An Annotated Overview of the Foreign Policy Segments of President George W. Bush's State of the Union Address

By: Stephen Zunes  

"This threat is new; America's duty is familiar. Throughout the 20^th Century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world. In each case, their ambitions of cruelty and murder had no limit. In each case, the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength of great alliances, and by the might of the United States of America... Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility."

The attempt to put Baathist Iraq on par with Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia is ludicrous. Hitler's Germany was the most powerful industrialized nation in the world when it began its conquests in the late 1930's and Soviet Russia at its height had the world's largest armed forces and enough nuclear weapons to destroy humankind. Iraq, by contrast, is a poor Third World country that has been under the strictest military and economic embargo in world history for more than a dozen years after having much of its civilian and military infrastructure destroyed in the heaviest bombing in world history...

"Republicans claim they are the pro-life party. Pro-life is more than being against abortion. It's about the death penalty, euthanasia, assisted suicide, medicine for the sick, feeding children, clean air to breathe, a home to live in, protection from the cold, help for the mentally ill, using our military personnel to defend life, and the innocent children everywhere, not just in the U.S."

- Joanna Walsh-Ward, of Lewiston, Maine, in the Lewiston Sun Journal

"Taxes are the cost of a civilized society. However badly it may do some things, government is the only provider of many services we demand and need. Most of the proposed tax cuts will go to people who don't need the money. I have always believed that, among other things, 'liberty and justice for all' meant that there was a social contract among the people of this country."

- Donald Kaiserman, who lives in the posh Philadelphia suburb of Wynnewood, in the Philadelphia Inquirer

By: Mike Hersh  

Why do right wing Republicans embrace failed policies and reject basic economic laws? Out of greed and because ideology overwhelms their better judgment. Wealthy special interests hire mercenary and fanatic academics to pontificate from self-serving "think tanks". Keep this in mind the next time you hear right wingers - calling themselves supply-siders or "libertarians" or whatever - tell you they know what's good for you and the economy. They never let economics, facts, or history stand in the way of a bad, unfair policy.

Bush's policies are taking money from most Americans, and concentrating cash in the hands of the elite few. That means almost all of us will have less money to spend and invest, and the few who have more money will have less incentive to do either. This is a recipe for recession - if not depression.

Former Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips wrote at least three books explaining this in detail with irrefutable data. J.K. Galbraith and many others traced the Great Depression to wrong-headed right wing policies such as those Bush is pushing. These policies lose millions of jobs and mortgage the future by rolling up debt and slashing investments in education and infrastructure.

By: Rich Procter  

Recently, several hundred thousand courageous, committed, peace-loving Americans turned out to stop their country from being stampeded into a senseless, insane war by a belligerent monomaniac hell-bent on dropping bombs, spilling blood, and throwing gasoline on the simmering inferno of the Middle East. For their efforts, bloviating bullhorn Rush Limbaugh called these people "communists", "anti-capitalist", and "anti-American". Screed-spewing David Horowitz has called antiwar protesters "America-hating communists, who regard their own country as the enemy and who sympathize with America's terrorist adversaries". And of course psycho wack-job Ann Coulter has a new book called Treason, where she'll presumably echo all her fellow wingnuts in calling everyone who doesn't want this war a traitor.

I'm not calling anyone a traitor - that's for the chickenhawk wingnuts. I am saying that people who are trying to stop this war - the World War II vets and working families with no health care and families of 9-11 victims and everyone else - are the true patriots.

Editorial from:  

Everyone expects a certain amount of hokum in a State of the Union address. But for artful misdirection it's hard to top the three paragraphs in which President Bush promised to protect the environment while promoting energy independence. Set aside for the moment the meagerness of his menu, as well as the plain fact that he has spent the last two years rolling back laws and regulations that have long guarded the nation's air, water, and public lands. The real tipoff to his intentions lies in the three proposals themselves. Whatever their long-term promise, none would do much good in the short term and some would actually do harm.

It is possible that Mr. Bush's forthcoming budget proposal will offer more cheerful news for the country's environmental and energy future. The State of the Union offered almost none.

"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer."

- Henry Kissinger, in the New York Times, Oct. 28, 1973

By: Barbara Kollmeyer  

U.S. workers are an increasingly unhappy bunch: Overworked, bored, fed up with management, worried about the future and lacking recognition or rewards.

