The Pondman Wrote Us about the POTUS Giving his SOTUS

I still don't quite believe it. It's a bad dream, isn't it? George W. Bush must be the strangest political occurrence in the history of the American republic. Whenever I see him behind the podium, his thin lips pursed in that simian pout, struggling to explain how he will clear all nukular weapons from the Korean peninchula, half of me wants to believe this is all some sort of collective hallucination. This man cannot be the President of the United States of America. The system cannot be so basically flawed that it could come to this, a genuine mental defective ruling over the mightiest nation on Earth. It would be only slightly less startling if Lonny, the inbred boy banjo player in "Deliverance," were to mount the dais and deliver the same speech. Although Lonny would be a genuinely sympathetic character, and one with actual talent.

No, we've got George. It must be true, because he was on TV last night. By a fortuitous juxtaposition, I picked up Peter Galbraith's essential "The End of Iraq" the other evening at Borders, and I was halfway through it when the speech began. The book had impressed upon me the deep complexity of the political situation in Iraq. It also described the context (an Oval Office meeting between Bush and leaders of the Kurds) in which Bush betrayed, two months before the invasion he ordered, his complete ignorance about the two Muslim sects vying for power in Iraq. Yet there was Bush, struggling to pronounce words, fumbling through the text of a speech written by someone else, reducing the entire world to a Manichean duality of "us" and the "enemy," and reiterating that the "enemy" in Iraq must be defeated to complete the "mission." Willfully or haphazardly, Bush conflated the 9/11 attackers with this same "enemy," lumping them all together as terrorists who must be defeated in the "defining struggle of our age." The Congressional house went stone quiet as Bush described the dark world of his fearful imagining, one haunted every moment by an unseen, mononlithic enemy comprised of "killers" and "freedom haters."

He's so deeply weird. Taken to its logical extreme (as one must with Bush's "analysis"), Bush simply proposes to keep killing until no one is left to challenge us. We'll never be safe, no victory will ever be final, not in Iraq, not anywhere. On whose side are we fighting in Iraq? The good guys, presumably. A fussbudget like Galbraith unhelpfully points out that the "good guys" in Iraq are members of parties with names like the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), spawned and supported by Shiites in Iran, or the Dawa Party of Nouri al-Maliki, organized and strengthened during the days of exile in Syria. Presumably, the "good guys" are to be propped up and supported only by Iraqi regular army and police, Sunnis and Shiites who have risen above their sectarian identification (or who desperately need a job), cooperating with the Americans. The task of this mythical alliance is to defeat all the "bad guys," who must be Sunni insurgents, Shiite death squads, Shiite militia, the Badr Brigade, the Mahdi Army, al-Qaeda in Iraq, Syrian and Iranian infiltrators, freelance Arab mercenaries and anyone else who causes trouble, such as the Kurdish separatists in the north, who have a de facto separate country already in operation. Victory will be complete when none of these groups causes any trouble anymore, and the coalition government elected by the purple-fingered masses, those who have not already fled Iraq (as 40% of the former middle class have already done) rules a serene, prosperous, democratic country.

That's the plan. It doesn't matter how long it will take. At some point, al-Maliki or some other prime minister will actually venture outside the Green Zone and take control of a united country where Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds live in tranquil harmony. Would you ever grasp the slightest hint of the complexity of the undertaking from Bush's speech last night? Looked at in all its daunting ramifications, why on Earth would 20,000 more American troops (which Bush allocated to specific zones of Iraq in his speech, I suppose to save the "enemy" time in figuring out the deployment) make any difference?

Still, he must really be up there, behind the podium, his simple, vacuous mind struggling with huge, complex problems involving many layers and many moving parts which interact, one with the other to produce a kaleidoscopic mess. Congress looks on, horrified, yet politically too timid to do what they really ought to do: Use the Constitution to move Bush and Cheney out. Stop pretending anything about this is normal. Seize control before it's too late.