I was curious to examine the speech George W. Bush gave to the Veterans
of Foreign War convention last week since it compared Iraq with Vietnam.
Three years ago I gave an interview to BBC in Ireland on exactly the
same question. While there are obvious differences between the NLF and
the decentralized and often nihilistic Iraqi insurgency, I hoped that
the occupation of Iraq would end the same way, with Americans dangling
from helicopters flying out of the Green Zone.
The speech itself is remarkable for literary references that seem
utterly remote from George W. Bush’s experience, including one made to
the radical journalist I.F. Stone who published a newsweekly throughout
the 50s and 60s that I subscribed to. Bush took exception to Stone’s
“Hidden History of the Korean War.”
After the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel in 1950,
President Harry Truman came to the defense of the South — and found
himself attacked from all sides. From the left, I.F. Stone wrote a book
suggesting that the South Koreans were the real aggressors and that we
had entered the war on a false pretext.
Bush also singled out Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” a novel that
was set in Vietnam in the 1950s and that in its own way was critical of
American colonialism. This is another book that I have read and which
led me to the conclusions at odds with Bush, who referred to it in the
following terms:
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument
gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled
out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people…The world
would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.
My first reaction to these references was to assume that Bush was simply
reading a speech written by one of his aides, since I doubt that his
reads much outside of the Washington Times and Tom Clancy novels. I
simply can’t imagine George W. Bush ever opening up I.F. Stone’s history
of the Korean War. But I can imagine somebody like Christopher Hitchens,
David Horowitz or Paul Berman writing such a speech. These ideological
converts to American imperialism would have first-hand experience with
I.F. Stone or Graham Greene, who were required reading for radical
intellectuals in the 1960s.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/08/25/george-w-bushs-history-lesson-to-the-vfw/
- [PEN-L] George W. Bush's history lesson to the VFW Louis Proyect
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