Throwing old meat to the NeoConivores

August 25th, 2007

Dubby’s throwing a barbecue bash for his cousins, the Ditto Heads. Turns out this whole delusional flap about Vietnam — a topic Bush has been careful NOT to mention for years — is desperate bait to draw in the remaining NeoCon’s, and the down-wind Rambo-esque among us, propping up the old “we could have won it” debate by using our current occupation of a Muslim country as a chance to capture lost glory!

That’ll play big in the South, anyhow — the Rebs still think the Yanks are upstarts they could have whipped eventually; and the Iraqi’s aren’t the right color to count for much with the Guts and Glory crowd, anyhow. To them, the “gooks” are easily replaced with the “towels”; “Charlie” has become “Hadji” … pass my rifle. I’m sure there are Southerner’s that see the folly of this argument — but the “Dixie” thing, where time-honored notions of race and religion, and old Civil War victimization tapes, plays in a perpetual loop to color the South’s version of “exceptionalism.”

Well — wouldn’t be the first time a nation chose war because it’s “feelings got hurt,” like Saddam hurt Dubby’s. I’d like to think it might be the LAST. Old scores … tit/tat … us/them.

Yet for the moment, and even as the preponderance of news from Iraq is grim, nothing changes but the rhetoric Dubby uses to stir the pot. Sunni’s AND Shiia’s are running from secular violence, relocating, now, by the millions, and old diverse neighborhoods have become, as said one Iraqi woman, “a city of ghosts.”

Banner headlines tell us that GOP Big Dog and elder statesman John Warner wants the troops to begin drawing down by Christmas, and advising …

wait for it …

“I say to the President, respectfully, pick whatever number you wish. You do not want to lose the momentum. But certainly, in the 160,000 plus - say 5,000 - could begin to redeploy and be home to their families and loved ones no later than Christmas of this year.”

5,000 — coincidentally, the number that would probably have to rotate out anyhow, with replacements nowhere in sight. The Army has refused to consider further “extensions” for their exhausted troops, and a new report indicates that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Peter Pace is expected to tell President Bush to cut the US footprint in Iraq next year by almost half, according to the LA Times [he's since retracted.] Oh sure, that would work — Bush takes direction so well! He’s not about to let military leaders spoil his picnic!

So — step right up and fill yer plate, cousin. Sadly, our menu selection at Bush’s shindig will be same-old, same-old — from the History Repeats column, we’ll get a big helping of “Guts and Glory Redux,” along with a piping hot side of hubris and hegemony, served bloody. America will pick up the tab for all this even though their wants and wishes are turning slowly over the coals [along with Mr. Maliki, hog-tied to the spit] — while on the burner, Iraq will continue to boil right down to the bone. And at Dub’s little downhome jamboree, don’t forget to visit the thin and tattered reputation of the nation, which is being displayed, gutted on a platter, with an apple in its mouth.

A few “Vietrac” reads for you. If you’re cherry picking articles, be sure to read the last one by blogger, Baratunde Thurston — and don’t miss Jon Stewart’s video, first.

Jude

Magical History Tour
Jon Stewart - Comedy Central

Here are some quotes from Froomkin, at the Washington Post:

Rejected By Historians

Bush argued that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Southeast Asia three decades ago resulted in widespread death and suffering — just as it would in Iraq. Historians and analysts were quick to refute this Vietnam revisionism.

As Stockman and Bender write in the Globe, political analysts and historians are agog.

“‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said Allan Lichtman, an American University historian, adding that far more Vietnamese died during the war than in the aftermath of the US withdrawal. Lichtman said the rise of the Khmer Rouge, a brutal pro-communist regime, could as easily be attributed to American interference in that country.

“The president’s portrayal of the conflict ‘is not revisionist history. It is fantasy history,’ Lichtman said.

“Melvin Laird, secretary of defense under President Nixon from 1969 to 1973, said Bush is drawing the wrong lessons from history.

“‘I don’t think what happened in Cambodia after the war has anything to do with Iraq,’ Laird said. ‘Is he saying we should have invaded Cambodia?

