Yesterday's downpours beginning in late morning, I forgot to say, ended up brightening the "dreary" day even before clouds broke that evening. I'm not certain what it was about the rain; perhaps the crisp autumn scent, an absence of the earthy aroma you smell in summer - if for nothing else, a pleasant change. The temperature was just right, too: a solid seventy degrees, not the frigid shower that makes at least some of us more than happy to battle with snow for four or five months (not as damp, better looking). And the relentless cascade was heartening, last call for all things green before moisture is served only as morning dew and varying degrees of frozen droplets. As the boss noted, we took in more rainwater than with Isabel.
Today, as any first day after a low-pressure front, climbs into the official ranks of "glorious." A steady breeze is pushing a host of cumulus to the east. I just caught sight of some seagulls, venturing in from the lake, stationary as they hung in the air, westbound, against the wind. Absent haze, the sky is one of those purer blues you'd readily look for in a Crayola box back in elementary school. The sun is neither obscured nor oppressive; it's just right. Magnificent stuff.
I'm still undecided as to whether the weather is acting as a natural opiate or whether I may simply be jaded to the biggest politics of the day. Bush goes to the United Nations today; Germany is conciliatory, Russia is brilliantly sly, France is scheming. A large portion of the president's audience will be representatives from nations who saw Iraqi freedom as either an impossibility, a trade embargo or an ideological affront. The table has been set for a few months. Does the United States need additional troops? Perhaps, but how well can you bail water when you can't plug the holes? What Iraq truly needs for its security is for Damascus and Tehran to be best noted over the next few months for public displays of their former regimes - Ba'athist and Islamist, respectively - hanging. That's what new divisions of American soldiers could occupy themselves with (undoubtedly aided, at least in Iran, by a popular revolt).
Iraqis themselves aren't particularly fond of neighbors, Arab or not, who led cheers for a dictator who abused them for twenty years; so the multicultural drive for different "faces" on the ground, as if this were a politically correct breakfast cereal commerical, is poorly reasoned at best. It's difficult to mask the rationale of adding foreign troops to offset our own as targets - that's pretty cynical, and makes a flimsy case that foreign troops already in theatre (British, Polish) aren't the only ones with the equipment and training (or numbers) to actually aid the American force.
And money - money? As it's been noted, the same opposition voices nagging the White House for money in Afghanistan have turned into well-meaning misers for none other than the federal government's primary purpose of defending the nation's security via Iraq. Yes, yes: the budget is bloated and Bush has played a part. But it's largely domestic spending - and much of it politically motivated. We are in a war. Funny how Congress, Democrat or Republican, considers cutting the military before pork.
Most of this shale will, hopefully, be smashed by White House momentum gained from Bush's speech today: Iraq can become a shining example of Near East democracy, and the beginning of the end of Islamic terrorism. If the war fails here, legitimate infrastructure spending won't mean a damn. As Condoleezza Rice put it, "freedom is priceless."
Brit Hume's interview with Bush in the Oval Office, which aired last night, followed well with words from Fred Barnes earlier in the evening: the president is giving the United Nations a gigantic benefit of the doubt, going so far in the interview as to compliment the international bureaucracy as being "good at" writing constitutions. The interview itself - I thought, at least - was untimely for any significant policy expounding or revelation. No president would risk tipping his hand the night before a diplomatic challenge, so Jacque Chirac ends up being described as "strong-willed." Intriguing as Hume's questions on Democrat challengers were, Bush was right: Why worry about them now when only one candidate is the real electoral threat? Hume followed up this - does it matter if the Democrats are, in a vacuum, trying to define issues? Bush felt confident that he could maintain his own conversation with the country.
A guarded interaction with Hume, in summary. What Bush seemed to be hinting at, though, gives today's events even more significance: Wait until the United Nations address. So, with some predictions and suggestions, we wait. And keep hope.
UPDATE: The speech was consistent with Bush's foreign policy and defiant of enabler nations' opportunism. Even the Christian Science Monitor concedes that the president has held firm to his beliefs; Clifford May of National Review picks up where the Monitor leaves out (as in, the president's strongest words):
[There] is no neutral ground. All governments that support terror are complicit in a war against civilization.[T]hose who incite murder and celebrate suicide...have no place in any religious faith, they have no claim on the world's sympathy, and they should have no friend in this chamber.
A suitably disappointed Reagan-era bureaucrat was quoted in the Monitor article lamenting the president's unapologetic tone but indirectly acknowledged that, ultimately, it is the Constitution of the United States to which Bush is accountable, not the United Nations General Assembly - a stubborn fact of democratic sovereignty that internationalists often ignore.
May says it best: "[S]peaking frankly and truthfully to the members of the U.N. - as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to do - is a tradition worth reviving."