In last year's State of the Union address, President Bush identified Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, as terrorist regimes \seeking weapons of mass destruction.""
Bush has spent the subsequent 364 days promising that the United States will bring about regime change in Iraq at any cost, with or without our allies. Bush obviously saw this as his chance to lay out the case against Iraq. And he did as good of a job as can be done.
But even as he has portrayed Iraq as a serious threat, his poor handling of North Korea should remain a great concern. Calling on regional powers to help defuse the North Korean crisis falls short of what it will take for this to end.
The president's plan to address the greater threat to American security, North Korea's recently professed nuclear capabilities and wherewithal to sell them to al Qaeda and groups linked to terrorism, however, went largely unaddressed. Bush's primary concession to the Korean situation was to justify his crusade against Iraq: ""Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula.""
And though the administration has depended in the past upon displacing attention from serious concerns or incomplete diplomatic missions (nation-building in Afghanistan comes to mind) to Iraq, diplomacy with North Korea must be our first priority as leader Kim Jong Il retreats further from the common ideology of world leadership.
A real solution to our nation's ever-increasing economic decline has also fallen by the wayside under Bush's watch. Dating from his earliest presidential aspirations, Bush has supported a fiscal plan in which tax cuts are the solution to any circumstance--the responsible alternative to paying off the deficit in times of surplus and a sure-fire stimulus in economic decline.
A highlight of his recent budget proposal proving to be surprisingly pleasant to even our country's most conservative political action groups was a plan to eliminate the tax on stock dividends--which the Democratic respondent pointed out as a break for the nation's wealthiest families. All the while, Bush paid lip service to stimulating the economy through tax breaks. Just one aspect of Bush's budget promises to provide more tax relief to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans than the bottom 95 percent combined.
Most tellingly illustrating the president's neglect of the average American's concerns, last year Bush promised the creation of more jobs and a revitalized economy through his $1.6 trillion tax cut. Today, we face economic decline with no end in sight and increasing levels of unemployment.
While Bush showed resolve last night, his misguided focus reinforces what approval polls are showing: Bush must inspire real confidence in Americans in our gravest domestic and foreign concerns before pursuing his plans for Iraq.
