This and that and the state of the Empire

I caught the Bush state of the union on reruns. I went out to a Mexican restaurant and talked about Iraq when I couldn't stomach seeing it live.

In talking about Iraq - they are going to find technical violations - Iraq agreed to not build long range missiles and there are some over the range agreed to. I was surprised that Pat has become a dove on this war. She asked about how Iraq could afford a nuclear weapons program when they had one and was surprised about the US sending the Iraqi scientists to Los Alamos and Sandia to learn how to handle nuclear weapons shortly before the Gulf War. She was dismissive of the Iraqi's helping Afghan war refugees set up in Kurdish controlled territory. The question becomes when is the United States justified in going to war. Technically, Iraq is a UN Security Council problem as that was the structure of Gulf War I but that may not fit the reality of the situation. Particularly with imperialists in power who want a diminished UN, pointing out that the United Nations went to war with Iraq and signed the truce and not the US is beginning to seem pointless.

On to the speech, the first part of the Bush speech was all about the domestic agenda.

The first thing to remember about Bush is that speeches are not policy. He co-ops Democratic rhetoric and adds a few bold but distant programs that he will not fully fund. Then he adds more then a dash of the Republican brand of populism - no taxes. Things like Medicare and jobs are added to the speech to make him seem "compassionate."

The hydrogen car thing was cute, this is a program that will not work for 20 years when there are things you could do now. The new AIDS program came out of left field but may be tied to the West Africa initiative the administration is working on to develop their oil fields. There has already been some attention paid to it not being funded to the billions of dollars he used in the speech. Like most Bush programs it would start slowly and then build in funding. As Ted Kennedy found out after working with Bush on the education bill, several months after passage Bush will cut the funding.

The prescription drug program for seniors is tied to them joining HMO's. This is a program both the companies that provide it and the recipients are abandoning.

On Iraq he made clear he is weeks away from war. The tone was somber and steady. He really has improved on his public speaking ability.

He repeated several lies about the non-existent Iraq nuclear program. I tell you three times there is no evidence that Iraq has tried to obtain uranium and those aluminum tubes were not for nuclear weapons development.

One thing left unstated was that all of the suspected chemical and biological weapons that Saddam has he had before the last Gulf War. We should known, we provided them to him.

The basic argument of the speech was to magnify the threat that Saddam poses and add a moral imperative to free the Iraqi people.

No one has ever claimed it wouldn't be better if Saddam was gone. Although these claims he has the ability to create a reverse domino effect in the middle east for democracy seems unlikely

The most ominous line in the speech is that Saddam Hussein has missed his "final chance."

There is no change in my prognosis that we are in the period of world history that will be known as the height of the American Empire.

The Green Party has a response to his speech.

The pentagon, perhaps inadvertently, confirmed that US troops are already in northern Iraq. (NYTimes).