Iraq — the literary thesis

August 23rd, 2007

Remember when it became clear that Dubby would be a CEO president and delegate authority to “the best people” around? Turned out they weren’t the best — they were just like him, shallow and ill-informed and increasingly delusional … including his speech writers. And — no brainer — with the public starved for intelligent discourse, nobody was in a buying mood with the speech Dubby gave yesterday. The pitch was “we need to stay the course because Iraq is Vietnam” — and we can’t cut ‘n run again, allowing a genocide to follow … and all this trying desperately to establish the NeoCon talking point that any wobble on our part, any protest at home, is “defeatism.” Remarkably Spartan talk from a bunch of old faux-macho chicken-hawks and arm-chair generals, don’t you think? And WHO in their right mind would even MENTION Vietnam to sell “patience” in a war effort? Over the cuckoo’s nest … way over.

As well, the Dubby used a literary reference that has the world scratching their heads — it almost appears that he’s saying that the naive are a tool of God … I dunno, maybe now he fancies himself Joan of Arc. I understand he has a followup speech to capitalize on this first “pre-Petraeus report hard sell” to give in a day or two. Can’t wait to hear that one; perhaps he’ll quote from Don Quixote.

Frankly, dearhearts, the only person on the planet that would swallow this load is Jeff Gannon … and they’d have to pay him.

The last half of the post is a collection of excellent commentary on this prime example of presidential Foot In Mouth disease. The bloggers are in top form. The first portion is newz of the day — insurgents taking the grid and causing blackout in Iraq, an analysis by Ret. Maj. Gen. John Batiste that he couldn’t get published in MSM and a couple of snips from Juan Cole on the Maliki situation and rumors of an American coup to topple the current government.

Oh yeah, and really “bad news” about the Democratic response to the “good news” on the surge buried in the Digby Pol Pot piece. Sigh.

Amazing times!

Jude

Militias Seizing Control of Iraqi Electricity Grid
JAMES GLANZ and STEPHEN FARRELL
August 23, 2007

BAGHDAD, Aug. 22 — Armed groups increasingly control the antiquated switching stations that channel electricity around Iraq, the electricity minister said Wednesday.

That is dividing the national grid into fiefs that, he said, often refuse to share electricity generated locally with Baghdad and other power-starved areas in the center of Iraq.

The development adds to existing electricity problems in Baghdad, which has been struggling to provide power for more than a few hours a day because insurgents regularly blow up the towers that carry power lines into the city.

The government lost the ability to control the grid centrally after the American-led invasion in 2003, when looters destroyed electrical dispatch centers, the minister, Karim Wahid, said in a news briefing attended also by United States military officials.

The briefing had been intended, in part, to highlight successes in the American-financed reconstruction program here.

But it took an unexpected turn when Mr. Wahid, a highly respected technocrat and longtime ministry official, began taking questions from Arab and Western journalists.

Because of the lack of functioning dispatch centers, Mr. Wahid said, ministry officials have been trying to control the flow of electricity from huge power plants in the south, north and west by calling local officials there and ordering them to physically flip switches.

But the officials refuse to follow those orders when the armed groups threaten their lives, he said, and the often isolated stations are abandoned at night and easily manipulated by whatever group controls the area.

This kind of manipulation can cause the entire system to collapse and bring nationwide blackouts, sometimes seriously damaging the generating plants that the United States has paid millions of dollars to repair.

Such a collapse took place just last week, the State Department reported in a recent assessment, which said the provinces’ failure to share electricity resulted in a “massive loss of power” on Aug. 14 at 5 p.m.

It added that “all Baghdad generation and 60 percent of national generation was temporarily lost.” By midnight, half the lost power had been restored, the report said.

With summer temperatures routinely exceeding 110 degrees, and demand soaring for air-conditioners and refrigerators, those blackouts deeply undermine an Iraqi government whose popular support is already weak.

In some cases, Mr. Wahid and other Iraqi officials say, insurgents cut power to the capital as part of their effort to topple the government.

But the officials said it was clear that in other cases, local militias, gangs and even some provincial military and civilian officials held on to the power simply to help their own areas.

With the manual switching system in place, there is little that the central government can do about it, Mr. Wahid said.

“We are working in this primitive way for controlling and distributing electricity,” he said.

Mr. Wahid said the country’s power plants were not designed to supply electricity to specific cities or provinces. “We have a national grid,” he said.

He cited Mosul and Baquba, in the north, and Basra, in the south, as being among the cities refusing to route electricity elsewhere. “This greatly influenced the distribution of power throughout Iraq,” Mr. Wahid complained.

At times the hoarding of power provides cities around power plants with 24 hours of uninterrupted electricity, a luxury that is unheard of in Baghdad, where residents say they generally get two to six hours of power a day.

Mr. Wahid said Baghdad was suffering mainly because the provinces were holding onto the electricity, but he said shortages of fuel and insurgents’ strikes on gas and oil pipelines also contributed to the anemic output in the capital.

Although a refusal by provincial governments to provide their full quotas to Baghdad could easily be seen as greedy when electricity is in such short supply, many citizens near the power plants regard the new reality as only fair; under Saddam Hussein, the capital enjoyed nearly 24 hours a day of power at the expense of the provinces that are now flush with electricity.