That’s what we would have had to do, and we would have never done that. I don’t see how he draws the parallel.’

“Other historians said Bush bypassed the fact that, after the painful US withdrawal was completed in April 1975, Vietnam stabilized and developed into an economically thriving country that is now a friend of the United States.”

Michael Tackett writes in the Chicago Tribune that Bush’s remarks “invited stinging criticism from historians and military analysts who said the analogies evidenced scant understanding of those conflicts’ true lessons….

“‘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.’…

“Cordesman noted that human tragedies similar to those that occurred in the aftermath of U.S. involvement in Vietnam already have taken place in Iraq.

“‘We are already talking about a country where the impact of our invasion has driven 2 million people out of the country, will likely drive out 2 million more, has reduced 8 million people to dire poverty, has killed 100,000 people and wounded 100,000 more,’ he said.
‘One sits sort of in awe at the lack of historical comparability.’

“It also struck some historians as odd that the president would try to use a divisive issue like Vietnam to rally the nation behind his policy in Iraq.

‘If we get into a Vietnam argument, the country is divided, but if you are going to try sell this concept that the blood is on the American people’s hands because we left and were weak-kneed in Asia, that is a very tenuous and inane historical argument,’ said historian Douglas Brinkley.”

The Associated Press quotes more reaction from experts:

“The speech was an act of desperation to scare the American people into staying the course in Iraq. He’s distorted the facts, painting all of the people in Iraq as being on the same side which is simply not the case. Iraq is a religious civil war.” — Lawrence Korb, assistant defense secretary under President Reagan and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington.

“Bush is cherry-picking history to support his case for staying the course. What I learned in Vietnam is that U.S. forces could not conduct a counterinsurgency operation. The longer we stay there, the worse it’s going to get.”

– Ret. Army Brig. Gen. John Johns, a counterinsurgency expert who served in Vietnam.

“The president emphasized the violence in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early. It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The longer you stay the worse it gets.”

– Steven Simon, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Opinion Watch

The New York Times editorial board writes:

“The only lesson he found in the nation’s last foreign quagmire of a war was that it ended too quickly.”

The Los Angeles Times editorial board writes:

“It’s true that millions of Iraqi civilians have already paid a terrible price and may suffer even more as fighting may well worsen after a U.S. withdrawal — whenever that occurs.

But it seems equally clear that the civil war cannot be suppressed indefinitely unless the U.S. plans to occupy the country for decades.

Killing fields? Iraq’s already got them: A dozen or two corpses are found dumped in the streets each morning, and bombs go off daily. Boat people? Two million Iraqis have already fled the country, and perhaps 50,000 more leave each month. Could it get worse? Absolutely. But can we stop it?”

Here’s David Gergen’s reaction to the speech on CNN:

“He’s tried all along to say this is not Vietnam. By invoking Vietnam he raised the automatic question, well, if you’ve learned so much from history, Mr. President, how did you ever get us involved in another quagmire? Why didn’t you learn up front about the perils of Vietnam and what we faced there? …

“But here’s the other point, that if you look at Vietnam today, you have to say that Vietnam at the end, after 30 years, has actually become quite a driving country. It’s a very strong economy. So there are those who say, yes, when we pull back there were bloodbaths in the immediate aftermath, but after that the Vietnamese started putting their country together. Is that not what we want Iraq to do over the long term? …

“[And] the other issue and why it’s dangerous territory for him to go into Vietnam and the Vietnam analogy is reason we lost Vietnam in part was because we had no strategy. And the problem we’ve got now in Iraq, what is the strategy for victory? If the strategy for victory is let our troops give the Maliki government enough time to get everything solved, and the Maliki government is going nowhere, as everybody now admits, you know, what strategy are we facing? What strategy do we have to win in Iraq? It’s not clear we have a winning strategy in Iraq. And that’s what cost us Vietnam, and that’s why we eventually withdrew under humiliating circumstances.”

Here’s Democratic strategist Paul Begala on CNN:

“He’s saying, essentially, that 58,000 dead in Vietnam weren’t quite enough, that maybe we should have twice as big a tragic memorial on the Mall.

