Bush Tries His Trump Card For the Mid-term Election

Bush's broken record of "stay the course" is becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.
WaPo

President Bush issued a stern warning yesterday about what he called the continuing terrorist threat confronting the nation, using the haunting words of Islamic extremists to support his assertion that they remain determined to attack the United States. Abandoning his practice of only rarely mentioning al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, Bush repeatedly quoted him and purported terrorist letters, recordings and documents to make his case that terrorists have broad totalitarian ambitions and believe the war in Iraq is a key theater in a wider struggle.


"Iraq is not a distraction in their war against America" but the "central battlefield where this war will be decided," Bush said in an address before the Military Officers Association of America.


[...]"What is missing from the . . . public discussion of all of this is some explanation of the phenomenon of radicalized Islam," said Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at CSIS and former Clinton administration official. "Why are there so many people out there who want to kill Americans and so many Westerners? Why is this such a durable phenomenon?"

Now that Bush turned a secure and functional Iraq into a failed state, it has indeed become the number one recruiting ground for Al Qaeda. So if it's so important for the US to fix the problem, why isn't he sending another 350,000 troops to effectively occupy Iraq? At this point, it is clear, Bush's agenda on Iraq is to make a mess and force the next President to take the blame.
Then he takes on one of the other world "evil doers".

In his speech at the Capital Hilton in Washington, Bush said the threat posed by al-Qaeda and other Sunni Muslim "extremists" is no different from that posed by Shiite Muslim "extremists," who he said include the leaders of Iran and the group Hezbollah. He quoted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having said that if the United States wants to have good relations with Iran, it must "bow down before the greatness of the Iranian nation and surrender. If you don't accept to do this, the Iranian nation will force you to surrender and bow down."


"America will not bow down to tyrants," Bush added to loud applause from the audience.

This pretty well sabotages any effort to bring the Administration to the table to talk to the Iranians. They never really intended to talk, they just wanted Iran to say no by offering them a deal they couldn't accept. In fact, the US has told Iran that very message. "...bow down to the greatness of the US and surrender."