The President's Speech on Iraq: Truth vs. Spin

President Bush was more frank about the problems we face in Iraq than he has been in the past.

The president talked in more depth than before about the need to make Iraqi forces effective, and why deadlines for U.S. withdrawal could present serious problems. He presented a case for not increasing U.S. troops and he at least seemed to commit the United States to not establishing bases in Iraq or maintaining any lasting presence:

"We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed -- and not a day longer," he said. "Sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave."

Key parts of his speech, however, were driven by spin, rather than a frank effort to warn the American people of the sacrifices necessary to win and the risks involved. The end result was to mislead in ways that could come back to haunt the administration and reduce longer-term public support.

Insurgency

One key failure was his effort to explain the insurgency in Iraq almost solely in terms of foreign Islamic extremists. The president correctly referred to hundreds of foreign fighters, their horrifying extremism and the very real threat they pose. He totally failed to mention the thousands of native Iraqis that make up the core of the insurgency, the fact we have only some 600 foreign detainees out of a total of 14,000 total detainees, the fact most intelligence estimates put foreign fighters at around 5 percent of the total, and the fact that we face a major native popular Sunni Muslim uprising and deep Sunni distrust.

He implied the liberation, elections and democracy had somehow unified Iraq when they clearly have not, and glossed over the major political turmoil that will accompany the efforts to draft the constitution and elections to come. The president fundamentally misstated the true nature of the threat and risks in Iraq.

At the same time, he tied the reasons for the situation in Iraq to "9/11," and ignored all of his previous rationale for going to war in Iraq, and the U.S. failure in Iraq to plan for stability operations and carry out effective nation-building. He ignored the CIA analysis indicating that the invasion and initial mishandling of the insurgency had made Iraq a magnet for Islamist extremists.

He dodged over the fact that much of their extremism is designed to provoke an Iraq civil war between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and implied that Iraq is the center of such activity and not a center. The fact is that Iraq is not draining Islamist activity in other regions. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia and other Gulf states are just a few of the areas where Islamist extremist activity remains a major threat that in no way is diminished by involvement in Iraq.

Diplomacy, Economics and Aid

The president talked about democracy as a regional panacea, and not as part of a difficult and long-term process of reform that must be coupled to the rule of law and human rights, economic reform, social reform and demographic change. As usual, he cast his call for such reform in ways likely to provoke considerable local hostility from both friendly regimes and reformers. He talked about Libya, but not challenges like Iran, and totally avoided the difficult subject of the linkage between progress in the Arab-Israeli peace process and success in Iraq. He made no mention of the problems in dealing with Iraq's neighbors or how he intends to address them.