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The most
prominent theme from the punditry commentary on Pres. Bush’s Tuesday night
speech at Ft Bragg, which may forever be remembered as a ill-advised TV
commercial produced in campaign mode rather than governing mode, is that the
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld troika is not listening: not listening to their generals,
not listening to diplomatic experts, not listening to the public. This
tone-deaf isolationism has plagued them before, but now appears to have set in
as a terminal condition, rather than a temporary one. These two
examples from tenured Washington observers, below, are just a small sample of
the 1) disappointed or 2) validated responses much of the political corps is
expressing. Defending the administration is getting to be more difficult by the
week, and those diehards who do should reconsider recent similar references
like Baghdad Bob, whose glowing pronouncements on the eve of ‘shock and awe’
were ridiculed. A practical politician would have made significant changes
before now, but the Troika zealously guard their neocon aerie, preferring
delusion and “rhetorical sleight of hand” to alternative, workable solutions. KwC Hoaglund:
Subtle Shift in Goals. “One of the greatest handicaps the
administration still confronts is a self-imposed refusal to listen to Iraqis
about doing things the Iraqi way. From trying to build a new Iraqi army on U.S.
specifications and prejudices to preferring to contract with foreigners rather
than employ Iraqis, U.S.
officials have often made the perfect the enemy of the good. Echoes of Vietnam By Richard Cohen, Washington
Post, Thursday, June 30, 2005; A23 About two years ago I
sat down with a colleague and explained why Iraq was not going to be Vietnam.
Iraq lacked a long-standing nationalist movement and a single charismatic leader
like Ho Chi Minh. The insurgents did not have a sanctuary like North Vietnam,
which supplied manpower, materiel and leadership, and the rebel cause in Iraq
-- just what is it, exactly? -- was not worth dying for. On Tuesday President Bush proved me wrong.
Iraq is beginning to look like Vietnam. The similarity is most
striking in the language the president used. First came the vast, insulting
oversimplifications. The war in Iraq was tied over and over again to the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, although that link was nonexistent. The
Sept. 11 commission said in plain English that there was no connection between
al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Even a line such as we must "defeat them
abroad before they attack us at home" had a musty, Vietnam-era sound to
it. Whether it's
true or not, it is an updated version of the domino theory: if not Saigon then
San Francisco. Second, just as Lyndon
Johnson and others referred to communism as if it were a worldwide monolith, so
Bush talks about terrorists. He mentioned "terrorists" 23 times, and
while he also occasionally employed the word "insurgents," his emphasis was on the wanton murders of
the former and not the political aims of the latter. He even cited the terrorist leader and al
Qaeda associate "Zarqawi" by name, saying the United States would
never "abandon the Iraqi people to men" like him -- strongly
suggesting that he was the problem in Iraq. Abu Musab Zarqawi, though, is only
part of the problem. Bush sounded downright
Johnsonian in talking about progress in Iraq. He cited rebuilt "roads and
schools and health clinics," not to mention improvements in
"sanitation, electricity and water." This, too, had a familiar ring.
We got the same sort of statistics in Vietnam. Some of them were simply
concocted, but most, I think, were sort of true. Roads were paved, schools were
opened and village councils were elected -- and yet, somehow, it never
mattered. The newly elected village council could meet in the newly opened
school and get there on a newly paved road -- and spend the night planning an
attack on U.S. forces. It is all so depressing. In Vietnam, it took the United States
forever to recognize that it was fighting not international communism but a
durable and vibrant nationalist movement led by communists. Something similar
may be happening in Iraq.
Yes, foreign terrorists
are flocking to the country. But the
Sunni insurgency is a different thing. The Sunnis may work with foreign terrorists and gladly use
their expertise, but their goals are not the same. The salient and depressing
fact remains that no
insurgency can survive for long without either the cooperation or the apathy of
the populace. Someone's making bombs, and someone's not turning him in. Bush may extol Iraqi democracy, but at
the moment not enough Iraqis feel it is worth dying for. Finally, Bush
descended to Vietnam-speak. This is the language used by the Johnson and Nixon
administrations to obscure the truth by emitting a fog of numbers. Thus Bush cited the "8 million Iraqi men
and women" who voted, the "30 nations" with troops in Iraq (a
total joke, and the president knows it), the "40 countries" and
"three international organizations" that have pledged "$34
billion" in reconstruction assistance (another joke), the "80
countries" that recently met in Brussels to aid Iraq, and the
"160,000 security forces trained and equipped for a variety of
missions" -- one of them being, clearly, to stay out of harm's way. The war Bush declared
to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction is not the war being waged. The two
have only one thing in common: rhetorical sleight of hand. Yet the consequences of pulling out of Iraq
would be awful. The day Saigon fell I was ashamed for my country -- an ugly,
disgraceful retreat. I don't want that to happen again. But unless Bush
rethinks his strategy, fires some people who long ago earned dismissal, examines his own assumptions (what's the
point of continuing to isolate Iran and Syria when we need them both to seal
Iraq's borders?)
and talks turkey to the American people, he will lose everything good he set
out to do, including the example Iraq could set for the rest of the Middle
East. I know Iraq is not Vietnam. But Tuesday night it sure sounded like it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/29/AR2005062902585.html?nav=hcmodule |
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