Now for his special address to the people of the Nation, I present the President of the Untied States, George W. Bush. Good evening my fellow Americans. My talk tonight will be about the current situation in Iraq. Our enemy is on the run. Everywhere we see the collapse of the opposition and the concurrent rise of Iraqi leadership now that the cruelest, most inhumane tyrant the world has ever seen has been vanquished. He was defeated by the Will of Almighty God and the military forces of the United States. We have the complete support of the Iraqi people who understand that our intervention in their country and the regime change we wrought was for their benefit alone, and that the 30,000 Iraqis, both civilian and military that sacrificed their lives in this noble cause was a small price to pay for the country’s freedom. We will stand by the Iraqi leaders for as long as necessary to insure that a democratic government will be instituted free from opposition and dissent, and that the new Iraqi State will emerge a staunch ally of the United States for the foreseeable future. …I have started the address that I was to give to you tonight. As I rehearsed the delivery earlier with my writers and presentation advisors, I had some qualms and misgivings about the message content. At the risk of condemning my political future, I am going to depart from my prepared speech and speak from my heart. Please bear with me, I am not used to this. The situation in Iraq reminds me of some kids who find a bottle of soda pop, shake it briskly a few times and then open it. The agitated contents of the bottle spews out and drenches them…such a violent reaction when all they did was to shake things up a little. Something like that happened in Iraq, although it was not children opening the bottle, but presumably intelligent adults – and a nation’s leaders at that. The “hot fight” that defeated the Iraqi Army and subsequently toppled Saddam Hussein, went very much according to plan and was successfully concluded. Unfortunately, the “hot fight” plan was all there was. There was no plan, at least no realistic plan, for establishing a new government and creating democracy-based institutions within a secular albeit Moslem state. This would have been a marvelous experiment in social reordering had we developed and executed such a plan. A plan which would be based on Iraqi history and culture, their status under the Ba’athists, and a realization of exactly where we wanted to take them and how best to accomplish that task with the Iraqis themselves as increasingly involved partners, secure in the knowledge that they were forging a new and welcome destiny for Iraq. What did happen however, was wrong almost from the start. We disbanded the military to avoid any confrontation with the Republican Guard or any other military faction. That seemed to set the stage for civilian looting and armed gangs that terrorized whole neighborhoods which were now without any civil or police authority whatsoever. Our military was spread too thin to function in a civil security role, and worse they had never been trained for such duty. The Iraqi leaders that we thought would be our mainstay to interface with the people were not welcomed by the majority. We did not appreciate the level of leadership shown by the Islamic clerics toward their Iraqi followers, and we were not appreciative of the nature and depth of the conflicts between the several Islamic sects. We did not understand the nature of contemporary Iraqi culture, and as a result, while we were OK at regime toppling, we unable to even start the process of regime forging. We were powerless to halt the rising discontent among the civilian population who began to see us as conquerors rather than liberators. Their concern was reflected in an ancient complaint -- You have denied us what we had, and have not replaced it with anything of value. We did not have enough people in Iraq to adequately defend and define the peace. The people we did have were military and not at all trained for winning the hearts and minds of the population. We spent too much of our energies fighting the local insurgents and covering their actions by statements pointing to ‘foreign’ or Al Queda influences, masking the true nature of the Iraqi discontent even from ourselves. One full year after we drove the Saddam regime out of power, we are wallowing in a quagmire of revulsion and anger at the U.S. We have lost more military personnel to hostilities after the “hot fight” than we did during it. It would appear that the day we toppled the statue of Hussein from the pedestal in the heart of Baghdad was the day that we opened the can of soda and got drenched. We are now facing another dilemma. The pictures of prisoner abuse by our forces, either civilian or military, are threatening to completely derail any pretext we harbor concerning how effective we can be in getting the Iraqi people to trust us. As I look at these hundreds of photos I am struck by the open and comfortable way they were taken. These are not photos taken clandestinely through a secret peephole, these photos were taken to document what was considered to be a normal and routine interrogation methodology. Where did such a philosophy come from? Who set the moral tone to justify these incredibly horrid abuses? Who decided that civilian detainees were not to be protected by the Geneva Convention, or for that matter any other basic concept of human rights and human dignity? These are questions that must trouble every American They most certainly trouble me.. If nothing else speaks to our lack of planning for peace perhaps this does, not because of the individual abuses, but because it is indicative of a systemic and willful leadership psychology that looks at the Iraqis as a conquered people that are inferior to their captors. How do you go forward with a program for nation-building when the very organizational structure you need for the project has such a dreadful and self-defeating bias. Does my Administration truly have control over what we do in Iraq? I have repeatedly stated that we will stay in Iraq for an extended period. Hopefully, in time we could have broadened our coalition and eventually gained significant UN support for the caretaker role that must be played for the interim. I have been told by many advisors whose expertise I have trusted and respected that getting out of Iraq prematurely is a bad move. Civil war and internal strife would be rampant in a society where its security forces are non-existent or ineffectual, and a cohesive government was not in place to control and plan for rebuilding a national infrastructure. We have disbanded what they had and replaced it with something that many Iraqis consider to be at best a marginal improvement. We cannot leave precipitously, but we can reduce our presence much sooner than I had anticipated. We are no longer in a position to act as a benevolent advisor to the Iraqi people. We must use whatever financial resources we have to restructure and enhance the current coalition under the banner of the UN and turn over the process of rebuilding Iraq to them. There will be I am sure political consequences to this, but I feel that from where we are now this a prudent course to take. Our efforts from this moment forward will be to disentangle ourselves from Iraq as the primary military force in country. The rate at we phase our troops out will be determined by how quickly UN designated forces can move in. We will support initiatives that will bring the Iraqis to a point of governing their own destiny with whatever means we can short of military force. I call for action now by the State Department to initiate this new direction and give the lead to the Secretary of State operating with my full support to obtain a world consensus. The history of Iraq is thousands of years old. They have survived as a people enduring strife and hardship under various regimes and conquerors. They will survive and be free yet again. My desire has been to do God’s work in striving to obtain a world without evil and without the oppression of people anywhere. In this I felt that I had a sacred calling, but I fear now that the voice I heard exhorting me to be an avenging force was not God’s but my own ego speaking. With the outcome I have just proposed, God has given me a sign that I must temper my willingness to do His bidding with more inner reflection and patience. Thank you and may God Bless America The above speech is fantasy. Too bad.