The Address

This was the first state of the union speech I had the opportunity to view while I’ve been in the U.S. As Chomsky has noted, if the administration repeats the lies often enough and they are reported by the corporate media with little fact checking, analysis or comment, they become accepted as truth.

This was the first state of the union speech I had the opportunity to view while I’ve been in the U.S. As Chomsky has noted, if the administration repeats the lies often enough and they are reported by the corporate media with little fact checking, analysis or comment, they become accepted as truth.

That the president could speak at all about Iraq, given the revelations of Paul O’Neill is incredible. Planning a war on a country that was the least powerful in the region almost immediately after the administration took power is grounds for prosecution under the U.N charter. This is a war that is revealed to have been not in response to the “new Pearl Harbour” (to quote the neocon Project for a New American Century) but to have been plotted in advance as an aggressive conquest of a sovereign nation. The very planning itself is a crime against the peace and therefore a war crime.

Most revealing is the tone of the speech. Bush is clearly scared of the Democrat candidates. There was little vision, merely a restatement of existing policies, reasserting the same bogus arguments used to push through those policies in the first place. There was no real attempt to address any counter-arguments, to reach across the political divide. This is clearly an embattled president, speaking to his supporters only, adding some poisoned sugar coating such as the insulting project to push abstainence rather than meaningful safe sex and planned parenthood programs. This won’t be a workable tactic with his approval rating so low.

Hence the reason for the Bush administration to retreat from Iraq by July, with the intention of leaving it to the U.N in a near repetition of the disaster of the creation of the state of Israel and of India/Pakistan when the British left those former occupations. There needs to be a facade that the situation is improving and most importantly that U.S troops stop dying in order for Bush to be reelected.