“And who’s saying it? A man who chose not to serve, took steps, used family friends to get out of serving in Vietnam, didn’t even show up for his own Guard duty, so that better, braver men could fight that war. He stood before those better, braver men today a coward in the company of heroes.”

Sen. John Kerry released this statement:

“Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars. Half of the soldiers whose names are on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after the politicians knew our strategy would not work. …

“As in Vietnam, we engaged militarily in Iraq based on official deception. As in Vietnam, more American soldiers are being sent to fight and die in a civil war we can’t stop and an insurgency we can’t bomb into submission. If the President wants to heed the lessons of Vietnam, he should change course and change course now.”

++

The Problem Isn’t Mr. Maliki
New York Times editorial
August 24, 2007

Blaming the prime minister of Iraq, rather than the president of the United States, for the spectacular failure of American policy, is cynical politics, pure and simple. It is neither fair nor helpful in figuring out how to end America’s biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has been catastrophic for Iraq ever since he took over from the equally disastrous Ibrahim al-Jaafari more than a year ago. America helped engineer Mr. Jaafari’s removal, only to get Mr. Maliki. That tells you something important about whether this is more than a matter of personalities. Mr. Jaafari, as it happens, was Iraq’s first democratically chosen leader under the American-sponsored constitution.

Continuing in the Jaafari tradition, Mr. Maliki’s government has fashioned Iraqi security forces into an instrument of Shiite domination and revenge, trying to steer American troops away from Shiite militia strongholds and leaving Sunni Arab civilians unprotected from sectarian terrorism. His government’s deep sectarian urges have also been evident in the continuing failure to enact legislation to fairly share oil revenues and the persistence of rules that bar much of the Sunni middle class from professional employment.

Sectarian fracturing even extends to the electricity grid, where armed groups have seized control of key switching stations and refused to share power with Baghdad and other provinces.The problem is not Mr. Maliki’s narrow-mindedness or incompetence. He is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy.

That distinction is enormously significant, since President Bush’s current troop buildup is supposed to buy, at the cost of American lives, a period of relative calm for Iraqi politicians to bring about national reconciliation. How much calm it has brought is the subject of debate. But just about everyone in Washington now agrees that Mr. Maliki has made little effort to advance national unity.

The most recent intelligence report on Iraq, released yesterday, concludes that Mr. Maliki’s government is unable to govern and will become “more precarious” over the next six months to a year.That is why there can be no serious argument for buying still more time at the cost of still more American lives and an even greater cost for Iraqis. A report by an Iraqi correspondent for The Times earlier this week described the deadly sectarian hatreds that have torn apart life in his home province, Diyala, which is almost equally divided between Sunnis and Shiites.

The same day, an Op-Ed article by seven American soldiers serving in Iraq underscored the extent to which American troops have worn out their welcome among Iraqis as social and economic conditions have deteriorated and rampant lawlessness has destroyed the most basic sense of personal security.

When it comes to fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq, Washington and Baghdad are often at cross-purposes. In the western province of Al Anbar, the American military has registered some gains by enlisting local Iraqi Sunnis to fight against foreign-led Al Qaeda formations. That strategy depends on the sense of Iraqi nationhood among local Sunnis. But the Maliki government prefers to concentrate on fortifying Shiite political power and exploiting the immense oil reserves of southeast Iraq. It is hard to imagine any Shiite government acting very differently.

Washington’s failure to face these unpleasant realities opens the door to strange and dangerous fantasies, like Mr. Bush’s surreal take on the Vietnam war.

The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.

The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.

If Mr. Bush, whose decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre, took the time to study the real lessons of Vietnam, he would not be so eager to lead America still deeper into the 21st century quagmire he has created in Iraq. Following his path will not rectify the mistakes of Vietnam, it will simply repeat them. ++

Shameless: Bush’s Bogus History Lesson
Thomas de Zengotita, HuffPo
August 23, 2007

In today’s NY Times Thom Shanker summarizes the distortion of history that was Bush’s speech to the VFW on Wednesday. After years of refusing comparisons of Iraq with Vietnam, Bush is now flogging that comparison to veterans in yet another effort to manipulate their native patriotism. He wants them to support his last ditch effort to prove he was right after all by shoveling more of their children into cannon fodder. All he cares about is his image in history and he will do and say anything to rescue it if he can.