Keeping electricity for the provinces, said Mohammed al-Abbasi, a journalist in Hilla, in the south, “is a reaction against the capital, Baghdad, as power was provided to it without any cuts during the dictator’s reign.”

Other Iraqis are just grateful for anything that brings more comfort to their families and neighborhoods.

“We support any step that provides us with power,” said Ahmed Abdul Hussein, an ironsmith in Najaf, in the south.

The precision with which militias control electricity in the provinces became apparent in Basra on May 25 when Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army carried out a sustained attack against a small British-Iraqi base in the city center, and turned that control to tactical military advantage.

“The lights in the city were going on and off all over,” said Cpl. Daniel Jennings, 26, one of the British defenders who fought off the attack.

“They were really controlling the whole area, turning the lights on and off at will. They would shut down one area of the city, turn it dark, attack us from there, and then switch off another one and come at us from that direction.

“What they did was very well planned.”

The electricity briefing began with Brig. Gen. Michael J. Walsh, commanding general of the Gulf Region Division of the Army Corps of Engineers, saying the United States had finished more than 80 percent of the projects it planned for rehabilitating the Iraqi grid.

He said that even though Baghdad now got no power from either the south or north, about a third of its electricity was still supplied by the national grid.

But General Walsh said he knew people in Baghdad were far from satisfied.

“I understand people’s impatience,” he said. “Certainly when you flip the light switch and nothing happens, you can get angry.” ++

Damien Cave contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Basra, Najaf, Hilla and Karbala.

Gen. Batiste’s Op-Ed That The WSJ And The Washington Times Didn’t Want You To See
Ret. Maj. Gen. John Batiste, OpEdNews

Our guest blogger is Ret. Maj. Gen. John Batiste, the former Commanding General of 1st Infantry Division.

For my first post here at ThinkProgress, I thought I would share something a little different from what you usually read here — something from a conservative perspective. I think this is especially fitting, given the new poll of foreign policy experts by Foreign Policy Magazine and the Center for American Progress, which shows 64 percent of conservative analysts feel the so-called “surge” in Iraq is having no impact, or a negative effect.

The following is an op-ed I wrote two weeks ago, which neither the Wall Street Journal or Washington Times wanted to consider, so I’m posting it here…

Over a year and a half ago, I made a gut-wrenching decision to leave the Army in order to speak out about the war in Iraq. I turned my back on over 31 years of service and what by all accounts would have been a great career. I realized that I was in a unique position to speak out on behalf of Soldiers and their families. I had a moral obligation and duty to do so. My family and I left the only life we knew and entered the political debate. As a two-time combat veteran, I understand the value of thorough planning and deliberate execution. I understand what it takes to win. As a life-long Republican, I am prepared to carry on with the debate for as long as necessary. I have been speaking out for the past 17 months and there is no turning back.

As a conservative, I am all for a strong military and setting the conditions for success. America goes to war to win. I am not anti-war and am committed to winning the struggle against world-wide Islamic extremism. But, I am outraged that elected officials of my own party do not comprehend the predicament we are in with a strategy in the Middle East that lacks focus and is all but relying on the military to solve the diplomatic, political, and economic Rubik’s Cube that defines Iraq. Our dysfunctional interagency process in Washington DC lacks leadership and direction. Many conservatives in Congress have allowed the charade to go on for too long.

It is disappointing that so many elected representatives of my party continue to blindly support the administration rather than doing what is in the best interests of our country. Traditionally, my party has maintained a conservative view on questions regarding our Armed Forces. For example, we commit our military only when absolutely necessary. In the same way conservatives have always argued against government excess in social programs, the lives our young men and women in uniform, our most precious resource, are not to be used on wars of choice or for nation building. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz taught us that wars are to be fought only as a last resort–the extension of politics by other means.

These principles are apparently not understood by many of the Republicans in our Congress. Besides the fact that many conservatives allowed President Bush to jump head-first into a war of choice, the bullheadedness of Congressional Republicans who argue for staying the course runs contrary to conservative values. Many politicians of my party continue to argue that we must liberally use up whatever our military has left. Bottom line, the Republican Congress of the last six years abrogated its Constitutional duty and share in the responsibility for the debacle in Iraq.

Our all-volunteer military cannot continue the current cycle of deployments for much longer. America’s national strategy in Iraq is akin to a four legged stool with legs representing diplomacy, political reconciliation, economic recovery, and the military. The glue holding it all together must be the mobilization of the United States in support of the incredibly important effort to defeat world-wide Islamic extremism. The only leg on the stool of any consequence is the military–it is solid titanium and high performing, the best in the world. After almost six years since September 11, our country is not mobilized behind this important work and the diplomatic, political, and economic legs are not focused and lack leadership. Most Americans now appreciate that the military alone cannot solve the problem in Iraq. In this situation, the stool will surely collapse.