A surprising 55% are negative about their workplace and a third are intensely negative, according to a new survey by human-resources consulting firm Towers Perrin. The remaining 45% were mildly to passionately positive, according to the poll of 1,100 workers at 300 mid- to large-sized companies.

By: Abdel Monem Said  

Probably no area of the world had a keener interest in President Bush's address on Tuesday night than the Middle East. And probably nowhere will there be greater disappointment. People in moderate Arab states will conclude that the President, in a number of significant ways, is woefully misguided in his approach to the region's troubles.

First, the American government seems to have divided the Middle East into a set of separate problems, each in its own little box: Iraq, Iran, the Palestinians and the Israelis, Fundamentalism, Terrorism. To an Arab, these are all related issues. The United States should concentrate on the problem whose resolution would, ultimately, solve all the other problems.

By: Lisa Walsh Thomas  

The stories are endless, and in my own history, the only ones of young women tossing flowers to soldiers have to do with a country being liberated by its OWN people FROM the U.S.

Now the Ashcroft people are talking about the "liberation of the people of Iraq". I've corresponded with two people in Iraq and dozens who have been there in the past year, and I have yet to to hear of Iraqis within the country trusting the United States.

Are we to believe that they will throw out their arms in welcome to the armies who have left their country glowing a sickly uranium green for a billion years while the pictures of premature, uranium-deformed babies are too grotesque for mainstream U.S. publication?

By: Bob Herbert  

...Despite rising unemployment, the President's plan for the economy was simply a continuation of his tax-cut mania. There was nothing in the way of a job-creation program or a real economic stimulus. And there was absolutely zero help offered to the states and local governments whose budgetary knees are buckling under the weight of their worst fiscal crisis since World War II.

The President's prescription drug benefit, tempting at first glance, is tied to a restructuring of Medicare that will curtail, not enhance, the delivery of health services to the elderly. It was designed to look like an act of compassion. It's not.

The hydrogen cars initiative was a particularly deft touch for a President who has been hammered for his environmental policies. Hydrogen-powered autos could make a difference in the long term, say 20 or 30 years from now, or more. But what is much more significant is that Mr. Bush has stood like a rock with the opponents of increased fuel efficiency for the cars we're driving right now. The payoff for immediately improving vehicle fuel economy would be huge. In addition to saving money for motorists, it would cut pollution, curtail our contribution to the greenhouse effect, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

By: William Rivers Pitt  

Bush failed to mention how the American economy could handle the billions of dollars needed to support the war, the inevitable oil shock that would come as a result of the war, the billions more needed for his missile shield, the billions needed to push his new tax cut through, the billions needed to make his old tax cut permanent, and the billions needed to pay for the new programs he proposed.

Bush failed to explain why so many admirals and generals, including Generals Zinni and Schwartzkopf, have spoken about the recklessness of this war plan. He failed to mention the inevitable blowback of terrorism that America would suffer should this war take place, especially if it takes place with a "coalition of the willing" that does not include a U.N. sanction.

At no time, and in no way, did George W. Bush mention the name Osama bin Laden.

By Gene Lyons  

Toward the end of her astonishing review of Susan McDougal's book The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk in the New York Times Book Review, Beverly Lowry condescends to give the author some advice. A novelist and professor of creative writing at George Mason University, Lowry thinks McDougal ought to have sought professional help writing her memoirs, "an editor or writer... who would have persuaded her all she had to do was tell the story straight".

This is big talk from a reviewer who couldn't even summarize the book's basic facts competently. According to Lowry, Kenneth Starr's Whitewater investigation "came up with pretty much of nothing, beyond a felony conviction for McDougal on charges of obstruction of justice and criminal contempt".

In reality, Starr's failure to convict Susan on precisely those charges provides the book's triumphant climactic scene. As Judge George Howard read the jury's "not guilty" verdict on the obstruction charge, McDougal writes: "a cheer went up in the courtroom... We had taken on the most powerful prosecutor in the country, an organization with an unlimited budget and incredible resources, and we had beaten them soundly. But as much as I enjoyed being a part of the victory, I was not naïve enough to believe that the verdict was about Susan McDougal. The entire trial was a referendum on Kenneth Starr, and we had succeeded in showing just how corrupt his investigation was."

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