George W. Bush’s speech on Iraq before the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) on March 13 attracted some media attention, but few commentators focused on what was new in the speech: the President’s emphasis on IED (Improvised Explosive Devices) -- in plain English, roadside bombs -- that he stressed were a major threat to our troops in that U.S.- occupied country.

Bush repeated his previous explanation that we are in Iraq to promote “democratic ideals” and to train “a new generation of democratic leaders in the Middle East.” But his remarks at FDD emphasized a previously little reported role for the U.S. military in Iraq: to eliminate IED and the “bomb makers” that produce them.

As columnist Robert Scheer points out, Bush repeated “IED” 26 times in his speech. His detailed treatment of the topic was at the heart of his remarks.

What’s the reason behind the administration’s new proclamations about the IED threat?

The answer is not far to seek: The White House, desperate to gain support for the Iraq war, is now providing yet another justification for its Middle East misadventure. Bush is again trying to convince us that we should fight in Iraq, since all his other explanations have failed to persuade an increasingly skeptical public that our military presence in that distant part of the world is necessary.

So, for Bush, the urgent need to abolish IED is a recycled version of why we are in Iraq, which initially -- we hate to remember -- was to get rid of its Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), which turned out to be non-existent.

IED, in other words, are Bush-produced clones of the fictitious WMD, as Scheer has noted. From the administration’s narrow propaganda perspective, IED are in fact even more believable as a threat to national security than WMD. There is visual, mainstream media-provided evidence that the murderous devices are in fact “out there” and pose a real danger to our troops.

Moreover, any doubts regarding the White House’s IED claims can be dismissed as the unpatriotic rants of war critics that don’t care for the safety of our men and women in uniform (far too many of whom are victims of these murderous devices).

The language in Bush’s speech leaves little doubt that IED have become his favorite new weapon of mass distraction to lure Americans into “staying the course” in Iraq. Like WMD, IED is an acronym -- perfect linguistic fakery to frighten the public about something it can’t clearly identify. The less understood, the scarier.

As the White House try to show about WMD, IED are, Bush tells us, weapons that allow the terrorists “to attack from a safe distance without having to face our forces in battle”; “they can be hidden”; they “strike terror.” Similar to the WMD in Saddam’s Iraq, they’re produced by a dangerous enemy: “Some of the most powerful IED we are seeing in Iraq today,” Bush discloses, “includes components that came from Iran.”

Our commander in chief doesn’t fail to base his IED claims on imprecise intelligence, just as he did with WMD: “Our director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, told the Congress Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shi'a militia with the capabilities to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq.”

True to his administration’s WMD spin, Bush links IED with nuclear weapons: “Such actions [by Iran], along with Iran's support for terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear weapons, are increasingly isolating Iran. And America will continue to rally the world to confront these threats.” This twisted IED logic echoes the case for going after WMD: If we don’t get rid of these weapons now, a mushroom cloud is bound to be upon us.

To push its now discredited WMD claims, the administration repeatedly used numbers that were difficult (if not impossible) to verify. With IED, Bush is again playing the statistics game. “Iraqis are increasingly providing critical intelligence to help us find the bomb-makers and stop new attacks. The number of tips from Iraqis has grown from 400 last March to over 4,000 in December. … Iraqi and coalition forces have found and cleared nearly 4,000 IED … ” (What a coincidence that the number of tips match the number of IED).

Just as the campaign to save America from WMD that weren't there demanded massive resources and personnel -- given the nature of their putative threat to the United States -- so does the struggle against the violent extremism of IED: “To improve our training,” the president announces, “last month we established new IED Joint Center of Excellence [could Orwell have thought of a better name?] headquartered at Fort Irwin, California, where we're taking lessons learned from the IED fight in Iraq and sharing them with our troops in the field and those preparing to deploy.”

Along with other anti-IED measures, this “new initiative,” as Bush puts it in perfect bureaucratese (ever heard of an old initiative?), of course costs a great deal of money, another proof of the magnitude of the threat: “In 2004 the administration spent $150 million to fight the IED threat. This year we're providing $3.3 billion to support our efforts to defeat IED.”

Meanwhile, as we stay awake at night fearing the IED-producing Iran and spend billions of our tax dollars combating IED, we mustn’t forget the other enemy: the press, which the administration can’t stop blaming for giving what it claims is a false impression of the situation in Iraq.

“Earlier this year,” Bush tells us, “a newspaper published details of a new anti-IED technology that was being developed. Within five days of the publication, using details from that article, the enemy had posted instructions for defeating this new technology on the Internet. We cannot let the enemy know how we're working to defeat them.”

(The paper in question is the Los Angeles Times; as Jason Sherman in InsideDefense.com points out, the description of the IED technology “appeared well before the Times story in numerous open sources, including the report accompanying the defense appropriations supplemental spending bill last May.”)

Just as Bush’s accounts of WMD were based on obfuscation, so are his claims about IED. Bush says that “[i]n the past 18 months, we’ve cut the casualty rate per IED attack in half.” Charles J. Hanley of the Associated Press puts this declaration in proper perspective: “Better armor and tactics,” he writes, may have “lowered the casualty rate per IED attack last year, but the fast-growing number of attacks meant the U.S. death toll still rose. Since mid-2005, an average of about 40 Americans a month have been killed by improvised explosives, twice the rate of the previous 12 months.”

Moreover, Bush fails to disclose what the military itself says about IED -- statements that would lead the public to doubt the reason for making the elimination of IED a prime justification for the U.S. presence in Iraq. As Hanley points out, “Out on those risky roads, and back at the Pentagon, few believe that even the most advanced technology will eliminate the [IED] threat.” He cites Lt. Col. Bill Adamson, operations chief of the anti-IED campaign, who says that the insurgents “adapt more quickly than we procure technology.”

So, when seen for what it is, the Bush IED propaganda campaign is based, like WMD falsifications before it, on complete cynicism about the mental capacities of the American people. It assumes, wrongly, that the public will buy yet another feeble justification for a war that has never been adequately explained.

Indeed, so completely do Bush and his handlers underestimate the intellect of their countrymen and misread the national mood, that they take it for granted no one in these United States will come to a simple conclusion: Had we not invaded Iraq, IED there would never have become the threat that our mission-accomplished, gung-ho, “bring them on” commander in chief says they are now.

Moreover, is it not obvious (except to the White House) that if our troops withdrew from an impoverished country we’ve helped destroy, the Improvised Explosive Devices there would no longer be a threat to our soldiers?

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who practiced public diplomacy for more than 20 years, now compiles the "Public Diplomacy Press Review."

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