Our military and our treasury are not unlimited resources. The war in Iraq is breaking our fine Army and Marine Corps, and we are perilously close to doing damage that will take more than a decade to fix. Our brigades and divisions in Iraq today are at near full strength because the rest of the force has been gutted. We cannot place America in a position of weakness as it just begins its long war against world-wide Islamic extremism. The Republican administration is bleeding our national treasure in blood and dollars with little to show for it.

The high price we are paying might be worth it if Iraq’s many factions were making meaningful progress to achieve political reconciliation. But, after more than four years, Iraqis are no closer to settling their differences and the sitting Shia government is ineffective. With insufficient coalition and Iraqi security forces on the ground, the myth of Sisyphus is playing out over and over again. The Iraqi Parliament goes on vacation instead of working, and every few months, it seems, another Iraqi political faction walks out of the process. To me, continuing to expend money and American lives on a nation that shows little drive to solve its own problems is the foreign policy equivalent of a welfare queen.

The only way to stabilize Iraq and allow our military to rearm and refit for the long fight ahead is to begin a responsible and deliberate redeployment from Iraq and replace the troops with far less expensive and much more effective resources–those of diplomacy and the critical work of political reconciliation and economic recovery. In other words, when it comes to Iraq, it’s time for conservatives to once again be conservative.

++

Military Coup Planned for Iraq?
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
8/23/07

A rumor is circulating among well-connected and formerly high-level Iraqi bureaucrats in exile in places like Damascus that a military coup is being prepared for Iraq. I received the following from a reliable, knowledgeable contact. There is no certitude that this plan can or will be implemented. That it is being discussed at high levels seems highly likely.

“There is serious talk of a military commission (majlis `askari) to take over the government. The parties would be banned from holding positions, and all the ministers would be technocrats, so to speak. . . [The writer indicates that attempts have been made to recruit cabinet members from the ranks of expatriate technocrats.]

The six-member board or commission would be composed on non-political former military personnel who are presently not part of the government OR the military establishment, such as it is in Iraq at the moment. It is said that the Americans are supporting this behind the scenes.

The plan includes a two-year period during which political parties would not be permitted to be part of the government, but instead would prepare and strengthen the parties for an election which would not have lists, but real people running for real seats. The two year period would be designed to take control of security and restore infrastructure.

…[I]t is another [desperate plan], but one which many many Iraqis will support, since they are sick of their country being pulled apart by the “imports” - Maliki, Allawi, Jaafari et al. The military group is composed of internals, people who have the goal of securing the country even at the risk of no democracy, so they say. “

Hillary develops Foot in Mouth Disease on Dumping al-Maliki

PM Nuri al-Maliki responded to Senator Carl Levin’s (D-Michigan) call for him to be unseated, and Bush’s failure to support him on Tuesday by unwisely getting hot under the collar and saying he can find other friends in the world to support his endeavor. I predicted that Levin’s unwise and inappropriate comment (in a conference call with Tel Aviv!– Americans have no clue about Middle Eastern politics) would elicit an angry response. Levin managed to make it look as though he were ordered by the Israeli government to see al-Maliki gotten rid of because he was making economic deals with Syria (thus strengthening the latter). I underline that such an interpretation is unfounded, but that is how many in the region see it. Levin is usually sure-footed and careful on Middle East issues, including especially Iraq, so I can’t understand why he wants to appoint himself secretary of state all of a sudden.

The serial episodes of unwisdom are lengthening and feeding on one another. Now Hillary Clinton has urgedthat al-Maliki be unseated.

But as Farah Stockman of the Boston Globe and Damien Cave of the NYT point out, it may not be easy for parliament to dump al-Maliki. And, Senator Clinton should be more careful about this sort of thing. Here’s a scenario: al-Maliki survives and is PM in January 2009, and Hillary is inaugurated as US president. She now has to deal with him in arranging for an orderly withdrawal of US troops. She needs him, depends on his sway with Shiite militias to have them avoid harassing our troops on their way through the Shiite south to Kuwait. And he should put himself out to help her at that point. . . why?

Of course, al-Maliki’s survival is a little unlikely (see above), but it is not out of the bounds of the possible and wisdom would dictate taking that possibility into account.

Presidential candidates should not box themselves in on foreign policy issues by making categorical statements of this sort. Hillary Clinton has to stop talking like a junior senator and start thinking like a president if she wants to succeed abroad. ++

The Analogy Quagmire
Dan Froomkin, Washington Post
Wednesday 22 August 2007

President Bush boldly entered risky rhetorical territory this morning, likening the war in Iraq to Vietnam.

It’s an analogy Bush typically avoids, given how strongly Vietnam is associated in the national consciousness with the concept of quagmire - and with its lesson about the limits of American military power.

But Bush today tried to turn the Vietnam analogy on its head, arguing that the U.S. withdrawal led to disaster there and emboldened American enemies around the globe. He even went so far as to argue that present-day terrorists like Osama bin Laden are inspired by the turning of American public opinion against the war in Vietnam.

The White House was so proud of this speech that Bush’s new counselor, Ed Gillespie, took the unusual step of releasing extensive excerpts last night. Among them:

“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’

“There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle - al-Qaeda. In an interview with a Pakistani paper after the 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden declared that ‘the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. They must do the same today.’ . . . . Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility - but the terrorists see things differently.”

