The official spin from the White House, abetted as usual by the compliant press, is that Sunday's Presidential address represents a significant mid-course correction on Iraq. So far, the translation of that into normal English seems to be: We know people are upset about the way things are going and we want to put a better public-relations face on it.
Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution, reports the Washington Post, "sees no indication that Bush plans to redress the concerns that have made foreign governments reluctant to contribute money or troops to the occupation."
"This is typical Bush: 'I know what's right; here is what's right; you have to do what I tell you to do,' " Daalder said. "They think they can fix this with a speech instead of doing the hard work of traveling to these countries and convincing them that we're willing to listen to their point of view and figure out what they need for us to do in order for us to do this together."
The American press is also doing a pretty pitiful job of reporting the trouble in which Tony Blair finds himself. Derided by his critics, many of them in his own Labour Party, as "America's poodle" (or "Bush's poodle"), Blair has put his entire political career on the line to support Bush and Rummy's adventure in Iraq.
And as a result, he'll be lucky to survive the year as Prime Minister. The immediate cause of his troubles is an investigation into the suicide of a British weapons expert who was the source of a BBC report on the British government's prewar claims on "weapons of mass destruction." But, any way you cut it, it was Blair's support of the Iraq War that put him into this jam.
Elected leaders in Germany, France and other democracies will have Blair's fate very much in mind as they consider whether they, too, want to stake their careers - and the lives of their soldiers - on supporting Bush and Rummy's Iraq policies.
- Bruce Miller
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