Hi Karen,
My, this is chilling! I'm not sure which upsets me more -- that spin
could to any significant measure rewrite mass murderer Bush 43 as a
liberator, or that the American war-supporting voters might prefer to
save face (within the cowering countenance of the Bush administration)
rather than own up to any responsibility for turning their backs on the
entire Iraqi people from the outset of the invasion to the inevitable US
troop withdrawal.
I haven't seen a single article challenging Bush's nerve over statements
to the effect that the US has been supportive of Iraq-- as if the Iraqi
people had asked the US to come and destroy their country's beauty and
infrastructure, compromise all of them, condemn hundreds of thousands of
them, and stoke a civil war that will last for decades. Media memory is
as short as it ever was, it seems, and continues merely to reflect the
voices of power and influence.
To avoid the possibility of the Republicans looking good, Democrats had
best take serious steps to impeach the top presidential team now.
Democrats must then apologize to Iraq for ever supporting the invasion,
and systematically undo all the sleazy deals illegally arranged to
benefit western oil and other industry concerns that will disinherit the
people of Iraq.
Further, the Dems should immediately plan for an effective Iraq
restoration fund, financed solely by coalition forces. It might have to
be withheld until all current US personnel are removed, and some sense
of order is returned to Iraqi government. The success of any new
authority would depend on operation/restoration funds, and the
escalation of capital should have to be conditional upon actual
progress. If none is possible, then Iraq should become a UN concern,
although certainly not a UN funded one, because innocent people have
died, and are suffering and dying almost entirely due to a US invasion.
These are the steps, in my opinion, that would begin to make amends and
begin to restore faith in Democratic leadership. The Iraqis, however,
are deeply wounded psychologically. For this, and for the sake of
justice, the Democrats must follow through with impeachment, thereby
helping to restore faith in US integrity -- in the eyes of Muslims, US
citizens and the rest of the world.
In addition, a full-scale 9/11 investigation!
Natalia Kuzmyn
******************************************
Karen Watters Cole wrote:
Tactics have changed but the strategy has not.
Please see summary and links below to:
Ø James Ridgeway's article drawing the same association to
Kissinger, citing historian Gareth Porter, and
Ø Republican linguist and pollster Frank Luntz' essay on Wartime
Linguistics.
How Republicans Win If We Lose In Iraq
Bush and the GOP are shifting tactics just like Nixon did with Vietnam
- to win the next election, not the war.
Rosa Brooks, LA Times, January 12, 2007
If you think the growing similarity between Iraq and Vietnam is tragic
but inadvertent, you're not being cynical enough. During the first
years of the Iraq war, any resemblance to Vietnam was the result of
the Bush administration's disastrous miscalculations. But today, the
Iraq war is looking more and more like the Vietnam War because that's
exactly what suits the White House.
Writing on this page Thursday (see below), Jonah Goldberg praised
President Bush for telling Americans that "he will settle for nothing
less than winning" in Iraq. Sure, Goldberg acknowledged, Bush "may be
deluding himself," but at least he's "trying to win." No, he's not.
It's clear that Bush knows perfectly well there's no possibility of
"winning" anymore, so apparently he's seeking in Iraq exactly what
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sought in Vietnam before the 1972
election: a face-saving "decent interval" before the virtually
inevitable collapse of the U.S.-backed government.
By 1971, Nixon and Kissinger understood that "winning" in Vietnam was
no longer in the cards -- so they shifted from trying to win the war
to trying to win the next election. As Nixon put it in March 1971: "We
can't have [the South Vietnamese] knocked over brutally ... "
Kissinger finished the thought " ... before the election." So Nixon
and Kissinger pushed the South Vietnamese to "stand on their own,"
promising we'd support them if necessary. But at the same time,
Kissinger assured the North Vietnamese -- through China -- that the
U.S. wouldn't intervene to prevent a North Vietnamese victory -- as
long as that victory didn't come with embarrassing speed.
As historian Jeffrey Kimball has documented, Kissinger's talking
points for his first meeting with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai on the
topic of Vietnam included a promise that the US would withdraw all
troops and "leave the political evolution of Vietnam to the
Vietnamese." The US would "let objective realities" -- North
Vietnamese military superiority -- "shape the political future." In
the margins of his briefing book, Kissinger scrawled a handwritten
elaboration for Chou: "We want a decent interval. You have our
assurance."
