I’ll leave it to the warriors to pass judgment on the accuracy of President Bush’s military assessment of Iraq in his address last night.  As a speech, it had one major failing, and many minor ones. 

The major failing was that the President didn’t seriously take on the debate over the war by acknowledging that there is enormous opposition to his administration’s position.  About three-quarters of the way through the talk, he says:

Americans want our country to be safe and our troops to begin coming home from Iraq. Yet those of us who believe success in Iraq is essential to our security, and those who believe we should bring our troops home, have been at odds. Now, because of the measure of success we are seeing in Iraq, we can begin seeing troops come home.

The way forward I have described tonight makes it possible, for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together.

That’s too little, too late.  If you want to sway the opposition, you have to first show that you take their arguments seriously by paraphrasing them with some integrity, not merely alluding to them.  Then, and only then, can you state your own position and expect to be heard. 

The ancient Greeks understood the necessity of showing the opposition that they’ve been heard; they called it the ‘residues’ method.  You talk about the other possible positions, show what’s wrong with them (respectfully), and then the ‘residue’ of the argument that’s left is your position.   

By not showing the opposition that it has been heard, all President Bush will accomplish with this speech is to harden the determination of his foes. 

That’s the major failing of the address.  The minor failings include beginning with Iraq’s perspective, not his own — it sounds disengenuous.  (In Iraq, an ally of the United States is fighting for its survival.)  That’s not how the war started, and everyone knows it.  Second, his claims of progress simply sound feeble after so many years of effort.  His rhetoric raises the implicit question, why did he wait so long to try a surge?  If progress is being made now, why not more troops years ago?  It hardly deserves to be called a strategy.  Third, there are many implicit admissions of failure and change of heart in the speech, but no explicit ones.  It would have been much more elegant and powerful to acknowledge some of those mistakes. 

In the end, not a great speech.  Not a rhetorically sophisticated one, and not one which will change many minds.