A Resounding Thud

Administration spinmeisters are already out "clarifying" what the President said at his inaugural address on Thursday.

White House officials said yesterday that President Bush's soaring inaugural address, in which he declared the goal of ending tyranny around the world, represents no significant shift in U.S. foreign policy but instead was meant as a crystallization and clarification of policies he is pursuing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and elsewhere.

Nor, they say, will it lead to any quick shift in strategy for dealing with countries such as Russia, China, Egypt and Pakistan, allies in the fight against terrorism whose records on human rights and democracy fall well short of the values Bush said would become the basis of relations with all countries.
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Bush advisers said the speech was the rhetorical institutionalization of the Bush doctrine and reflected the president's deepest convictions about the purposes behind his foreign policies. But they said it was carefully written not to tie him to an inflexible or unrealistic application of his goal of ending tyranny.
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"It is not a discontinuity. It is not a right turn," said a senior administration official, who spoke with reporters from newspapers but demanded anonymity because he wanted the focus to remain on the president's words and not his. "I think it is a bit of an acceleration, a raising of the priority, making explicit in a very public way to give impetus to this effort." He added that it was a "message we have been sending" for some time.

As Bush would say: "in other words, we really didn't mean it, at least the way it was written for me. In other words, see we only go places and kill people when we know we can crush them quickly. As to China, we need them too much because they finance all our debt. China's army is too big anyway. As to North Korea, as bad as their leader is, the pudgy little fellow, everybody knows we can't go in there. In other words, what I said doesn't apply to countries that we use, like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Just like we used to do with Iraq. And as to Iran, we're just hoping that Israel takes care of it for us."

All this makes me wonder who the heck wrote the speech? Apparently they went through more than 20 drafts of the klunker. Here was a speech that lacked any discussion on domestic agenda other than a brief mention of social security. The speech was about what is America's role in the world.

"We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right," Bush said in his speech. At another point, he said, "We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people."

Yet the advisers insist that they aren't having to distance themselves from the clear language of the address.

Presidential advisers also said they were not trying to roll back the speech on the day after, pointing to language in the address that they said made it clear that the goal of ending tyranny would not be accomplished with cookie-cutter policies or unrealistic ambitions. For example, Bush declared that ending tyranny would not be accomplished primarily through armed conflict, and he made distinctions between dealing with outlaw states that actively support terrorism and those whose human rights records may be poor but that have shown a willingness to change.

We did get a glimpse into how a speech gets written and probably how "policy" is set in this administration. Bush belches and his staff figures out what he meant, much like happens now in the Vatican.

The planning of Bush's second inaugural address began a few days after the Nov. 2 election with the president telling advisers he wanted a speech about "freedom" and "liberty." That led to the broadly ambitious speech that has ignited a vigorous debate. The process included consultation with a number of outside experts, Kristol among them.

One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House. White House senior adviser Karl Rove attended, according to one source, but mostly listened to what became a lively exchange over U.S. policy and the fight for liberty.

So that's how it is done. Give me a speech on freedom and liberty then they go out and find the most extreme of the wingers and have them tell the speech writers what to put in the speech. At least now we know why the administration is running away from the policies suggested in the speech Bush read on Thursday.