I won’t splice the president’s final SOTU, many others have already beaten me to the punch.  But as I watched last night, there was one little worthy nugget that caught my ear:

In Iraq, the terrorists and extremists are fighting to deny a proud people their liberty, and fighting to establish safe havens for attacks across the world. One year ago our enemies were succeeding in their efforts to plunge Iraq into chaos. So we reviewed our strategy and changed course. We launched a surge of American forces into Iraq. We gave our troops a new mission: Work with the Iraqi forces to protect the Iraqi people, pursue the enemy in its strongholds, and deny the terrorists sanctuary anywhere in the country.

I couldn’t help but chuckle, as my mind raced through the Rolodex of Bush cliches and catch phrases which were often the cause of derision and praise, depending on the partisan or pundit you spoke to.  For years President Bush has asked us to stay the course on Iraq, stay the course in Afghanistan and stay the course against Al Qaeda. 

The problem is that we never truly knew what that course was.  We can assume that the president has a good idea of what this enemy looks like, and what they’re capable of.  But he never convinced us.  Where past presidents used times of war to mobilize the nation around a collective purpose and defense, President Bush sat back and told the American public “relax, we’ll handle it.  9/11.”  He insisted that we believe just how monumental this moment in history is, but repeatedly sapped it of all its notoriety and significance.  He fought the wars, and where that wasn’t possible, he contracted the job out to private enterprise.  No need to worry Jonah Goldberg about creeping fascism, because there were no calls for national mobilization and awareness.  The White House will surveil the country, and monitor the bad guys.  To guide you in all of your security needs, we have this attractive color coded system to instruct you on how afraid you should be at any given moment.

This is one of the key failures of the Bush presidency, and it will dog his legacy.  As Andrew Cochran observed today, the president never once used the words “Islamic” or “Islamist” in describing the core of this war.  The war is with Al Qaeda, or Iraqi insurgents, or the Taliban or something.  Abandoning his lofty, Wilsonian rhetoric from 2006, President Bush has once again changed the course and repudiated his very own doctrine.  A war against finite gangs, or their various surrogates in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not what it’s about.  The mullahs in Qom are not what it’s about.  By declaring a litany of shadowy villains all around the world, the president creates an ambiance of war that has no direction and no clear finality.

This doesn’t sell with the American people, however. Americans don’t want to vanquish every bad guy in every corner of the world. The Bush administration understood this, thus the imperative need to attack our most basic concerns for immediate survival and safety. How do you do this? With bombs. Big bombs. We invaded Iraq because of them, and we rattled the sabre towards Tehran because of them. The latter’s support of global terrorism–a key tenant of the Bush Doctrine–was secondary. Saddam Hussein financed terrorism in Palestine, and was a bane on the entire region from day one.  But it was assumed by the White House–perhaps rightly–that Americans wouldn’t be able to mobilize around these concepts. Building an Iraqi democracy sounds great, but how does it get Bin Laden? If Saddam had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, why are we attacking him? Did Iran attack us on 9/11? Oh, so they finance other groups I’ve never heard of. And?

This is all too complex for us patriotic plebeians. Just tell us they have bombs. Big bombs.

President Bush assumed less of his own citizens immediately following September 11, 2001. There was never a plan to roll out support for the right war, but only a force-fed gesture to sell us on a different one. The president is fighting the right war, he just doesn’t want to tell us about it. He doesn’t trust us to understand it. This requires a constant policy scramble, as was the case with Iraq and Iran. Confronting Iran is just as important today as it was before the NIE downplayed the nuclear scenario. They’re still dangerous, and still pose a threat to the entire region. But Americans don’t know that, because our most immediate concerns have been alleviated. Oh, they don’t have nukes? Okay, let’s move on.

This is the president’s doing. With no faith in his own country’s ability to understand the war we’re waging, he opted instead to treat us as children. So while he insists that the war abroad is improving, he has already lost the war he never waged at home. He enters his final year as a lame duck with no country behind him to lead.

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