The "decent interval" strategy worked. By declaring that "peace was at
hand," Kissinger took the wind out of antiwar Democrat George
McGovern's sails, and Nixon won reelection. And though Nixon himself
later fell to the Watergate scandal, the Republican Party successfully
used the "decent interval" to cast the Democratic Party in the role of
spoiler.
In December 1974, tired of hemorrhaging funds to prop up the failing
South Vietnamese government, the Democrat-controlled Congress finally
pulled the plug on further US financial support. The following April,
Saigon fell, just as Kissinger and Nixon had privately predicted. But
enough time had elapsed for Republicans to pin the blame on South
Vietnamese missteps and, most important, on the perfidy of the
Democratic Party.
In the end, the Vietnam War was a terrible tragedy for the both the US
and the Vietnamese -- but it was a great success for the Republican
Party. Nixon and Kissinger's "decent interval" created the myth of the
Democratic Party as weak and anti-military and helped keep the White
House in Republican hands for all but 12 of the last 30 years.
Bush's "surge" is the "decent interval" redux. It's too little, too
late, and it relies on the Iraqis to do what we know full well they
can't do. There is no realistic likelihood that it will lead to an
enduring solution in Iraq. But it may well provide the decent interval
the GOP needs if it is to survive beyond the 2008 elections.
The surge makes Bush look, as Goldberg suggests, like he really wants
to win, even as he refuses to take the necessary and honest steps to
mitigate the terrible damage we've already done. The surge buys time
-- and meanwhile, the Democratic Party is placed in the same untenable
position it was in during the last stages of the Vietnam War.
If it backs Bush's feckless plan, it loses credibility with the
voters, who hate the war. But if it opposes the escalation, it will be
attacked for undermining the military. Ann Coulter offered a preview
last week: "Democrats want to cut and run as fast as possible from
Iraq, betraying the Iraqis who supported us and rewarding our enemies
-- exactly as they did to the South Vietnamese."
The Democrats need to break out of the script the White House has
written for them and remind Americans that the war in Iraq is a
dangerous distraction from other pressing threats to US security, such
as nuclear proliferation and the rise of militant Islam worldwide.
They need to emphasize that withdrawal from Iraq isn't about "defeat"
-- it's about shifting our troops, our money and our energy to the
real challenges that the Bush administration is ignoring or exacerbating.
At this point, the Republicans win by losing in Iraq -- as long as
they can blame the loss on the Democrats. And unless they find a way
to refuse to play the game, the Democrats will just lose."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-brooks12jan12,0,62141.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Frank Luntz Wartime Linguistics: No one wins the war of words after
the president's speech Wednesday night
"Not since the frigid days of the Cold War have so many people parsed
the lexicon of a world leader. Americans tuned in Wednesday night to
hear the president's plan for a "new way forward" in Iraq. We also
tuned in to be convinced and reassured that Pres. Bush was the right
man to execute that plan.
The speech was a clear attempt to draw a distinct line between the
past and the future. The president addressed head-on the most common
attacks on him and his administration, countering "inflexible,"
"unrealistic" and "incompetent" -- 3 words pollsters like myself have
heard from an angry electorate for more than a year -- with "adjust"
and "change," "scrutiny," "responsibility" and, again and again, "our
new strategy." Speaking from the White House library, a different
setting befitting a different strategy, the president attempted to
make the case that things in Iraq were going to be different from now on.
The problem is, for most Americans it is too little and too late."
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-luntz12jan12,0,69016.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
Jonah Goldberg At Least Bush wants to win: Bush sticks to his goal of
winning in Iraq. The Democrats are just stuck
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-goldberg11jan11,0,6981418.column?coll=la-opinion-center
James Ridgeway thinks there is a lingering smell of Kissinger in
Bush's New Way Forward speech. Quoting historian Gareth Porter, he
writes "although he knows very little about how to deal with Sunnis
and Shi'ites, Kissinger does know how to convey to the public the
illusion of victory, even though the US position in the war is
actually weak and unstable."
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2007/01/3231_reaction_to_bus.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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