The President's Speech

The president’s speech on Iraq didn’t provide any new strategy or plan, nor any announcement of greater troop levels or shift in administration attitude. It didn’t have to. What the president needed to accomplish last night, and what has been so sorely lacking in recent months, is some context and perspective. All Americans have seen recently, whether it be in their newspaper or on the nightly news, are headlines and images of another car bomb going off and the deaths of more American soldiers and innocent Iraqis. All they’ve heard is hysterical rants from their leaders in congress, whether it be Teddy Kennedy labeling Iraq a "quagmire" and "George Bush’s Vietnam", or Chuck Hagel going so far as to say we are losing there.

What they haven’t seen or heard is what else is going on in Iraq, of all the political and military developments in that country that are making the jihadists so barbarically cruel and desperate. They haven’t heard about the progress that coalition forces are making in training Iraqi defense units, or the progress American forces are making in rounding up and arresting or killing members of Zarqawi’s network. All they have heard is an over emphasization of the terrorist attacks and scarcely a word about why we are over there in the first place and why Americans are sacrificing their time, money, talents, and lives there.

That is exactly what Americans needed to hear from the president last night, the full context of what’s going on there and why we are doing what we are doing. And to the president’s credit, that’s exactly what they did hear.