That vague odor seeping from your TV set last Tuesday night? Call it flop sweat – the whiff of futility you sometimes get when a person of high position tries yet again to persuade a roomful of people who no longer believe him. Who no longer believe in him.
And why don’t these people (and millions of other people they represent) believe him? How much time do you have?
It’s hard to know where to start. It’s harder to know where to stop.
So let’s focus on just one sentence. A single sentence President Bush delivered midway through his State of the Union address. It wasn’t the most-quoted sentence in the speech, or the most poetic, or even the most controversial. It was just a sentence.
“This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we’re in.”
It looks simple enough. Two clauses, and 16 innocent-looking words.
But writing is choosing – this word over that word, this shade of meaning over that one. So let’s consider some of the particular words the president and his speechwriters chose to use in this one sentence, and some of the words they might have chosen instead.
Take a look, first of all, at “entered.” This is not the fight we “entered,” the president said. He could have said “started.” “Entered” sounds like we were just walking down the street and heard some commotion somewhere, and when we discovered where the noise was coming from, we simply opened the door and joined in.
But we didn’t really “enter” the fight, did we? We “started” the fight. We kicked in the door. Saying “This is not the fight we started in Iraq” would have put the responsibility where it belongs, on the president and his advisers. The war in Iraq began on their schedule, at a time of their choosing. And if the troops went in before the body armor did – well, stuff happens.
Or the president could have said “anticipated.” “This is not the fight we anticipated in Iraq.” Or even “This is not the fight we planned for in Iraq.” But that would raise the whole question of whether the president and his advisers had done the right kind of planning, and whether they were caught by surprise by the rise of the insurgency and all the sectarian violence. And if they were caught by surprise, why?
And that, of course, would remind people that before the war ever began, the president and his advisers had been warned by all sorts of people, inside the government and out, about the perils awaiting them in Iraq, about the kinds of problems they might have to deal with after they’d toppled the statue.
Those other people “anticipated” just fine. It was the president and his people who chose to ignore them. “Entered” slides right over all that.
And so do the words at the back end of the sentence: “but it is the fight we’re in.” As if the catastrophically changed circumstances in Iraq since we invaded the place nearly four years ago were something that had simply happened. As if forces beyond anyone’s conceiving, let alone controlling, had simply raised up and altered the landscape, or tinkered with the atmosphere in some nefarious way.
“The fight we’re in” – it’s not a lie, exactly. It’s just so … false. So incomplete.
The president’s speechwriters might have gone with “the fight we let ourselves get sucked into.” Or “the fight we haven’t a clue how to get out of.” Or “the fight we allowed to spin nearly out of control.” Or even “the fight whose consequences we’ll be struggling with for decades.” Those choices, those words, would have had the virtue of candor, at least. But candor wasn’t the president’s highest priority on Tuesday night.
“This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we’re in.”
Why does a roomful of people no longer believe him? It’s the spin we’re in.
And that was just one sentence.
Rick Horowitz is a nationally syndicated columnist. Contact him by writing to rickhoro@execpc.com.
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