Bush’s speech was a big hit at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City. But it’s hard to imagine that it will go over nearly as well with a wider audience - not to mention with historians.

That’s because the obvious lesson of Vietnam is not that leaving a quagmire leads to disaster, but that staying only makes things worse. (And oh yes: that we shouldn’t get into them in the first place.)

The previews of today’s speech allowed reporters and bloggers to get a head start on putting Bush’s remarks in context.

James Gerstenzang and Maura Reynolds write in the Los Angeles Times:

“Historian Robert Dallek, who has written about the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam, accused Bush of twisting history. ‘It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president,’ he said in a telephone interview.

“‘We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn’t work our will,’ he said.

‘What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,’ he continued. ‘We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.’”

Gerstenzang and Reynolds also spoke to Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who “criticized Bush’s speech, saying the president ‘continues to play the American people for fools.’

“‘The only relevant analogy of Vietnam to Iraq is this: In Iraq, just as we did in Vietnam, we are clinging to a central government that does not and will not enjoy the support of the people,’ he said.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid issued a statement:

“President Bush’s attempt to compare the war in Iraq to past military conflicts in East Asia ignores the fundamental difference between the two. Our nation was misled by the Bush Administration in an effort to gain support for the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, leading to one of the worst foreign policy blunders in our history. While the President continues to stay-the-course with his failed strategy in Iraq, paid for by the taxpayers, American lives are being lost and there is still no political solution within the Iraqi government. It is time to change direction in Iraq, and Congress will again work to do so in the fall.”

David Jackson and Matt Kelley write in USA Today:

“Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow said Bush is reaching for historical analogies that don’t track. ‘Vietnam was not a bunch of sectarian groups fighting each other,’ as in Iraq, Karnow said. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge toppled a U.S.-backed government.

“‘Does he think we should have stayed in Vietnam?’ Karnow asked.”

Talking Points memo blogger Josh Marshall asks:

“[I]sn’t this quite possibly the worst argument for his Iraq policy? . . .

“[V]irtually none of the predicted negative repercussions of our departure from Vietnam ever came to pass.

“Asia didn’t go Communist. Our Asian allies didn’t abandon us. Rather, the Vietnamese began to fall out with her Communist allies. With the Cold War over, in strategic terms at least, it’s almost hard to remember what the whole fight was about. If anything, the clearest lesson of Vietnam would seem to be that there can be a vast hue and cry about the catastrophic effects of disengagement from a failed policy and it can turn out that none of them are true.”

After one of the few other times Bush used a Vietnam analogy - during his official visit to Vietnam last November - Robert Scheer wrote in The Nation:

“The lesson of Vietnam is not to keep pouring lives and treasure down a dark and poisonous well, but to patiently use a pragmatic mix of diplomacy and trade with even our ideological competitors.

“The United States dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than it unloaded on all of Europe in World War II, only hardening Vietnamese nationalist resolve. Hundreds of thousands of troops, massive defoliation of the countryside, ‘free fire zones,’ South Vietnamese allies, bombing the harbors . . . none of it worked. Yet, never admitting that our blundering military presence fueled the native nationalist militancy we supposedly sought to eradicate, three US Presidents - two of them Democrats - lied themselves into believing victory was around some mythical corner.

“While difficult for inveterate hawks to admit, the victory for normalcy in Vietnam, celebrated by Bush last week, came about not despite the US withdrawal but because of it.”

++

Historians Question Bush’s Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq
Thom Shanker, The New York Times
Thursday 23 August 2007

Washingtion - The American withdrawal from Vietnam is widely remembered as an ignominious end to a misguided war - but one with few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.

Now, in urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, President Bush is challenging that historical memory.

In reminding Americans that the pullout in 1975 was followed by years of bloody upheaval in Southeast Asia, Mr. Bush argued in a speech on Wednesday that Vietnam’s lessons provide a reason for persevering in Iraq, rather than for leaving any time soon. Mr. Bush in essence accused his war critics of amnesia over the exodus of Vietnamese “boat people” refugees and the mass killings in Cambodia that upended the lives of millions of people.

President Bush is right on the factual record, according to historians. But many of them also quarreled with his drawing analogies from the causes of that turmoil to predict what might happen in Iraq should the United States withdraw.

“It is undoubtedly true that America’s failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia,” said David C. Hendrickson, a specialist on the history of American foreign policy at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

“But there are a couple of further points that need weighing,” he added. “One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam - this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred.”

The record of death and dislocation after the American withdrawal from Vietnam ranks high among the tragedies of the last century, with an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians, about one-fifth of the population, dying under the rule of Pol Pot, and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese and other Indochinese becoming refugees. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese who were sent to prison camps after the war have ranged widely, from 50,000 to more than 400,000, and some accounts have said that tens of thousands perished, a figure that Mr. Bush cited in his speech, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Mr. Bush did not offer a judgment on what, if anything, might have brought victory in Vietnam or whether the war itself was a mistake. Instead, he sought to underscore the dangers of a hasty withdrawal from Iraq.

