Some see irony there

Dan Froomkin in The Washington Post's "White House Briefing" summarizes the disparate responses to President Bush's speech yesterday before the United Nations General Assembly:

Was he strong, resolute, unyielding, unapologetic? Undeniably so. And in the view of his supporters, enough said.

But viewed in the context of how things have worked out, particularly in Iraq, his critics — including many in the audience of world leaders yesterday — found him misguided, simplistic, imperious and trigger-happy.

That's already better coverage than the speech got in the paper I work for. We ran a clipped version of Scott Lindlaw's Associated Press report under a headline something like "Bush appeals to U.N." One might wonder what kind of response this appeal received, but the Lindlaw piece doesn't really say.

Froomkin identifies the one line that jumped out at me:

If the whole speech was a litmus test, this one sentence was the clincher:

"We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace," Bush said.

Some people see irony there. Others don't.

One who did see the irony was Slate's Fred Kaplan, who wasn't impressed with the speech:

He catalogs some of the world's problems, then suggests nothing — not the vaguest plan of action — for how to deal with any of them. …

When Bush says, "The circle of liberty and security and development has been expanding in our world," he seems blissfully unaware that, for most countries, there is no such seamless circle. To the extent that liberty, security and development are taking hold in many regions and societies, they are jostling and clashing with one another rather than expanding peacefully in tandem. These clashes pose the critical questions of our time. Bush's speech evades them and assumes not merely that they don't exist but that they can't exist.

Go read the whole of Kaplan's piece, especially his wickedly accurate description of Bush's unease when speaking before audiences not prescreened for enthusiastic devotion.

The Post's Glenn Kessler notes the underlying truth about Bush's speech:

His message was aimed directly at American voters, not the leaders unenthusiastically listening to him …

One wonders why those leaders would be expected to have much enthusiasm for listening to Bush when he isn't really talking to them in the first place. This was the troubling aspect of the speech: Bush didn't seem to care how it was received by the U.N., only how it was received by American voters. This half-hearted appeal received, unsurprisingly, a half-hearted response from the assembly.

As Froomkin noted, Bush's supporters view this as evidence that the president is "resolute, unyielding, unapologetic." But one can be resolute, unyielding and unapologetic without saying, as Bush himself has before, "Who cares what you think?" Mutual respect can be persuasive. In his dealings with the U.N., Bush seems to act as though he believes both mutual respect and persuasion would involve compromising his principles.

Slate's William Saletan actually admires this trait of the president's. He likes that Bush refuses even to pretend he cares about what the rest of the world thinks. And from there Saletan moves on to rewrite one of the more tedious cliche columns of the past year: the idea that Bush is a foreign policy idealist while Kerry is a Kissingeresque realist.

This idea arises from several speeches like the one Bush gave on Tuesday, in which he strikes a Wilsonian note about promoting democracy around the world. Bush repeated several lines of this stock speech before the U.N., including this one: "For too long, many nations, including my own, tolerated, even excused, oppression in the Middle East in the name of stability."

If words were all that mattered, Saletan's binary idealist/realist formula might work. But words can be drowned out by actions.

Kessler also rehashes this dubious bit of conventional wisdom:

Bush's vision is lofty and idealistic … Unlike Kerry — who is more of a "realist" in the mode of Henry Kissinger — Bush has been willing to upset the established order to achieve his aims.

That's in the fifth graf of Kessler's report. Here's the 13th graf:

Bush's own actions have sometimes undercut his rhetoric. He has repeatedly expressed his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, even as Putin has slowly strangled democratic institutions. He also remains a strong supporter of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a coup. After giving his speech, Bush met in the afternoon with Musharraf at the United Nations — just days after Musharraf signaled he would break his promise to retire as army chief of staff.

So it seems the idealist/realist conflict that Kessler first describes is not a matter of Bush vs. Kerry. It is, rather, a matter of Bush's Rhetoric vs. Bush's Actions.