It's All About Oil

Let’s think about what we will, and won’t hear tonight from Bush. We’ll hear that we can’t afford to abandon the Iraqis now, because if we do, somehow the Shiite and Sunni militias will come to LA and blow us up. As for Al Qaeda, we’ll hear about how we need to stay in Iraq to fight them, when they weren’t there before Bush let them in, but we won’t hear why Bin Laden has run free for five years now after Bush let him go at Tora Bora. But fear not, Bush will use tonight’s speech to redirect attention away from Iraq and towards his new front in Somalia, and why that country presents a great lesson about not ever leaving a country until the job is done. Yet Bush won’t mention that he too has ignored Africa for years until recently.

We will hear that it is everyone else’s fault that things haven’t gone well. We will hear for example that not enough troops were sent to Iraq, without any mention of General Eric Shinseki, yet implicitly the blame will be placed on Rummy and Wolfie’s shoulders. We will hear that the generals were wrong with their strategies to date, but that President Bystander is now taking charge to make sure things are done right. And we may hear that the Iraqis have dropped the ball, but we won’t hear that this administration has been a willing partner if not enabler of that failure. Yet, we will hear that we need to support the Iraqis and hold them to benchmarks that Bush has previously resisted.

We won’t hear the following:

a) How long the troops will be there;
b) How Bush will pay for this escalation;
c) What these troops will be doing and where they’ll be coming from;
d) Any talk about sealing the borders;
e) Any willingness to talk with Iraq’s neighbors;
f) Any detailed reason why he is ignoring most of the ISG report.
g) Any discussion why members of his own party oppose him.