A Hollow Man in the White House: The Lost Bush Decade

Just before New Year’s Eve, I began reading “The Final Days” by Woodward and Bernstein on the last weeks of the Nixon administration. Not because of any conscious awareness of the imminent end of the Bush era, but simply because it was the first book that jumped out at me from the bookcase in my brother’s spare bedroom in Malta where we were spending ten days escaping from the icy winds that tore across the continent in late December and early January.

The impression one gains from this account and other descriptions of Nixon is that, though he was a crook, he was also a complex person with deep-seated neuroses and obsessions that he was able to harness as vehicles to advance his political career. Even Hunter S. Thompson, probably the most outspoken critic that Nixon ever had, acknowledged in the summer of 1973 that the true loathsomeness of Watergate was to be found not in the person of the president, but in the broader implications for the nation as a whole:

The slow-rising central horror of “Watergate” is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.

Only 27 years later, George W. Bush was elected the 43rd president of the United States. It is already clear that his sole lasting achievement and bequest to the Republican Party will be the rehabilitation of Richard Milhous Nixon. And while the legal and moral corruption of the Bush administration is immeasurably greater, making Tricky Dicky’s many crimes seem almost petty by comparison, Nixon himself now comes across as a larger-than-life figure – a tragic character in the full sense of the word, brought down by his own hubris and destroyed by the same traits of personality that made possible his ascent to power. Bush by comparison is a hollow man, a cardboard cutout, a two-bit tinhorn gambler who bet the ranch and lost. His legacy will be that of an idiot child who was somehow hoisted onto the throne and spent his days cycling, playing with his train set, and invading other countries in wars of aggression, ending in failure on an epic scale that was previously inconceivable.

I like children, but they can be stupid and cruel, as Bion of Borysthenes knew well:

It was the saying of Bion, that, though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.

Ultimately, Bush remains a mystery to us; maybe the only ones who can fathom him are those of us who have stared down the drooling, vacant-eyed monster inside of us that occasionally returns our gaze in the mirror at 3am. If so – and we would do well never to forget that Bush was re-elected in 2004, despite all the information that was publicly available at the time already – he represents not the most evil aspects of our political system and ultimately of our nature as political beings (that honor would have to be reserved for criminals of Nixon’s stature), but the most bland, careless, unthinking manifestation of human interaction. Could this be because Nixon came from a poor farming family of Quakers and had to claw his way to power and infamy, while Bush is a Fortunate Son of the establishment and was handed the keys to the White House by a coalition of the super-rich, the foreign-policy hawks, and the Christian Right?



Possibly the worst aspect of the Bush years has been not the political shit sandwich that he has tried to force-feed to all of mankind, but the way in which he has made cretinism and mediocrity fashionable, or at least acceptable in polite society. On the other hand, this development is already beginning to be reversed by the current economic devastation, which has disabused the world of the notion that the emperor’s new clothes are oh so pretty. Thus it is that in the run-up to Barack Obama’s inauguration, the residents of Washington, D.C. were throwing shoes at a blow-up doll of Bush/Pinocchio, even as the jailers guarding “shoe assassin” Muntadhar al-Zeidi in Baghdad threw a birthday party for him (after severely beating and torturing him, it should be added).

“So for him it does not matter for how long he would be imprisoned,” his brother said, “because the important thing is that he restored the honor of the Iraqi people.”

As for Bush, he can take solace in two deserved awards recently bestowed upon him: The Bishop John T. Walker Service Award, which he earned (in all fairness – though it is a shame he did not muster the same level of dedication when New Orleans was drowning) for his efforts to improve the lives of Africans, and a well-deserved label devised especially for Dubya by the esteemed Sean Bedlam:

“He is the Swiss army knife of being a fuckhead”

The 35 Articles of Impeachment

... and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush, by Dennis Kuchinich with David Swanson and Elizabeth de la Vega, available as a paperback from Feral House and available for free download as a PDF from the same publisher. Read it and pass it on, then lobby your local Democratic Party to push for impeaching the Chimp when Obama takes office in January.

In the best case, we will see GWB and his coterie sentenced to long prison sentences. Do I believe this? No, because even though I am supporting Obama, I think he is an establishment candidate and will not violate the unwritten rule that incoming administrations let sleeping dogs lie. But even in the worst case, you will be able to tell your grandchildren that it was through no fault of your own that Bush got away with murder.

Thought for the Day

As of the time of writing, Bush has 167 days, 4 hours, 4 minutes, 27.2 seconds left in office. Not a fifth of a second too soon.
I'm not a believer in end-times prophecy, but H.L. Mencken saw this coming:

“As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Merciful Mongols

John W. Dean, former White House legal counsel to Richard Nixon, was on Countdown with Keith Olberman yesterday to talk about the latest revelations about US government-sanctioned torture. Now, it stands to reason that he didn't do such a great job counselling Nixon on legal matters, or at least his counsel wasn't heard. He was one of the Nixon minions referred to in this quote by the good Doctor Gonzo:

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

(Read Hunter S. Thompson's entire obituary for Nixon, if you haven't yet, and bear in mind that the legacy of George W. Bush will be such that he will make Nixon look saintly by comparison.) Dean did jail time, but with a greatly reduced sentence, for his many crimes in connection with Watergate; his sentence was cut back because he turned witness for the prosecution and spilled the beans on Nixon and the Plumbers, and revealed the existence of the White House tapes.

Anyway, Dean has since declared himself an "independent" and has become a darling of the progressive camp in the US, especially since his book "Conservatives Without Conscience" was published. In this work, he charges that the Republican Party has been shanghaied by right-wingers with authoritarian personalities.

