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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (6925)	12/15/2005 4:59:17 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 542197

A credibility chasm ______________________________________________________________ By Thomas Oliphant Boston Globe Columnist December 15, 2005 boston.com FOUR SPEECHES. Four points. Wow. The latest cycle of orations from President Bush has produced a bump in his job approval ratings for handling the war in Iraq -- from about 35 percent to about 39 percent -- a bump so tiny that it may not have occurred at all, given the margins of statistical error in opinion polls. This happened for reasons that go well beyond the fact that the four speeches revealed no significant new fact or argument; they were also, in thrust and content, dishonest. As the political history of modern American wars has demonstrated repeatedly, the public responds to its understanding of the facts on the ground not the words on the air. To pick just one telling example, consider the elections this week for a new parliament in Iraq. Bush loved to trumpet the fact that elections were about to be held and then will trumpet the fact that they were indeed held and people voted. But his unwillingness to discuss the elections in depth undercuts the message he is attempting to convey. In this case, what was missing from Bush's final oration yesterday was even a minimally broad tour of these elections. He could have at least tried to explain that because these are parliamentary elections involving multiple slates of candidates, it is possible, indeed likely, that we will not understand what happened because Iraq is so bitterly divided. He could have urged calm and caution as Iraqis of multiple political persuasions try to sort through the tea leaves in search of some kind of majority that has a chance of actually governing the country. He could have emphasized the need for caution even more by explaining that this mystifying process could take weeks if not months and may at times become violent. Instead, his orations at an end, he will pack up and hide for most of the next three weeks at Camp David and in Texas while others try to make sense of what is likely to be one of the messiest elections ever. The reason for the mess, by the way, involves the last so-called ''milestone" that was promoted and then trumpeted by Bush -- the elections 11 months ago for an interim government and the October referendum on the constitution that this government produced. The baloney from our government and president celebrated democracy and consensus across the regions and sects. The reality was division, actually enshrined in the constitution under which Iraqis will vote this week. Rather than heal the society, the constitution cemented its divisions in place. One of the dirty little secrets that his advisers leak to the press all the time, a secret Bush seems incapable of acknowledging, is that there is nothing to prevent virtual independence in the Kurdish North and virtual theocracy in the South --a recipe for chaos in and around Baghdad. The other dirty little secret is that the first task of whatever government is formed will be to figure out a way to change this wretched constitution so there remains at least a dim possibility of allowing freedom to exist under its amended provisions. The president has also continued to be dishonest about what is about to happen in Iraq in terms of the American armed forces. The truth is that after a brief interval, the more than 20,000 extra troops brought in for the run-up to the elections will be withdrawn. Shortly after the first of the year, the force level will be reduced still further because people returning to this country as part of regular, already scheduled rotations in the combat zone will not be replaced. That will have the effect of cutting the force level still more -- probably to about 120,000. In other words, though Bush would insist that everything depends on how the war is going, the United States has plans to remove about one-third of its forces over the next three or four months. Just for the record, that is not any different from what the supposedly antiwar Democratic congressman, Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania, has said should happen over basically the same period. To the extent there is a dispute, it is over how many more servicemen come out of Iraq from the spring on. Murtha is straightforward about all this -- the entire force should, it should be redeployed nearby, and it should be out sometime next year. The president, however, claims we will stay until we ''win", but I suspect the withdrawal will continue next year no matter what he says. And that's why his poll numbers hardly budge. We can hear him, but most of us have learned not to believe him.