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For a few weeks, as the anniversary of Sept. 11 approached, the White House was thinking how best to advance the Administration's goals. Aides knew the news from Iraq was unsettling the public, and they knew too that it would take more than a few presidential homilies to calm everyone's nerves. "There was a time," said a White House aide, "when we could just give a speech, and that would take care of an issue. We can't do that now." The new strategy was to "big-picture Iraq" and place the struggle there in the larger context of the global war on terrorism. Bush was pleased with his reception at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Aug. 26, and it was on that day that the idea of giving a televised speech to the nation began to take shape. So on Sept. 7, after the NFL games, Bush, the go-it-alone ranger, turned reluctant multilateralist. He called on other countries, whatever their "past differences" with the U.S., to step up to their "present duties" in what the Administration likes to call the "central front" in the war on terrorism. "Members of the United Nations," said Bush, "now have the opportunity--and the responsibility--to assume a broader role in assuring that Iraq becomes a free and democratic nation." Bush said he would ask Congress for $87 billion in the current fiscal year for the military and for reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan. That breathtaking figure constitutes 11% of the entire discretionary spending in the federal budget.
But the grim reality in the arc of crisis was unchanged by his speech. Two days after the President spoke, suicide bombers from Hamas, the radical Palestinian group, killed 15 Israelis in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Israeli government responded by announcing that it had made a decision to expel Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Authority, from the West Bank. Then al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite-TV channel, showed a videotape of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri--the leader and ideologist, respectively, of al-Qaeda--strolling around a boulder-strewn mountainside with the insouciance of a couple of friends hiking in the Adirondacks, a sobering reminder that those who lead the network responsible for the worst terrorist attacks in history remain at large. On Friday U.S. forces in Iraq were involved in a fire fight at Fallujah in which they killed eight Iraqi policemen, and the same day, two American servicemen died in another battle. "The forces of reality have set in," said Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in what may be the year's finest understatement.
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