Shanker rightly highlights the ludicrous Bush claim that the Khmer Rouge slaughter in Cambodia was a consequence of American withdrawal from Vietnam when in fact it was the American invasion that inspired the formation of that insane gang in the first place.

But Shanker’s focus on specifics in Bush’s speech led him away from what we were told was America’s cause in Vietnam at the time. They said we had to win because if we failed communists would take over Indonesia and the Philippines and who knew what after that. Maybe Hawaii. That was what they said. I was there. I remember.

In fact, when we finally withdrew, no such thing happened. What happened instead was that the inherent Sino-Soviet split that our invasion of Vietnam had artificially suppressed finally opened up. What happened was that communist China evolved into the bizarre hybrid of tyranny and capitalism we know today and the Soviet Union went into self-inflicted collapse.

The whole justification for the Vietnam war turned out to be paranoid bullshit.

But what is most outrageous is the way Bush is still willing to take advantage of the historical ignorance of devoted Americans–after all the damage he has done. He has no shame at all. His cynicism and selfishness are unforgivable. ++

Iraq is to Vietnam as Dubya is to WTF!?!?
Baratunde Thurston
August 24, 2007

Just as effective democracy assumes and requires the consent of the governed, so does an effective analogy assume and require a common set of beliefs and experiences among its intended audience. This week, George W. Bush finally made the analogous connection he has so vehemently avoided between Iraq and Vietnam. But, as he has done with Biblical interpretation and the English language, the boy has badly mangled the meaning.

On August 22, Bush used his speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars to yet again to “reframe” the Iraq debate. How long can you “reframe” something before you realize that the problem is your crappy art and not the choice of a speckled mahogany vs. fluted sterling silver enclosure? Answer: at least four years.

After rehashing freedom-loving, fascist-hating arguments previously applied to American mid-century intervention in Europe, Shrubya used Microsoft Word’s search-and-replace feature to tell the story with Asians. That’s when he broke out the surprise Vietnam analogy.

However, it was neither the well-understood Vietnam-as-quagmire nor the equally-applicable Vietnam-as-conflict-he-avoided that the president relied upon. No, Bush rested his latest justification on Vietnam-as-lost-because-we-didn’t -stay-long-enough. Yeah, that was just the problem. Think about it. Had we stayed longer, we could have killed every last person in Vietnam and won the damn thing, but those perpetual back-stabbers in Washington again failed to support the troops.

Bush’s strategery in this case, as with global warming, evolution and other facts, depends on creating doubt. He said things like:

1. “Now, I know some people doubt the universal appeal of liberty, or worry that the Middle East isn’t ready for it.”

2. “Others believe that America’s presence is destabilizing, and that if the United States would just leave a place like Iraq those who kill our troops or target civilians would no longer threaten us.”

3. “Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility, but the terrorists see things differently.”

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

No, there isn’t. This is a complex literary device known as “bullshit,” which is employed all too often by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I, too, can invoke the tree hugging, ape-descending, freedom-hating “some” and “others” to create a “legitimate” debate where none legitimately exists. Watch me work my magic:

1. Some can argue that babies come from a magical stork that shoves the fetus into a woman’s body moments before birth then teleports back to its home in the trash can where Oscar the Grouch lives.

2. Others believe that babies are always inside of women, remote controlling them like that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles villain, Krang, the talking, fluid-dripping, pink brain that installed himself Shredder’s abdomen in order to defeat our turtle heroes.

3. There is a legitimate debate about how a woman becomes pregnant.

For Bush to sell the Iraq war by using America’s most shameful military expedition of the 20th century shows just how desperate he is. He’s not just drinking the Kool-Aid, he’s freebasing the powder. ++

“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