Keep Talkin' Baby

In September 2003, I opined that President Bush wasn't talking about the war often enough:

If it's not clear to me that we need more troops at this point, it is clear that we need more talks like Sunday night's speech. The President's talk about why we were in Iraq and how it was connected to the wider war on terror was long overdue. While I support most of the administration's actions since 9/11, I believe one of their striking failures has been an inability to communicate their larger goals and objectives in the war, to continually reinforce them, and to ask the American people to support them.

Flash forward nearly two years and I believe that the administration is still making the same mistakes. Not enough talk about why we're in Iraq, why we need to win in Iraq, and how the fighting going on there is critical to defeat the Islamist threat worldwide.

Tonight, in an all too rare address on the subject, President Bush will focus on Iraq. Early snippets from the speech released today indicate that he will talk about America's resolve and stress that we will not be intimidated by "car bombers and assassins." Which is all well and good, but I certainly hope that we hear something much more substantial tonight.

Bush needs to break away from the simplistic (although correct) mantra of "staying the course" and explain why defeating the insurgency and bringing a stable, if imperfect, democracy to Iraq will forever alter the political landscape of the Middle East. We're already able to see some of the impact of this in places like Lebanon and to a lesser extent Syria and Egypt. This is the broader future vision of progress and change that will win the war and tonight Bush both needs to articulate this vision clearly and connect it concretely to events transpiring on the ground in Iraq today.

And he needs to do it again and again. And again.

More talk please.