But the American drawdown from Vietnam was hardly abrupt, and it lasted much longer than many people remember. The withdrawal actually began in 1968, after the Tet offensive, which was a military defeat for the Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese sponsors. But it also illustrated the vulnerability of the United States and its South Vietnamese allies.

Although American commanders asked for several hundred thousand reinforcements after Tet, President Johnson turned them down. President Nixon began a process of “Vietnamization” in which responsibility for security was gradually handed to local military and police forces - similar to Mr. Bush’s long-term strategy for Iraq today.

American air power was used to help sustain South Vietnam’s struggling government, but by the time of the famous photograph of Americans being lifted off a roof in Saigon in 1975, few American combat forces were left in Vietnam. “It was not a precipitous withdrawal, it was a very deliberate disengagement,” said Andrew J. Bacevich, a platoon leader in Vietnam who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University.

Vietnam today is a unified and stable nation whose Communist government poses little threat to its neighbors and is developing healthy ties with the United States. Mr. Bush visited Vietnam last November; a return visit to the White House this summer by Nguyen Minh Triet was the first visit by a Vietnamese head of state since the war.

“The Vietnam comparison should invite us to think harder about how to minimize the consequences of our military failure,” Mr. Bacevich added. “If one is really concerned about the Iraqi people, and the fate that may be awaiting them as this war winds down, then we ought to get serious about opening our doors, and to welcoming to the United States those Iraqis who have supported us and have put themselves and their families in danger.”

To that end, some members of Congress and human rights groups have urged the Bush administration to drop the limits on Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States.

Mr. Bush also sought to inspire renewed support for his Iraq strategy by recalling the years of national sacrifice during World War II, and the commitment required to rebuild two of history’s most aggressive and lawless adversaries, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, into reliable and responsible allies.

But historians note that Germany and Japan were homogenous nation-states with clear national identities and no internal feuding among factions or sects, in stark contrast to Iraq today.

The comparison of Iraq to Germany and Japan “is fanciful,” said Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He noted that the American and allied militaries had eliminated the governments of Japan and Germany, and any lingering opposition, and assembled occupation forces that were, proportionally, more than three times as large as the current American presence of more than 160,000 troops in Iraq.

“That’s the kind of troop level you need to control the situation,” Mr. Simon said. “The occupation of Germany and Japan lasted for years - and not a single American solider was killed by insurgents.”

Senior American military officers speaking privately also say that the essential elements that brought victory in World War II - a total commitment by the American people and the government, and a staggering economic commitment to rebuild defeated adversaries - do not exist for the Iraq war. The wars in Korea and Vietnam also involved considerable national sacrifice, including tax increases and conscription. ++

The Vietraq War
Harkavy, Village Voice
August 23, 2007

Hell, no, we won’t go.

Speaking to veterans sure not to boo the president, George W. Bush’s handlers have launched a new offensive in the Vietnam War, which has been over for 30 years.

Offensive is right. In essence, if you take a look at our soldiers patrolling in Phuoc Vinh, Vietnam, in 1967-68 and in Iraq’s Diyala River Valley in August 2007, Bush is telling 21st century America: “Phuoc you.” [emphasis added - j]

It’s now the Vietraq War. Forty years ago, we were telling a president, “Hell, no, we won’t go!” Now we have a president telling us, “Hell, no, we won’t go!” Even though Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who really has no choice if he wants to keep his job and his life, is telling us, “Go.”

Over here, we’d better run for cover, because we’re likely to hear this rat-a-tat-tat from Bush for awhile. Dick Cheney’s regime launched this new war Wednesday in Kansas City at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, and Bush’s handlers plan more of the same next week at the American Legion gathering in Reno. As Maura Reynolds and James Gerstenzang reported this morning in the L.A. Times:

Aides said the president felt it was necessary to revamp his message in the weeks before Army Gen. David H. Petraeus delivers a progress report that Congress mandated.

White House counselor Ed Gillespie and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove worked with the president on the speech. There was a sense in the White House that the president’s rhetoric on Iraq, though consistent, was also becoming somewhat repetitive.

“The repetition is necessary and by design,” White House communications director Kevin Sullivan said in an interview, adding that the language is usually fresh to every new audience. “However, the president was aware of wanting to set the table for the upcoming report and the discussion that will follow it in a new way that was both compelling and illustrative. We’ve done this work before, and it was beneficial to the American people.”

Both speeches were planned for veterans groups, guaranteeing that audiences would respond enthusiastically to the president’s calls to support the troops. On Wednesday, VFW members repeatedly interrupted Bush’s speech with applause and standing ovations.

Rove, whose name (as I’ve pointed out) doesn’t rhyme with “dove,” will go hunting for real doves when he leaves the White House at the end of the month. But he’s still on patrol in the West Wing, and we’re his pigeons.

All the propaganda isn’t coming from the White House. We already knew that, but here’s fresh proof. While the excellent McClatchy D.C. Bureau (formerly the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau), headlined its story “Bush Steps up Sales Push to Sustain His Surge in Iraq” (accurately depicting Bush as the regime’s salesman), the L.A. Times story carries the softer headline “Bush Has a New Angle on Iraq Debate” (not really accurate because it’s his handlers’ angle). And the POTUS-pushers didn’t write the L.A. Times’s sub-headline:

In anticipation of progress report, the president is addressing veterans groups and setting up new effort to cast war in historical light.

