Snake Oil

[Say_What]

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Just one year after his now-infamous claim that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy African uranium for use in Iraq's apparently nonexistent nuclear-weapons program, President George W. Bush has once again chosen to paint a picture of the State of the Union -- and, indeed, the world -- that is essentially fraudulent.

Like last year, he started his speech with foreign affairs. He first sought to parry the main lines of criticism against his policies in this regard: that Iraq did not, in fact, have the weapons of mass destruction against which he warned last year, and that the administration's policies have been dangerously unilateral.

On the weapons-of-mass-destruction front, Bush said, "Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day." It's an elegant shifting of the goal posts away from the actually existing weapons of which the president used to speak. Regarding unilateralism, the president professed not to understand calls to internationalize the conflict in Iraq. After all, he reminded us, 34 countries have joined our coalition there. Never mind that the United States provides the vast majority of the troops and cash (and that Britain accounts for more than half of the coalition forces).

More broadly, the president sought to cloak his foreign policy in the noble mantle of democracy promotion, a concept that goes over well with the bien-pensant elements in the press corps. Some skeptics on both the left and the right have denounced the president's bold vision on this front as infeasible. The president obliquely acknowledges this point, saying, "It is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government."

http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2004/01/yglesias-m-01-21.html