Leading Democrats on Wednesday reacted angrily to President George Bush’s address to the nation, accusing him of ”exploiting the sacred ground” of September 11 by attempting to link the Iraq war with the terrorist attacks.
In his prime-time speech at Fort Bragg military base, the president mentioned September 11 five times in 30 minutes as he argued that withdrawal from Iraq would leave the US open to more terrorist attacks.
The twitchy mood in Washington was underscored on Wednesday when the White House was briefly evacuated — and Bush moved to a safe location — in the latest aviation alert to hit the capital. The all-clear was rapidly sounded when the airspace rogue proved to be an innocuous private aircraft.
Instant polls after Bush’s speech suggested that he might have solidified support among the largely Republican audience who watched the performance, but it was unclear whether he had made headway against a steadily advancing tide of scepticism about the justification for the war.
Democrats argued that he had offered no new ideas on how to beat the insurgency.
They pointed to the administration’s lack of credibility over Iraq in the wake of post-war inquiries that found no weapons of mass destruction and no substantive prewar links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, said Bush was trying to ”exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq”.
In his speech, Bush did not repeat his administration’s prewar claims of a direct Iraqi role in the September 11 attacks. Instead, he suggested that the insurgents shared a common ”totalitarian ideology” with al-Qaeda, and that if they were not defeated in Iraq they could use the country as a base from which to launch terrorist attacks on the US homeland.
Senator John Kerry, Bush’s opponent in last November’s election, said the speech represented the administration’s third rationale for the 2003 invasion.
”The first, of course, was weapons of mass destruction. The second was democracy, and now, tonight, it’s to combat the hotbed of terrorism,” he told CNN.
”But most Americans are aware that the hotbed of terrorism never existed in Iraq until we got there.”
Senator Joseph Biden, the Democrats’ leading voice on foreign policy, predicted that the martial rhetoric would not rescue the president’s standing in the polls, where Bush has lower ratings than presidents Reagan or Clinton at this stage of their second terms. ”I think the American people are a lot smarter than that,” he said.
However, Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Centre, a Washington polling organisation, said the broader ties outlined by the president might strike a chord with the public. ”For many Americans the premise for the war was that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous man and we are better off without him,” he said.
”It was not so much premised on a direct link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, as on the suggestion that we face a threat from that part of the world and if we leave a mess it will be a danger to us.”
Though one poll showed that the speech drew the smallest audience of any Bush presidential appearance, another poll by Gallup found that it may have served its purpose in bolstering the resolve of viewers, at least temporarily.
Of an estimated 23-million who watched, 54% thought the US was winning the war, compared with 44% before the speech. But only 23% were registered Democrats — and the boost the president received was weak compared with the upsurge following similar set-piece speeches in the past.
The address was also savaged abroad. A Labour MP, Lynne Jones, said any attempt to suggest that it was a response to the September 11 attacks was ”absolute nonsense”.
”What they have ensured, in invading Iraq, is they have actually promoted al-Qaida’s involvement in other countries, including Iraq.” – Guardian Unlimited Â