When Bush is less than clear about dangerous things

The daily atrocities which Bush inflicts upon the English language should probably be the subject of an Amnesty International probe. He smiles idiotically while he's doing it, but I've never found it all that funny that the President of the United States has so much trouble with his native tongue. In his press conference today, Bush again reiterated our goal of removing nukular weapons from the Korean peninchula. I double-checked just to make sure, but the American Heritage Dictionary lists two acceptable pronunciations, peninsula and (sort of) peninsyula, but no peninchula. I've never heard anyone say peninchula besides Bush. We were always going to be stuck with nukular, but peninchula now also looks like a permanent fixture. It's unfortunate, therefore, not only that North Korea has nukular aspirations but that it's located on a peninchula. A double whammy which we don't encounter with landlocked Iran.

Whenever Bush can be the least bit technical, he's apt to reiterate the point over and over in a self-satisfied attempt to impress. He did that today with "Chapter VII resolutions" from the UN. I don't know how many times he said that, but it was a lot. Chapter VII resolutions are issued out of the Security Council in cases where a threat to world peace exists, as by an act of international aggression. Bush did not explain the reference to the assembled stenographers of the Fourth Estate; I think he enjoyed keeping them in the dark while he showcased his peerless mastery of the arcana of foreign relations. He got going once on "casus belli" in the same way; everything, for a while, was a casus belli. An impertinent question from the docile press corps might have been a casus belli in the dark days before the Iraq invasion.

Anyway, he preens when he can use this kind of insider lingo. Sometimes, however, I think he and Rove make something up just before Bush takes the podium and then the effects are less felicitous. To wit, “And I’d like to repeat, I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government. But my point is, what’s worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and its happening?” I'm not sure how a question which he doesn't answer can qualify as a "point," especially since it doesn't make any sense. I do know why he and Rove cooked this one up; a day before, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, admitted the military had no evidence the Iranian government was involved in arming the Shiite militia with IEDs. Bush, who had been busy pounding the war drums, skipped a couple of beats with that one. He needed some kind of recovery, and back in the Oval Office, just before Bush made his irritated way to the podium, they came up with that beauty.

I wish I'd been there, because I know the answer. It's much worse if the top echelons of the Iranian government are ordering the Quds force to cooperate with Iraq's Shiite militias. Much worse, since that might indicate a coordinated, officially directed act of war against U.S. forces. Gen. Pace knows that, which is why he said what he said. If we're dealing with rogue elements in the Quds force, or just Iranian sympathizers (using, for example, all the Iraqi and American ordnance we left lying around unguarded after the mission was accomplished in May, 2003), then Bush should (though he won't) rethink the position. For such "rogue elements" in Iran might be analogized to the 15 Saudi hijackers of 9-11, and if I recall correctly, the national provenance of those anti-American terrorists was deemed immaterial in our subsequent dealings with Saudi Arabia. So that even though the Kingdom is located on a peninchula, we left them alone, even as we leave them alone now, although we're aware that Saudi financiers send money and materiel to Sunni insurgents in Iraq who attack American forces.

Bush is not big on what you might call logical consistency, however. If he were, he'd be more concerned than he is about the close ties between Maliki's government and Iran, which came about because of Bush's overthrow of Saddam. So Bush is trying to work up a casus belli against the non-peninchula and so far non-nukular country which most strongly supports the very same government in Iraq which Bush is bankrupting the United States and breaking the U.S. military to defend. Iran, actually, might be seen as more of an ally than a nemesis at this point, but then the 2002 SOTU speech named the starting roster for the Axis of Evil, and Bush just can't let that go. Once you're on The List, you're on The List. That was before, of course, Bush was aware that the Muslims in Iraq were overwhelmingly Shiite, just like the Iranians, and it was fairly predictable that Iran's hand would be strengthened in the region by bringing 15 million Shiites to power in Baghdad.

This may account for why Bush is lapsing more than ever into incoherence, and has taken to posing rhetorical questions which could only be meaningful if he answered them, but he doesn't because he doesn't know what the right answer is. It must make General Pace a little nervous about his new job. The only guy smiling, maniacally as always, there in the front row with his nimbus of baby hair and lunar countenance, is Rove himself, fascinated as Dr. Frankenstein must have been. Just how weird can my monster get?