Bait and Switch
Does it occur to anyone else that, in all the hand-wringing analysis of how various nations will interpret W’s inauguration speech, we’re missing the point of it entirely? In my view, the speech was almost wholly designed for internal, rather than international, consumption. The administration has never cared much, if at all, what anyone else in the world thought, and still doesn’t.
But, faced with declining support for the Iraq war in the U. S., and having quietly admitted the previous week that its major justification for precipitously and unilaterally going to war (WMDs) never existed, they needed to replace the lipstick and mascara on the pig of the Iraq war and try to get US citizens to keep sleeping with it So they washed off the WMD foundation and replaced it with the messianic bullshit of Bush’s florid speech.
If this speech was actually meant to articulate a Bush Doctrine, it’s dead on arrival, or, rather, still dying in Iraq. If this is the laboratory for it, we’ve bankrupted ourselves producing the prototype.
