The President's Dream World

Memo To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients From: Jude Wanniski Re: Zbig’s Assessment

The Gallup Poll last week reported that 46% of respondents said President Bush should be impeached if it could be shown he purposely misled the nation to war with Iraq. But unless living in a make-believe world is an impeachable offense, I don’t think that idea is going anywhere. Senator Chuck Hagel [R NB] thinks the administration is “disconnected from reality,” which is how I’ve always thought of the President’s disconnect. It was his underlings, the neo-cons who misled him into war – by building a phony story and implanting it in his mind, a story to which he still clings to justify the costs of the war in blood and treasure. His speech to the nation in prime time on Tuesday, trying to rally the nation to his side, completely failed in its objective, as the American people can now see the disconnect from reality and know Iraq is a quagmire as impossible to win as Vietnam was in its last stages.

The best assessment I saw of the speech was the op-ed in Thursdays Financial Times by Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter administration. He also sees the President living in a dream world, one of his own making, and offers constructive criticism of the kind we have not seen from any of the elected Democrats. That’s probably because Zbig correctly sees the Palestinian issue as part and parcel of the conflict in Iraq, and neither political party wants to take on Israel on that issue.