WASHINGTON, 22 January 2004 — President Bush on Tuesday night delivered his third annual State of the Union address to a joint session of the Congress and the American public, and yesterday many analysts said it was less an account of the State of the Union than an opening pitch for re-election.
Critics say the president glazed over the challenges that lie ahead in Iraq and the high cost of overcoming them, and skipped over his mistaken or exaggerated allegations about Iraq’s weapons in his State of the Union address one year ago, and instead tried to cover the gap between what has been found with a brief reference to “weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities.”
“He completely shirked any responsibility for misjudging the Iraqi WMD programs,” said Joseph Circincione, director of the non-proliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“The major problem of the president is that nothing he said about the Iraqi programs a year ago has turned out to be true and he tried to avoid this with some clever phrases and merging the WMD issue with the liberation of Iraq and the war on terrorism.”
“He has pursued a got-it-alone policy that has left us isolated abroad,” said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi after Bush’s address. “America must be a light to the world, not just a missile.”
Political analysts also expressed unease over his reform platform in the Middle East. “Bush’s speech was an example of the power of positive thinking without recognizing any of the troubling realities that contradict his version of the world,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for foreign policy and defense studies at the CATO Institute.
Republicans praised the speech. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said Bush’s speech “stuck it to those who thought getting rid of Saddam didn’t make America safer.” “It was an aggressive I’m-not-going-to-take-anymore-junk speech,” said the freshman senator. “I liked it.”
Democrats, meanwhile, said Bush has weakened America’s image abroad and ignored its basic needs at home. Sen. Car Levin, D-Michigan, called the speech “very disappointing.”
Finally, critics criticized the president himself: “We like a confident president, but we don’t like a cocky president, and George W. Bush had too many moments of cockiness last night,” noted Tom Shales in yesterday’s Washington Post.
