It was the 1970's all over again last night.
In his speech to the nation about the plan to escalate U.S. involvement in the Iraqi Civil War, Bush said that "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me." Some of the media jumped on this as evidence that Bush was finally--finally!--admitting he had done something wrong. Thus the headline on the CNN main page at 2:00 this morning was "Bush Admits Mistakes, Calls for More Troops." Nice headline, but it's just not true. All Bush said was that when other people make mistakes, he is ultimately responsible for them. That is not the same as admitting that he made mistakes himself.
It was all very Nixonian. On April 30, 1973, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation about the Watergate scandal. He said:
Who, then, is to blame for what happened in this case?
For specific criminal actions by specific individuals, those who committed those actions must, of course, bear the liability and pay the penalty.
For the fact that alleged improper actions took place within the White House or within my campaign organization, the easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I delegated the responsibility to run the campaign. But that would be a cowardly thing to do.
I will not place the blame on subordinates—on people whose zeal exceeded their judgment and who may have done wrong in a cause they deeply believed to be right.
In any organization, the man at the top must bear the responsibility. That responsibility, therefore, belongs here, in this office. I accept it. And I pledge to you tonight, from this office, that I will do everything in my power to ensure that the guilty are brought to justice and that such abuses are purged from our political processes in the years to come, long after I have left this office.
It also called to mind an old David Frye routine, which the Bush administration has unconsciously emulated before, the one where Frye, imitating Nixon, says, "I accept responsibility . . . but not the blame. Let me, let me explain the difference. Responsible people keep their jobs. People who are to blame lose them.”
There are more parallels. The tone of the speech reminded me of the one Nixon gave on November 3, 1969, when he announced his Vietnamization plan. Both speeches are marked by a tone of careful control, argumentation from selected facts and statistics, and a rigid equation of withdrawal with unacceptable defeat and disastrous consequences.
Speaking of argumentation from facts and statistics, this was the first Bush speech can recall that was delivered from what we were told was the library in the White House residence.
I'm sure that location was deliberately chosen to convey the idea that Bush has really studied this stuff, really thought about it this time, and is here to deliver great wisdom. Other bloggers have also noted the new Bush set dressing.
It was a little odd, though, that none of the books in the picture appeared to have titles on their spines, leading me to wonder whether they were deliberately blacked out for the speech so as not to distract the viewing audience, or whether the whole shebang was shot on a set and that what we are seeing was a Potempkin library, rather than a real one.
Bush's attempts at gravitas didn't sway local vets in my hometown:
Andy Aranyosi, an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War, was blunt:
"I'm totally against it," he said. "I say, bring the boys home. We've been there four years, and we haven't accomplished anything, as far as I'm concerned."
* * *
Rocky Newbold, the post's quartermaster, said that when weapons of mass destruction were not found, the United States could have said it made a mistake.
"No, we just made the mistake worse and worse," said Mr. Newbold, an Army medic in the Vietnam War who was in an Ohio National Guard military police unit during the Persian Gulf War.
"We need to look at, are the soldiers wasting their lives?" Mr. Newbold said. "That's our responsibility as civilians."
I hope those Democrats who are so fearful of being accused of not supporting the troops that they won't move aggressively to stop this escalation will read those vets' comments and grow some backbone. And I hope that this administration will not do what Nixon did and leave it to the next president to bring the troops home years later.
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