Bush's Union Address: Comments ......

Bush'r failours ......... To the Editor: When speaking about Iraq, President Bush told Congress, “And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure.” This is the president’s way of reframing the issue. Of course no one voted for failure, and the president’s opponents are not hoping for failure. The president knows full well that the failure has already occurred, but instead of looking at that failure as a way of learning how not to repeat it, he’s framing the discussion so that his opponents — including the 70 percent of the American people who disapprove of the way he’s handling the war — can be blamed for their lack of “resolve.” Here is a short list of the president’s errors: listening to his secretary of defense instead of the generals who cautioned him that we needed 500,000 troops to secure the peace; not clearing the troops out within six months of his announcement that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”; not listening to any voices, especially the Iraq Study Group report, urging anything but continued staying the course. I don’t include his justifications for the invasion — the W.M.D. or Saddam Hussein’s involvement in 9/11. Those weren’t errors. Those were lies. Nat EhrlichEast Lansing, Mich., Jan. 24, 2007 • New York Times .... dated 25th January,2007. (Letter to the Editor Columns)