Even the White House’s Kevin Sullivan didn’t use the adjective “progress.” But newspapers and TV are already calling the upcoming Petraeus report, which will be written by the White House, a “progress report.” Considering the debacle that is Iraq, how about just calling it a “report” and mentioning that it will be written by the White House?

Instead we’ll be inundated in the next couple of weeks — before the report is released on super-jingoistic 9/11 Day — with the words “progress” and “Vietnam.” Those words never did quite fit together when JFK, LBJ, and Nixon used them. ++

D- In 10th Grade Lit
by digby

Holy shit. I didn’t hear the whole speech, just read the excerpts and saw the cable coverage. Bush didn’t really evoke The Quiet American did he? Setting aside the fact that he almost assuredly hasn’t read it, unless he’s admitting that the US involvement in Iraq was a dangerously naive and arrogant undertaking, it wouldn’t exactly bolster his case.

Who’s writing his speeches these days, Jonah Goldberg? ++

Iraq and Vietnam, history in hands of speechwriters
Michael Tackett, The Swamp, Chicago Tribune

President Bush has attempted to drape war policy in Iraq in the lessons of World War II-era Japan and Vietnam as part of a broader argument for continuing the military campaign despite fierce opposition at home and abroad.

But his remarks to a VFW convention in Kansas City, Mo., also has invited stinging criticism from historians and military analysts who said the analogies evidenced scant understanding of those conflicts’ true lessons. What is more, the speech has opened a new vein of attack from Bush’s political opponents, including the man he defeated in 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) a Vietnam veteran who called the president’s words “irresponsible” and “ignorant.”

“This was history written by speechwriters without regard to history,” said military analyst Anthony Cordesman. “And I think most military historians will find it painful … because in basic historical terms the president misstated what happened in Vietnam.”

For more, see the report in today’s Tribune:

Watch an excerpt of President Bush’s address below and read the entire speech [open for video and link.] ++

Why would Bush cite ‘The Quiet American’?
Frank James, The Swamp, Chicago Tribune
August 22, 2007

In his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City today, President Bush summoned up the Alden Pyle CIA agent character of Graham Greene’s classic Vietnam novel “The Quiet American” which is essentially a contemplation on the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

I’m not sure he really wanted to go there or why his speechwriters would take him there.

As Bush said:

In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called “The Quiet American.” It was set in Saigon and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

After America entered the Vietnam War, Graham Greene — the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. Matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people. In 1972, one anti-war senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never heard of?”

Bush seemed to be seizing on Greene’s idea of U.S. naivete on entering the war and trying to turn it around and apply it to those now calling for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

But Greene wrote his book about the way America bumbled into Vietnam, not how it left it.

By reminding people of Greene’s book, Bush was inviting listeners to recall the mistakes his administration made in entering and prosecuting the Iraq War. Did he really want to do that?

Even more astonishing is that Bush’s speechwriters included in the president’s speech a mention of the very fictional character some of the president’s critics have used for years to lambaste him for what they consider a major strategic blunder.

The thinking goes, Bush may have been well-intentioned like Pyle but, also like the Greene character, Bush’s efforts are ultimately doomed.

Writing in Newsweek in November 2005, Christopher Dickey said:

For any of us who lived through the cold war, Bush’s attempts to equate the scattershot writings of Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the challenges posed by Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet empire are just mind-boggling. In his Veteran’s Day address to troops at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania (Murtha’s home state), Bush started four paragraphs with the phrase “like the ideology of communism.” He longs transparently for the challenge of an Evil Empire, like the one his idol Ronald Reagan confronted, whether or not it exists.

This is nuts, but alas, not that unusual in the annals of American policy. Once again, President Bush’s lethally misguided good intentions are reminiscent of Alden Pyle in Graham Greene’s novel “The Quiet American,” about the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam: “He was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined—I learnt that very soon—to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. … When he saw a dead body he couldn’t even see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy.”

Then there’s this pre-war, 2003 interview in Salon with Phillip Noyce, director of the remake of “The Quiet American” who also saw similarities between the very real Bush and the fictional Pyle.

NOYCE: What was the question? I forget. [Laughter] Greene defines, through the caricature that he wrote of Alden Pyle, he defines some aspects of American foreign policy that resulted from all of those factors coalescing. And, in doing so, he answered a lot of questions about the war against the Vietnamese that hadn’t yet been asked. And in many ways, Alden Pyle is alive and well today. And that’s either a mark of Greene’s brilliance, or the fact that some things just never change. I think his thesis has become very important to us, given the current administration. In theory, you’ve got a White House full of Alden Pyles. [Laughter] And that’s scary.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s draw that analogy out a little further.

NOYCE: Well, George Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle! He’s hardly been out of the country, he’s steeped in good intentions, believes he has the answer, is very naive, ultimately not that bright, and extremely dangerous. One only hopes that his advisors like Colin Powell are listened to carefully.

