The Richard Cohen article is probabl;y the best commentary on the Bush speech that I've read yet.
Keith
At 07:17 30/06/2005 -0700, you wrote:
The most prominent theme from the punditry commentary on Pres. Bushs 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 awewere 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 handto 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.
Iraqi concern on that score could be exacerbated by the president's heavy emphasis Tuesday on fighting terrorists in Iraq so that Americans don't have to fight them on U.S. soil. That may help steady public support here -- no American can argue with that aim -- but it is a shifting of the goal posts from liberating Iraq from tyranny. Bush should have done more Tuesday to show that his anti-terrorism objectives are compatible with Iraqi needs. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/29/AR2005062902592.html?nav=hcmodule
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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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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