakes, he has a plan that will work. Bush also needed to counter the widespread perception that his administration is in a state of denial over the mounting casualties and costs that are dramatically eroding his poll ratings. His Fort Bragg moment, if handled skillfully, might have enabled him to refute Republican senator Chuck Hagel’s armour-piercing jibe that the White House is “disconnected from reality [and] making it up as they go along’’. But the president fluffed it. Like a recidivist incapable of going straight, Bush plunged back into the scaremongering rhetoric of last autumn’s election campaign and once again deliberately conflated the Iraq war with the 9/11 terror attacks.

As before, he offered no way back and no joint, consensual path forward. Instead he ignored his critics, re-wrapped himself in the flag and gloried, from a safe distance, in the sacrifice of America’s soldiers. Oblivious to the inherent contradiction, he vowed to defeat a weakened, immoral enemy that was also ubiquitous and on the attack. “Terrorists who kill innocents on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania,’’ he said. “There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home. The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of September 11. For the sake of our nation’s security, this will not happen on my watch.’’ This last phrase possibly offered

the best clue to Bush’s second-term Iraq strategy, such as it is. He may lack new ideas, but he knows what he is not going to do.

There would be no timetable for a withdrawal, he said, despite claims that the American presence is the main problem. Nor would there be an unpopular, but arguably necessary, increase in troop numbers until Iraq’s post-Saddam institutions were secured. Off-stage, Bush’s chief adviser, Karl Rove, was lambasting Democrats and other “liberals’’ who he said wanted “to offer therapy and understanding for our attackers’’. Most tellingly, Bush once again refused to admit any mistakes before, during or after the 2003 invasion. There would be no raking over the past, Dan Bartlett, his communications director, insisted. In other words, Bush does wars. He does freedom and he does democracy, as defined in Washington. But he does not do apologies.

What the president’s “not on my watch’’ remark suggested instead was that as long as he occupies the Whi-te House, there would be no significant reconsideration of the present

“three-war’’ strategy. This comprises the war to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan; the global “war on terror’’ (which now increasingly targets Iran); and the selective, preponderantly diplomatic war for democracy in the Middle East and beyond. This is how Bush is beginning to define a legacy almost wholly lacking in domestic policy achievements. But if Bush is not for turning, the US public increasingly may be. All the signs are that Bush’s no surrender, hang tough, trust-me patriotism is wearing thin. Polls suggest that Americans just do not buy it any more. They feel they have been duped. — The Guardian