President Bush just finished his well-prepared speech, posed to ask Congress for seed money to clean up the mess in Iraq. Predictably, Bush uses the opportunity to try to justify the Iraq war as part of the war on terror.

Here are my comments, point by point, on Bush’s speech:

In Iraq, we are helping the longsuffering people of that country to build a decent and democratic society at the center of the Middle East.

Baloney. That’s the last thing the Bush administration wants. Since Japan and Germany, there has hardly been a country we’ve “liberated” that has become a democracy. What America wants is yet another puppet government. If Iraq were let alone to be a democracy, another theocracy like Iran may very well be the result.

The terrorists thrive on the support of tyrants and on the resentments of oppressed peoples. When tyrants fall, and resentment gives way to hope, men and women in every culture reject the ideologies of terror, and turn to the pursuits of peace.

Then why was Iraq free from terrorist attacks when Hussein was in power, and besieged by what Bush calls “terrorism” today?

Some of the attackers are foreign terrorists, who have come to Iraq to pursue their war on America and other free nations.

As I have stated before, there has not been one shred of evidence to support this claim. It is a back-door attempt to usher in a justification for the war in Iraq by linking the country to terrorism.

There is more at work in these attacks than blind rage. The terrorists have a strategic goal.

Okay. Now they’re all “terrorists” apparently. The metamorphosis (killers, to terrorists and loyalists, to terrorists) in complete. We went into Iraq because there was terrorism there, and this is a war on terror. Right. After the middle of the speech, Bush never again mentions killers or loyalists; he only repeats “terrorist” again and again. During the speech, he says “terror” four times, “terrorism” twice, and “terrorist” 16 times.

Two years ago, I told the Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war, fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front.

Like I said, he’s trying to justify Iraq as part of the war on terror. This must be spoken on, publicly–the president cannot be allowed to get away with this blatant revisionism to justify a grab for votes and oil and to satisfy the hawks.

Iraq is not a front in the war on terror. It is a distraction from it.

And even the “war on terror” itself is a bogus war–one of those unending political wars rather than an actual war, and for the Bush administration, an excuse to carry out the real wars they want to, and to slip into place the policies and programs they would never be able to get the American public to agree to otherwise.

We are encouraging the orderly transfer of sovereignty and authority to the Iraqi people.

Again, baloney. If so, then why not allow the U.N. to share in the authority in rebuilding? They have a much better record than we do in building democracies. Bush wants to keep the authority in Iraq precisely because he does not want a true democracy, he does not want to truly liberate the Iraqi people. He wants a lapdog, not a country with its own agenda, which probably will not go along with ours.

I will soon submit to Congress a request for $87 billion.

Two things should be noted here. First, a year after Bush started his drumbeat to war, this is the first time Bush has presented a figure to the public stating how much the post-war clean-up will cost. Second: this is the first figure presented, and these things always end up costing way more than the initial estimates.

And, incidentally, better start revising the deficit numbers upward again.

It should be noted that Bush did not mention that Saddam has not yet been captured, nor that WMD have not yet been found. It was just terror, terrorists, terrorism.

Then there is the oil question: why is no one mentioning this as a means of financing the rebuilding? Bush did not mention oil once in the speech. Oil should be able to pay for this whole thing, and certainly, America now has its hands on that oil. So who is making the money from that?

In the post-speech analysis, Bob Graham made the solid points that Bush did not mention who would pay for the $87 billion for Iraq, and that it would represent more than we spend on education in the U.S., and twice what we spend on repairing our own failing infrastructure. It may be true that we need to do this in Iraq–this is not being challenged. The complaint in that (a) Bush waited more than a year after he started seriously pumping the whole war idea before he finally predicts some costs, which were very much predictable ($100 billion was predicted a year ago), and (b) that we shouldn’t have gotten into this war in the first place, as we cannot afford it, and Saddam was no threat in the first place–Bush just lied about that to get us into the war. Again, it was about votes, oil, and the desires of the hawks.

And those are not good enough reasons for all of this.

We should not be here right now. We should be rebuilding our own country, not invading and then rebuilding others that really were no threat to us in the first place. We should be concentrating on working, both in enforcement and in winning hearts and minds, to reduce the hatred against us and to be a positive force in the world.

But now? Now, we have a huge mess on our hands. The world alternately laughs at us and virulently resents us. Bush has done more to encourage terrorists than to discourage them. We have a half-trillion dollar yearly deficit where we should have surpluses. Wealthy people are in a good place, but the rest of us suffer from wars, unemployment and the burden of debt.

The state of the union is not good. We need better than this.