Earlier in the interview, Noyce responded to a question about whether “The Quiet American” was anti-American by calling Pyle a “dunderhead.”

NOYCE: So no, I don’t think it’s anti-American, although at the time the book was written, Greene was accused of being anti-American, really for two reasons: one, Alden Pyle is a bit of a dunderhead. He’s just a complete big bumbling idiot who’s really not aware of any of the implications of what he’s doing. I don’t think that would have been true of a CIA operative at that time. And secondly, we have to remember the context that the book was written in, when Stalinism was still a valid and onerous enemy of America and of freedom everywhere. And a treatise like this might have been considered even by reasonable people to have been anti-American within the context of 1955.

Given all this negative Pyle baggage, why a White House speechwriter would include a reference to Greene and “The Quiet American” is dumbfounding.

Greene doesn’t really help the White House’s argument. Indeed, most people would read Greene’s novel as a refutation of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And why draw attention to a fictional character who has been used to outline Bush’s alleged flaws? ++

Pol Pot R Us
by digby, Hullabaloo

And here I thought it was the liberals who were the blame American firsters.

Mr Bush spoke of the massacres under Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge,”The defence strategy that refused to hand the South Koreans over to a totalitarian neighbour helped raise up an Asian Tiger that is a model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East.”

Mr Bush compared current calls for withdrawal from Iraq with what happened at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

“Many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people,” Mr Bush said. “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.

“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left.

“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” Mr Bush said, mentioning reprisals against US allies in Vietnam, the displacement of Vietnamese refugees and the massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

This is truly amazing. The president of the United States is actually blaming his own country for the Cambodian genocide. Even Normon Podhoretz and his creature Rudy Giuliani haven’t had the nerve to make that argument. Old Norm was adamant that the Vietnam Syndrome had helped turn the US into a bunch of wimps, but he didn’t actually blame the US for Pol Pot.

For the record, as I’m sure everyone knows, Pol Pot’s rise was enabled by the US’s war policies not by its withdrawal and it was the newly minted commies who ended the genocide so Bush is, as usual, talking gibberish.

And while Norm went way back to the 70’s to show how our allegedly feckless policies in the middle east he didn’t go this far:

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — al-Qaeda. In an interview with a Pakistani paper after the 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden declared that ‘the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. They must do the same today.’ . . . . Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility — but the terrorists see things differently.”

Now, Bush is saying that not only are the dirty hippies of today giving comfort to the terrorists the dirty hippies of the past caused terrorism. It all ties together so nicely.

But, you know, as Bush often says, history is for dead people. (Or something like that.) These pomo neocon historians are hard at work rejiggering the narratives all the time, both current and historical. (I’m beginning to think it’s a massive mind-fuck operation done with the express purpose of making us all crazy having to defend the obvious all the time. Perhaps they figure we’ll just give up at some point and submit to their will out of sheer exhaustion.)

I find his latest plea really rich in light of the fact that he also seems to be saying that he wouldn’t exactly stand in anybody’s way if they decided to depose Diem — er Maliki. Both Carl Levin and Bush (and now Clinton, apparently) came out with statements that Maliki is the problem and then Bush backtracks the next day? Come on. I don’t know if this is some kind of crude good cop bad cop or what, but it doesn’t make sense.

As Hilzoy writes:

I think that Levin is absolutely right that the Iraqi government is not working. But this does not begin to imply that the Iraqis would be well advised to oust Maliki, let alone that we should be advising them to oust him. That would follow if Maliki were the reason the Iraqi government was dysfunctional (or: a significant part of the reason.) Suppose, for instance, that most members of the Iraqi parliament were ready to compromise with one another. Deals were ready to be struck, compromises were in hand, but alas! Nouri al-Maliki stood in their way, using his power as Prime Minister to block them all. In that case, it might be a good thing if he were replaced.

On the other hand, suppose the reason the Iraqi government is not functioning is that its various members are not prepared to come to terms with one another and try to resolve the outstanding issues that divide them. Maybe they believe that a civil war is imminent, and that they should concentrate on being in the best position to win it once it starts rather than trying to prevent it; or maybe they are just incapable of putting aside their sectarian and ethnic differences and working for the good of the country. In that case, there would be no reason at all to suppose that replacing Maliki would solve anything. He might or might not be the best person for the job, but that wouldn’t really matter: if no one could make the Iraqi government functional, then the particular characteristics of Nouri al-Maliki are beside the point.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a single indication that Maliki himself is the problem…the Prime Minister could be replaced twenty times over and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. What it would do is cause months of delay while the new Prime Minister tried to put together his government.

The problems with the Iraqi government are immensely complex and almost certainly impossible to solve through some sort of imposition of a a new and American approved leader. I don’t know what in the hell this is about, but I can’t see that it’s going to help anything on the ground in Iraq and the political optics are terrible.

These things never work out the way you think they will. Either somebody miscalculates or we make things worse.

