Bush Speech Offers "Clear Strategy"- For Victory or Disaster? By Ray McGovern

But the bromide-heavy speech that President George W. Bush gave yesterday at the Naval Academy presents a clear strategy for quagmire and eventual disaster. Despite the gathering storm of opposition to his approach to the war in Iraq, the speech was bereft of new ideas, calling to mind the words of Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

The problem is that this hobgoblin has consequences. Bush's renewed warning of a future "Islamic empire from Indonesia to Spain" at first seemed to me as outlandish as President Ronald Reagan's warning that the Russians planned to transit Nicaragua to invade Texas. On second thought, Bush's concern may become self-fulfilling prophecy, since the course he is on could hardly be better designed to usher in an eventual Islamic, rather than American, "empire."

Iraqi Security Forces: A Pathetic Pillar

The president indicated that in the days ahead he would be addressing various pillars of his policy in Iraq. Yesterday's speech was devoted largely to the training of Iraqi army and security forces, and he protested too much in his efforts to accentuate the positive. His tortured attempt to explain why, after so many months of US training, only one Iraqi army battalion can fight independently was no more convincing that earlier attempts by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his star-bedecked generals. Statistics just confuse the issue, we have been told; progress is being made. Trust us.

All this is reminiscent of the rhetoric at a similar juncture at the beginning - yes, the beginning - of US involvement in the Vietnam War. The Lyndon Johnson tapes show how in February 1964 President Johnson found fault with a draft of a major policy speech by then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara:

LBJ: "I wonder if you shouldn't find two minutes to devote to Vietnam."

McN: "The problem is what to say about it."

LBJ: "I would say that we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom ... Our purpose is to train [the South Vietnamese] people, and our training's going good."

The training was not going good then, and it's not going good now. The Johnson administration's self-deception helped usher in a decade of war resulting in 2-3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American servicemen killed. The parallel is eerie. Just a few months ago Rumsfeld was talking about the need for US forces to remain in Iraq for perhaps as long as 12 years.