First, it really is time to cut through the obfuscation and double talk that Bush and his cronies put out about the Iraqi fiasco - or to put it in a more earthly way, it is time to cut the crap.
That means understanding that the military has done everything it can with what it has and, with the exception of things like Abu Ghraid, has done them well. Iraq is not a military failure regardless of how much Bush wants it to be a military failure. The failure with Iraq lies with the political/civilian side. Bush ignores that resemblance between Iraq and Vietnam.
Maybe we need to require every presidential candidate to pass a high school history test or maybe even a freshman college history exam.
Maybe we ought to have pressed Bush further on his use of drugs and alcohol. Did they make him as addled as he now seems or did they merely increase some inherent defect?
Once again Bush conflates Iraq with 9/11:
If this story sounds familiar, it is -- except for one thing. The enemy I have just described is not al Qaeda, and the attack is not 9/11, and the empire is not the radical caliphate envisioned by Osama bin Laden. Instead, what I’ve described is the war machine of Imperial Japan in the 1940s, its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its attempt to impose its empire throughout East Asia.
Along with a history exam add a logic exam.
Bush ignores a lot of other things, too. He spoke about Japan at some length. He ignored the depth to which General MacArthur wrote the Japanese constitution and rewired Japanese politics. The Wikipedia has the following on MacArthur's influence on the Japanese constitution:
Not quite the beatific unity of Japanese and American liberals described by Bush as creating a modern democratic Japan. There are those who disagree that Japan is actually democratic rather than a merely a constitutional monarchy. One has to wonder about how democratic is a government that has been controlled mostly one political party (not that that idea would put off Bush and Rove).Much of it was drafted by two senior army officers with law degrees: Milo Rowell and Courtney Whitney. The articles about equality between men and women are reported to be written by Beate Sirota. Although the document's authors were non-Japanese, they took into account the Meiji Constitution, the demands of Japanese lawyers, and the opinions of pacifist political leaders such as Shidehara and Yoshida Shigeru. The draft was presented to surprised Japanese officials on 13 February 1946. On 6 March 1946, the government publicly disclosed an outline of the pending constitution. On 10 April elections were held to the House of Representatives of the Ninetieth Imperial Diet, which would consider the proposed constitution. The election law having been changed, this was the first general election in Japan in which women were permitted to vote.
The MacArthur draft, which proposed a unicameral legislature, was changed at the insistence of the Japanese to allow a bicameral legislature, both houses being elected. In most other important respects, however, the ideas embodied in the 13 February document were adopted by the government in its own draft proposal of 6 March. These included the constitution's most distinctive features: the symbolic role of the Emperor, the prominence of guarantees of civil and human rights, and the renunciation of war.
With South Korea, Bush does a much better job describing the muddled support for Truman but he falls down in this paragraph:
Instead, South Korea is a strong, democratic ally of the United States of America. South Korean troops are serving side-by-side with American forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And America can count on the free people of South Korea to be lasting partners in the ideological struggle we’re facing in the beginning of the 21st century. (Applause.)He forgets how long South Korea remained under dictatorships sponsored by us. What has even more to do with South Korea now having a democratic government has as much to do with the end of the USSR as it does with our good offices.
Speaking of logic, there is gaping wound inflicted in logic in this paragraph:
Finally, there’s Vietnam. This is a complex and painful subject for many Americans. The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.The only argument I have heard is that Americans will stop dying in Iraq for dubious policy reasons if we start withdrawing. Australia's The Age published a report including this paragraph:
Melvin Laird, secretary of defence under President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973, said Mr Bush was drawing the wrong lessons from history.
"I don't think what happened in Cambodia after the war has anything to do with Iraq," Mr 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 Mr Bush bypassed the fact that, after the painful US withdrawal was completed in April 1975, Vietnam stabilised and developed into an economically thriving country that is now a friend of the US.
"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. MrLichtman 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," Mr Lichtman said.
Yeah, see there was thing about bombing Cambodia because North Vietnam shipped supplies through Cambodia to the South. (Note a major difference between Vietnam and Korea - Korea is a peninsula and Vietnam is on the mainland of Asia. Second difference is that Vietnam is covered in jungle and a jungle is by definition rather hard to see into.) We bombed Cambodia and sent troops into Cambodia, and Cambodia becomes part of the mess. By the way, those secret plans of bombing Cambodia became known as The Pentagon Papers which brought notoriety to Daniel Ellsberg and their publication started Nixon toward Watergate. Yeah, I would agree with the label of fantasy history.
It does seem to me that Bush would have had us invade Cambodia. Almost makes one yearn for the rationality of Richard M. Nixon, doesn't it?Bush offers us the same twaddle that was offered for South Vietnam - we need to be there to fight something that we do not like. He fails to mention that the falling dominoes of Southeast Asia never fell. He fails to mention that it was the Vietnamese Army that invaded Cambodia in response to the Khmer Rouge madness or that the Vietnamese Army kicked the Chinese Army back over the border. So much for Communist solidarity. More importantly, Bush fails wholly in not acknowledging that the Vietnam War was not a discrete war but a hot part of the Cold War that started in 1947 and ended in 1989. We won that war, I think.
Nixon (and LBJ) could not explain how Vietnam played in the larger strategic battle against the USSR or how the country endangered the United States. Bush fails to explain how Iraq endangers us or how staying in Iraq protects us from al Quaeda. Iraq clearly cannot attack the United States, they have trouble providing 24/7 electrical service in Baghdad. Al Quaeda is not put off from us by Iraq. Remember the attempt by terrorists to board British airplanes? Well, they were coming here.
Nope, we get the rote rhetoric of the used car salesman:
If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities. Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home. And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America. (Applause.)
The Age finished its report with this:
Justin Logan from the conservative Cato Institute was also critical.
"What the President and those who insist that 'the surge is working' are offering is many more years of war in Iraq with only a small chance of 'victory' — something the American people will not and should not accept," she said.
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