I suppose it would have been bad politics for the President to call his speech today on Iraq and our strategy there: “Okay, for You Knuckleheads who Haven’t Been Listening to Me for the Past Two Years, Here’s the Plan AGAIN“.
Bonus points also to the Post for calling the speech (and the accompanying 35-page PDF) a “…new Iraq Strategy”. Sorry, WaPo. It’s not new. It’s the same damned plan the President’s been talking about for two years but you’ve been bound and determined to tell us he’s never had.
Maybe now that the Anti-War Party has decided to come out with it’s new strategy for Iraq the MSM will decide that the President does, in fact, have a plan, although that plan will always be reported as having been unveiled after the Anti-War folks unveiled theirs.
Actually, I can save you all time. Instead of reading the PDF, you could just read this post, in which I summarize the plan in a hell of a lot less space than 35 pages.
That or you could just go back and read any of the President’s speeches about Iraq going back to 2003 or so. Google is your friend.
UPDATE: Or you could read this summary of the PDF from Jeff Harrell. The difference between his summary and mine? Well, a couple. First mine came out before this PDF, so it’s full of prescience (well, isn’t is prescient to be aware of a thing the MSM says is “new”?), so that’s one up for me. Jeff wins, hands down, though on bringing the funny and the insight in the same paragraph.
Witness:
The obvious question that springs to mind when the White House releases a document like this is, “Why the heck didn’t we see this three years ago?” The answer is on page two, right inside the snazzy, The Shape of Days-inspired cover page: “The following document articulates the broad strategy the President set forth in 2003 and provides an update on our progress as well as the challenges remaining.” And then there’s a quote from a speech the President gave in February 2003, before US troops ever even crossed the line of departure. He said, “Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own: we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more.”
The subtext is pretty clear, and infinitely amusing to your humble narrator: ”We did tell you our strategy three years ago; 48 percent of y’all were just too stupid to wrap your ‘American Idol’-softened noodles around it. So we’re gonna tell you all again, and again, and if necessary again until you get what we’ve been saying all along.“
Hee hee. That’s bad ass.
You know, it’s one thing for a guy like me or Jeff to point that out. It’s another thing for the President of the United States to do it. It’s pretty fricking tasty, actually.
Like sweet, sweet candy.
Bam.
(Also, I changed the post title because I thought of a better one. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know why it’s appropriate.)
Here may be a reason why the “liberal media” didn’t know what to publish interms of a “strategy” for Iraq. Below is the link to a speech given in November of 2003 (after the above mentioned date), and mysteriously there are no solid sentences that provide a “strategy” for the spread of freedom and liberty in Iraq. The best part is, it was delivered at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, so what better place to speak of the future plan for the spread of demecracy than the National Endowment for Democracy. I still see mixed signals and still cannot agree with the assumption that the Administration had given a plan over two years ago.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news.....106-2.html
P.S. The way I found this speech was through Google typing in, President Bush’s speeches, 2003, and since you convinced me that they would be abundant I decided to just choose the first one since you inferred I shouldn’t really have to bother looking to hard. Thanks.