But then the Democrats may be on the verge of the big el-foldo in Iraq anyway so it may all be academic. The Democrats got punk’d again — and now they are spinning like little guinea pigs on a treadmill trying to fix it:

Democratic leaders in Congress had planned to use August recess to raise the heat on Republicans to break with President Bush on the Iraq war. Instead, Democrats have been forced to recalibrate their own message in the face of recent positive signs on the security front, increasingly focusing their criticisms on what those military gains have not achieved reconciliation among Iraq’s diverse political factions.

Right. But now that we all agree that there’s been prah-gress we are going to have to give the surge more time to make more prah-gress FU’s for everyone!

Who could have predicted such a thing would happen?

Frankly, I don’t think it will make any substantive difference anyway. Bush will never agree to a withdrawal and I think even if the congress pulled the funding he’d stubbornly keep them there. Therefore, this Iraq debate is political and mostly about 2008. Rather than recognizing that, the Democrats are behaving purely reflexively to patented GOP threats and propaganda instead of building their argument for withdrawal with strength and commitment. In the process they are running a huge danger of demoralizing their base (and the growing number of people who are willing to give them a chance) by capitulating, if not actively embracing, the policies of the most unpopular president in history. They are playing a very dangerous game. Nobody owes them a vote.

But it’s a great plan for staying in the minority even when the wind is at your back and you are facing a party in steep decline, if that’s what they desire.

Update: I was completely wrong about Norm’s creature Rudy (and I wrote a long post about this just days ago even quoting the exact paragraph. Oy — my memory….)

Anyway, Via Perrspectives in the comments, here’s what Rudy wrote.

“America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South…The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse.”

Bush is learning history from Norman Podhoretz and Rudy Giuliani. Oh jesus. ++

Vietnam By Dummies (Prof. G.W. Bush Lecturing)
Stephen Pizzo, Smirking Chimp
Aug 23 2007

President Bush finally got something right by comparing the US war in Iraq with the disastrous US war in Vietnam. After five years of denying there were any similarities at all, Bush lectured us on the lessons he says we should have learned from that war and apply them to Iraq.

So far so good. Trouble is the lesson Bush suggested we should learn from our failure in Vietnam four decades ago goes something like this:

We cut and ran in Vietnam. We let our allies down. We allowed a rag tag group of insurgents to win against the great American military. And that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in today. Our enemies today, another group of rag tag insurgents called al-Qaeda - have been emboldened by our retreat from Vietnam.

Therefore, Bush posits, we must stay the course in Iraq, no matter how bleak the situation becomes. Because, to do otherwise would be to reinforce our enemy’s belief that the US lacks staying power and has no stomach for taking casualties. That in turn will encourage them to cause trouble throughout the region and to even launch attacks against the American homeland itself… or as Bush claims, if we don’t fight them in Iraq, we’ll have to fight them right here in the US of A.

Of course no well-read (or sane) person would draw such lessons from Vietnam. In fact, had Bush and Congress had heeded the real lessons of Vietnam they would have scoffed at the idea of putting tens of thousands of US combat troops on the ground in the heart of the Middle East.

(Note: Few will also miss the bitter irony of being lectured on “the lessons of Vietnam” by a guy who spent that war hiding out in the Texas Air National Guard, drinking beer and malingering by skipping out on monthly drills. [It was good to be the son of a powerful Texas congressman.])

Those of us who lived through the Vietnam era, or have since studied declassified documents from the Johnson and Nixon administrations, have walked away with much different lessons:

Super-power status is meaningless against a enemy fighting on and for their own land and willing to incur and take unlimited casualties.

Puppet governments set up under foreign occupying forces are viewed by their own people as illegitimate and therefore cannot govern.

The hurdle for an occupying army is very high - they need to win. The hurdle for an indigenous insurgency is much more achievable - they simply need to not lose.

When the vast majority of Americans cease to support a foreign war, that war is lost - period.

Retreat from Vietnam did not result in a “domino effect,” in the region, as threatened.

When we retreated from Vietnam the Viet Cong did not “follow us home.”

Our retreat from Vietnam did not result in permanent estrangement, just the opposite.

The only Vietnamese who “followed us home,” were refugees who have since become among some of the most highly educated and successful American citizens.

George W. Bush learned none of the real lessons of the Vietnam War. Because Bush and his Neo-con co-dependents insulated themselves from the those lessons by soaking their gray matter in the Kool-Aid of denial - that it was the “liberal media” and “liberals in Congress,” that cut the ground from under our troops. In other words, as far as Bush et al are concerned, we didn’t lose in Vietnam, we cut and ran before the job was done. They surely believe to this day that, had we only stuck with it a few more months, surged a few more times, that we would have won. The light was right there they say, at the end of that tunnel — a tunnel that never itself seemed to have not end.

And if you believe that, then I have a war in the Middle East to sell ya.

We’ve gone through so many iterations of the Bush doctrine with Iraq that I’ve lost the thread. But this appears to be a whole new version of the Bush doctrine: Never give up. Never admit defeat no matter how many soldiers are dying each week (especially since none of them are related to you.) Keep fighting…. no matter the cost in treasure or to our nation’s soul. Because, as long as we keep fighting no one can say we lost. No one can say we cut and ran.

It’s not a new idea. In fact it’s just a reworked version of the military doctrine of another George — George Custer. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves