Dubya, [Back] @ Turtle Bay

Here are some of the reviews of the President's UN remarks.

Rush Limbaugh:

President Bush really, really, really taking it to them there at the Star Wars bar scene, otherwise known as the United Nations General Assembly. There is applause going on. There were no smiles from most of the crowd. There was contempt in most of the faces as I watched this. The President put the onus on the United Nations and virtually every problem country, cited a resolution that they've passed, said it was up to them to enforce its resolutions and to maintain its viability.

Now, I'm going to tell you something, folks. If anybody else spoke these words on this day, they would be etched in stone. These words would be praised, they would be exalted, the man who spoke them would be exalted, he would be considered one of the great visionaries of our time. The world would rally to him to a certain degree, except these words were spoken by George W. Bush, for whom there is contempt, not only in this country among Democrats and the left and many in the Drive-By Media, but in the very body in which he spoke, but he took it right to them. He laid it right on the line. He told them who they are and what the problems are and how to solve it. He stood up for the United States' position on all this. He did not make one policy reference. To the people of Iran he told them, we love you, you got a great culture, you've had many contributions, but you are being squashed by a bunch of totalitarian leaders. That's his answer to all of you people who think he ought to sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and listen to what an insane lunatic has to say. That was his answer to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

If that was Bush's answer to Adolph the Reincarnated, no wonder Ahmadinejad barely took notice of it. First of all, do you think the Iranian "president" would care that "El Diablo" called him out as a "totalitarian"? Heck, judging from what he had to say later, the little Neanderthal probably enjoyed the acknowledgement. Second, since the Bush Administration has done next to nothing to aid the cause of Iranian democratic dissidents over the past five and a half years, speaking to the Iranian people now with echoes of his second Inaugural remarks and State of the Union Address a few weeks later have to ring awfully hollow to both them and their demonic theocratic overlords.

But the theme I find most frustrating is the continuing urging of the UN to take responsibility for fulfilling the responsibilities set forth in its original charter and enforce its resolutions. The old axiom "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" comes to mind. Didn’t GDub do this very same song & dance four years ago vis-a-vie Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Did it make any difference then? Didn’t we have to go into Iraq anyway without a UN fig leaf? So why are we rerunning the same progression now? To what possible end? It’s just futile rhetorical masturbation, and everybody in that den of thieves, cowards, and murderers knew it.

NRO’s symposium participants gave reviews of Bush’s speech as rave as El Rushbo, hailing its glittering vision of freedom and self-determination for a region of the world that has never experienced it. But Claudia Rosett noticed the same disconnect between the shining city on a hill and the absence of any hope that America will haul it down into the oppressed valley below:

And yet, his speech at the United Nations rang hollow. Why? Because Bush kept trying to find things to praise about the U.N. itself, as a partner in achieving his vision. That would be the same unrepentant, unreformed, corrupt, and dysfunctional U.N. that opposed him over Iraq, failed to keep peace in Lebanon, has failed to stop genocide in Sudan and is failing spectacularly to stop Iran’s nuclear-bomb program. No doubt diplomacy demands a certain amount of polite fiction, but Bush more than discharged that obligation later in the day — with his bizarre toast in praise of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, over lunch. The U.N., with its ranks of despots, its ingrown and unaccountable bureaucracy, and now its platform for the messianic musings of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has repeatedly proved itself part of the problem, not the solution. To champion the cause of freedom while praising today’s U.N. is a very mixed message.

It is, once again, a case of seeking the ends yet ducking the means to attain them. It is all sizzle and no steak. All hat and no cattle. "Gosh, we really want to see the people of the Middle East set free to determine their own rulers and their own destiny, but we’ve got to ask King Kofi for his permission first." And of course, that permission will not be forthcoming, and Dubya knows it but long ago lost the stomach for either challenging or bypassing it to do what needs to be done.

David Frum, depressingly but candidly, picked up that dismal litany, concluding that the President’s speech was a tacit admission of defeat for his policy of attempting to avert a nuclear Iran diplomatically:

Did the President call on the Security Council to reconsider [failing to impose economic sanctions]? Did he challenge the Iranian bomb program before the world? He did not. He said nothing about it. There will be no UN action, no Security Council sanctions, nothing. Not that they necessarily would have done any good, but they are out of the game. America's dwindling list of Iran options has dwindled further to just two: unilateral military action without any semblance of international approval to pre-empt the Iranian bomb program - or acquiescence in that program.

And I'm guessing that the option to emerge will be: acquiescence.

Acquiescence, it ought not need to be reiterated, is not an option. Dear LORD, look at what Ahmadinejad said in his address to the General Assembly; the idea of allowing people like this to get their hands on nuclear weapons is, not to put too fine a point on it, frakking insane. It guarantees "a massive confrontation with Iran." It makes nuclear war in the Middle East inevitable.

But that, apparently, is precisely what George W. Bush – the "unilateralist warmongering cowboy" – is going to do. Frum offers several arguments as to why, the strongest of which is this:

Despite the accusations of America's critics, the United States does not bomb other countries out of a clear blue sky. When it uses force it does so either in response to an aggression against the US or an ally - or with the legitimation of some international organization. For all the talk of "unilateralism" in Iraq, the US went to war on the strength of more than a dozen coercive UN Security Council resolutions. Post-Iraq, this kind of legitimation is more essential than ever to bringing along US allies. The US has not even begun to build any such kind of predicate against Iran - even though Iran has repeatedly been caught violating nonproliferation rules. Most recently, Iran has defied an August 31st Security Council resolution ordering it to suspend its uranium enrichment program - and yet President Bush did not even mention this resolution in his UN address on Tuesday. If he were preparing to lead the nation and the world to war, he would have done so. [emphases added]

Instead, the Bush Administration appears to be drifting in the direction of capitulation.

Is it any wonder that the mullahs are described as "supremely confident"? They are building a nuclear arsenal in direct and open defiance of the rest of the world that they will promptly use to bring the entire world to its knees, and everybody, including the United States, is too cowed to actually do anything to stop them.

When the turbaned fuehrer told us, in essence, "We will bury you!," he didn’t mean it as blustering hyperbole; he and his twelfth-imam-questing sponsors not only really mean it, but really believe, with a zealot’s fervor, that it’s going to happen.

And frankly, I’m starting to be convinced of it myself.