Analysis: President Bush's call-to-arms State of the Union speechwas based on one request: trust me. Conor O'Clery examines what he said
Presidential speechwriters usually try to elevate a State of the Union speech with some poetry, some flights of rhetoric to define a presidency and a point in history. In 1966 Lyndon Johnson inspired listeners with his call to build "a Great Society here at home".
President Bush had some fine oratory in his second State of the Union address on Tuesday evening: "Free people will set the course of history," he declared. "We go forward with confidence because the call of history has come to the right country." Saddam Hussein was a man who manufactured weapons of mass destruction and tortured his citizens in gruesome ways, and "if this is not evil, then evil has no meaning."
But poetry is not the style of Mr Bush, rather it is hard prose delivered with moralistic fervour and intensity. Lowering his voice and pointing with his index finger, he delivered a stern message to the world that the die was cast and America would go it alone if needs be in its confrontation with the evil one.
"The course of this nation does not depend on the decision of others," he declared, prompting a grimly smiling Vice-President Dick Cheney to rise behind him to lead a standing ovation.
Mindful of critics around the world who see nothing but American hegemony in his foreign policy, Mr Bush claimed benign intent for what he is planning in the coming days.
He wanted to bring to the Iraqi people "food, medicine and supplies - and \ freedom", he declared (redefining the The Bush Doctrine as liberation theology from the right), just as the US had helped overthrow "Hitlerism, militarism and communism" in the 20th century.
But the jury he was most concerned to address was composed of the many nervous and sceptical Americans watching in homes across the country. To convince them that there was no other way but to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr Bush laid out all the assertions he has made before on Iraq's banned weapons programmes.
He didn't expand on them. That would be done by Colin Powell in the Security Council next week. But he had one potent new emphasis in his appeal for support from a population which suffered the trauma of September 11th, 2001. This was that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaeda.
He did not offer proof, rather he claimed to have "evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody" that revealed "that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda." Secretly, and without fingerprints, Saddam "could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own," he told the hushed chamber.
Last year Mr Bush listed Iraq, Iran and North Korea in his "axis of evil". This year North Korea and Iran were afterthoughts; the axis of evil was Iraq and al-Qaeda, and it could strike at any moment.
"Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons, and other plans - this time armed by Saddam Hussein," Mr Bush said. "It would take just one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."
No one listening could be in any doubt that the strategic goal of the President is the elimnation of Saddam Hussein - a point confirmed by a "senior administration official" to the Washington Post yesterday.
But why now? "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent," said Mr Bush. "Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option."
The US President drew on the report on Monday by chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix to make the case that Iraq had not accounted for stocks of chemical and biological weapons and was deceiving the world.
If this had been a trial of Saddam Hussein, the defence would have objected that much of the evidence was circumstantial, obscure and even misleading. It mainly had to be taken on trust, like his claim that Iraq had secret mobile biological weapons labs, which was based on the word of "three Iraqi defectors".
Mr Bush had no incontrovertible proof of the existence of banned weapons. Some of the evidence has been disputed by his own intelligence officials and by the UN. Just a few months ago the CIA told Congress that it believed Saddam Hussein was developing new weapons but that he was unlikely to endorse terrorist attacks against the United States unless attacked first.
Pentagon officials are sharply divided, according to the New York Times, on the evidence of links to al-Qaeda. This is based mainly on alleged contacts between Saddam Hussein and the Ansar al-Islam extremist group in a northern Iraq enclave, many of whom trained in Afghanistan.
Mr Bush also repeated his claim that US intelligence had told him that Saddam Hussein "has attempted to purchase high- strength aluminium tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." But on Monday International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei told the Security Council that it appeared the aluminium tubes were consistent with a programme to reverse-engineer conventional rockets, as Baghdad claimed.
For long-serving members of Congress there were echoes in the speech of the words of President Bush's father, George, who in 1991 called Saddam Hussein "this brutal dictator" who "will use any weapon, will commit any outrage, no matter how many innocents must suffer."
If taking on Saddam Hussein is family business, there is a family lesson that the President has not forgotten. Mindful that perceived political indifference to a weak economy and an obsession with Iraq robbed his father of a second term in 1992, President Bush focused the first half of his speech on an ambitious domestic agenda.
His legislative programme was based on new tax cuts which critics have said are tilted towards the wealthy, and initiatives to overhaul the health system, like offering prescription drug benefits to the elderly through private health plans, along with a few surprises like doubling the money for fighting AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean to $15 billion.
This agenda will dominate the next election, a point not lost on the several Democrats who will jostle for the chance to challenge him in 2004 and who watched him from the front row with unsmiling, often sour, faces.
Mr Bush delivered his second State of the Union address at a time when his popularity at home and abroad has fallen below where it stood before September 11th. For him the stakes could not be higher.