The President just gave a speech in Cleveland, Ohio. God help me, I listened to the whole thing, including the questions and answers segment. I’ll have more to say about the speech after I get a transcript.
But, after slogging through an hour and a half of Bush three things come to mind. First, he framed the issue of troop withdrawal as tantamount to surrender to Usama bin-Laden. Second, he said that we should expect the President to listen to the objectives of the enemy (again bin-Laden) and third he held up the city of Tall Afar as an example of a success story in Iraq.
On the first two points, Bush has never mentioned bin-Laden’s objectives in an honest way, and he didn’t do so today. Bin Laden intends to force us out of the Middle East by bankrupting us. He is not so stupid as to think he can force us out by force of arms. Bush thinks that his strategy is to force us out by killing enough Americans that we will cut and run. That has never been bin-Laden’s stated strategy. But, yes, the Americans do have a right to expect the President to understand our enemies. It’s too bad that he doesn’t.
On the third point, Tall Afar is not a good example of what is going on in Iraq. Tall Afar is in the northwest corner of Iraq, forty miles from the Syrian border. It’s primarily populated by ethnic Turkmen. The Turkmen are split among adherents of the Sunni and Shi’a sects. They reside in the north and northwest areas of Iraq, and they make up a significant portion of the population of disputed city of Kirkuk.
The Turkmen are an not insignificant presence in Iraq, but they do not represent one of the main factions that are spiraling the country into civil war. The real fault lines remain those that divide Sunni Arab from Shi’a Arab, the Arabs from the Kurds, the Arabs from the Persians, and the areas that demarcate the boundaries of the Sunnni Triangle (north and northwest of Baghdad) and the borders of Kurdistan and the ultimate control of the city of Kirkuk and its surrounding oilfields.
Whatever happens in Tall Afar, it will have little, if any, effect on whether Iraq’s central government can form a unity government and an effective civil service that can protect its citizens and provide economic growth.
The President is still smoking crack.
