Cool Response to Bush Address

President Bush gives a thumbs up as the arrives at the White House in Washington, Monday, Jan. 22, 2007, after spending the weekend at Camp David, Md. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

Barbara Ferguson, Arab News

WASHINGTON, 25 January 2007 — President George W. Bush’s first words of his State of the Union address Tuesday night made it clear that things have changed on Capitol Hill.

“Tonight, I have the high privilege and distinct honor to begin a speech with the words ‘Madam Speaker,’” Bush said in Congress, setting off a wave of thunderous applause. He was referring to Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the first woman to be speaker of the House and the first Democrat to lead the lower house of Congress during Bush’s presidency.

After his opening words, the 50-minute long annual address to the nation continued. The reception was polite, but the applause seemed as subdued as his current poll ratings.

Facing a new Democratic majority in Congress and increasing lame-duck status, Bush tried in his speech to reinvigorate support for the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq by using Homeric terms like “epic battle” to describe what would happen if the US pulled troops out of the country. “For America, this is a nightmare scenario,” he said, striking a more defiant than downbeat tone despite his mounting political woes. “For the enemy, this is the objective.”

His promise to boost troop numbers in Iraq didn’t receive the standing ovation the president has received in past speeches about military action. And in the Democratic response to his address, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia (who is one of the few federal lawmakers with a son in the military serving in Iraq) said that Bush “took us into this war recklessly,” and that the US was now “held hostage to the predictable and predicted disarray that followed.”

Webb said Democrats are calling for “an immediate shift toward strong regionally based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq’s cities and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.”

The Virginia senator then invoked past Republican Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, describing how the former helped heal domestic class divisions and the latter brought US soldiers home from the Korean War.

“Tonight we are calling on this president to take similar action,” Webb said. “If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way.”

Bush’s spotlight on terrorism abroad has previously helped him in the polls. He continued that strategy last night, by focusing a good part of his speech on various military Islamic factions and governments in the Middle East.

“Last night, President Bush presented an arguably misleading and often flawed description of ‘the enemy’ that the US faces overseas, lumping together disparate groups with opposing ideologies to suggest that they have a single-minded focus in attacking the United States,” wrote Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post.

Kessler noted that Bush lumped Iran, “which enjoys diplomatic representation and billions of dollars in trade with major European countries”, with Al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

“The Shiite and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat,” Bush said, referring to the different sects of the Muslim religion — both of which would undoubtedly question his generalization.

Bush also asserted that Shiite Hezbollah, which has won seats in the Lebanese government, is a terrorist group “second only to Al-Qaeda in the American lives it has taken,” referring to the 1970 attacks on a US Marine barrack in Beirut.

Hezbollah, noted The Post, “has evolved into primarily an anti-Israeli organization — and the European Union does not list it as a terrorist organization.”

Bush also claimed “we have a diplomatic strategy that is rallying the world to join in the fight against extremism.”

But Monday, a poll of 26,000 people in 25 countries was released that showed that global opinion of US foreign policy has sharply deteriorated in the past two years. Nearly three-quarters of those polled, disapproved of US policies toward Iraq, and nearly half said the US is playing a mainly negative role in the world.