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Originally Posted by charms
My fault for an unclear sentence. My point was that Democrats should not try to score cheap political points by pretending Bush declared victory. He did not, and for Democrats to pretend he did is insincere.
Surely, he was trying to get political points and photo ops. Anything the president does is political, and Bush certainly doesn't hesitate to take advantage of it. I certainly think he went over the top with it and I don't support it. But I won't fault him for celebrating the end of the initial, major combat phase of the war, which by most accounts went pretty well. There is nothing wrong with celebrating the small victories along the way.
We can argue all day about the semantics of what constitutes "major combat," but Bush was celebrating the return of a carrier battle group and an end to theater-wide operations. A carrier battle group is just about the most major thing you can have on the battlefield: destroyers, cruisers, frigates, supply ships, submarines, 9 aircraft squadrons, etc. Just about anything else is minor in comparison.
That's not to say that we haven't seen recent escalation in the past few months and perhaps a return to 'major' combat operations. But criticism of Mission Accomplished started long before the recent operations into Fallujah, at a point where most military actions were along the lines of peacekeeping and low intensity operations.
Which brings us to the heart of Democratic criticism. It wasn't the speech or the proclamation so much as the swagger and style that really burns the Democrats. That's okay, but it has a tendency to overshadow the reasonable criticism. There is plenty of criticism to go around about Bush's post-war planning, but I think Democrats have overextended themselves by trying to make Mission Accomplished into some sort of gigantic metaphor.
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charms,
I started this thread because of this:
"When asked by Fox News if he still would have put on a flight suit to declare major combat operations in Iraq over, Bush replied, "Absolutely."
The word "still", before "would have put on a flight suit to declare major combat operations in Iraq over", means to me, "in hindsight", which means to
me, "if you knew then what you know now".
What Bush knows now is that 905 more troop deaths have occurred in Iraq
since he "put on a flight suit" on a day that the troop deaths numbered
138. He also now has the 9-11 commission report and the weapons inspectors' final report. Bush knows that the 9-11 commission found no
substantive link between Saddam and al Queda, and the inspectors found
no signifigant WMDs and no WMD programs nearing a state of readiness or
completion. The signifigance of these developments is that Bush knows that
we know what these new reports say about his justification for war in Iraq.
Add the 905 post "flight suit" day troop deaths, and the current instability in
Iraq, and the continued U.S. troop casualties there, to this body of knowledge that did not exist when Bush "put on a flight suit to declare major combat operations in Iraq over", and it defies credulity and rationality for
Bush to answer that, "he still would have put on a flight suit to declare major combat operations in Iraq over, Bush replied, "Absolutely."
This is not a critique of Bush's aircraft carrier landing and speech under the
banner, because it can be argued that it was appropriate given the circumstances at the time, and given what was public knowledge about
the justification for the Irag war at that time, the perception that the invasion was a success, that our casualties then, while signifigant, were not
alarming, and that an end to hostilities was anticipated, and that the country
was safer because of the Iraq war. Time has since passed and, knowing what
we now know, I am outraged that Bush would "still put on a flight suit to declare major combat operations in Iraq over", if he had to make that choice
today.