In the interview with Olberman on Countdown yesterday, Dean made some interesting points (check out the video at Crooks and Liars). After discussing the recently revealed existence of a new, shameful torture memo from the Bush/Gonzales Justice Department, Olberman and Dean talk about the Republican/conservative tendency to believe that reality can be adapted to their own requirements merely by choosing the right words to describe it: "We're not doing it cause we say we're not doing it"; or even "this is not torture because [the Bush administration] are not the kind of people who torture".

Dean points out that this is not just a matter of deficient perceptions, but that the White House is trying to change the laws that ban torture and other violations of the Geneva Conventions. He calls on Congress not only not to approve these changes, but to extend the Statute of Limitations on such crimes from five to ten years, in order to highlight the fact that "indeed, these are real laws". Of course, that would be very bad news indeed for Gonzales, Rumsfeld and other war criminals who are now or have been involved in policymaking and ordering prisoners to be beaten, waterboarded, and otherwise tortured.

But Dean goes on to make another critical point that is often missed and rarely, if ever, mentioned in the traditional media outlets:

Well, let me tell you, one of the thoughts in conservative thinking and circles today is that they felt very bad when Ronald Reagan left office with a 60 per cent approval rating. They thought: "That's just a waste!" They want their president to not be loved, to not be particularly respected. They want him to drive their agenda. And so Bush, as he heads on down with these kinds of policies that are being revealed, is doing exactly what the core of his party wants him to do. So, I don't... it may get down to single digits, and then he won't "die rich", so to speak.

So much for bipartisanship; what the Democratic Party needs in order to emerge from its present doldrums (and historically low approcal rates for its members of Congress) is the balls to push for flat-out partisanship in progressive issues.

Another example of this kind of Republican thinking can be found in the reasoning underlying Bush's veto against the State Children' Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) on Wednesday. Bush has argued that state support for children's health insurance would put the US budget on a slippery slope towards Communism. This program would be financed through higher taxes on tobacco. So, while SCHIP would be very efficient in providing healthcare for poor children, it would violate at least three mainstays of Republican ideology: No state-funded healthcare; no new taxes; and avoidance of anything that could hurt the tobacco industry, wherever possible.

Again: so much for bipartisanship. Bush's posturing as a fiscal conservative is all the more ridiculous considering he has blown the biggest budget surplus in the nation's history on an illegal war. Note: the US defense budget for FY2007 was increased by 7 per cent to US$439.3 billion, about 13 times the amount that the SCHIP bill would have cost. Look up "Starve the Beast" on Wikipedia for more on the thinking behind this strategy.

What does all of this have to do with the latest torture memo? The overall picture makes a mockery of the concept of "Compassionate Conservatism". It is just a shell of a phrase, a propaganda label used to sell policies that are not conservative in the Goldwater tradition and certainly not compassionate. What "Compassionate Conservatism" does is alliterate; no more and no less. As a catchphrase, it may serve its purpose among lazy thinkers. As a label for current White House policies, it is about as thoughtful, and appropriate, as if Ghengis Khan had promoted his conquest of the West as "Merciful Mongolism" - merely adding insult to injury.

A Drunken Liar

Robert Draper's new book on George Bush, "Dead Certain", claims that Bush believed until last year that WMDs would be found in Iraq - that is, two-and-a-half years after the Interim Report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) headed by David Kay, and one-and-a-half years after the ISG's Duelfer Report, both of which made very clear that there were no such weapons in Iraq.

"Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs." [p. 388]

[h/t Think Progress] NB, this was after Bush had publicly conceded that the Duelfer Report invalidated his stated pretext for going to war:

BUSH: The chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, has now issued a comprehensive report that confirms the earlier conclusion of David Kay that Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there.

Now this: According to Sidney Blumenthal, writing in Salon.com, Bush was told by former CIA chief George Tenet in unequivocal terms, in September 2002, that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs, as confirmed by a top-level source inside Saddam's inner circle of advisers, namely Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabri.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail.

The headline of the Salon article, "Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction", is misleading; a more accurate, though less pithy version would probably be "Bush was told Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, but refused to believe the best available intelligence, instead choosing to trust in the words of a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer", the source now known as "Curveball":

According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq's alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as 'crazy' by his intelligence handlers and a 'congenital liar' by his friends [... A] US official was surprised to find Curveball had a hangover and said he 'might be an alcoholic.' By early 2001, the Germans were having doubts of their own, telling the CIA their spy was 'out of control'.

A "crazy" man described as a "congenital liar" even by his friends, assessed as an "out of control alcoholic": Could it be that Bush felt a certain kinship with this man, since they have so much in common? In fact, the headline of the Guardian/Observer story quoted above, "US relied on 'drunken liar' to justify war", had me thinking of Bush before I realized it referred to the Curveball source. But let us return to Blumenthal's story:

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD [...] The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD [...] Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Powell apparently also realized, without having access to Sabri's views, that the information he was given was not holding up to scrutiny. Preparing his testimony to the UN Security Council in February 2003, which he delivered with George Tenet sitting directly behind him, Powell reportedly

tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -."

The French and US intelligence service reportedly paid Sabri "hundreds of thousands of dollars" for information about Iraq's banned weapons programs. Blumenthal's CIA sources confirm that Sabri stated Iraq had no such weapons. However:

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

Dearlove must have suspected he was being treated to a snow job, since the notorious "Downing Street Memo", of which, he is believed to be the author, noted that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Bush's determination to overthrow Hussein was such that he decided to ignore the intelligence provided by Sabri and presented to the president by the CIA director:

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."

I have long refused to believe that the rationale for invading Iraq was based on a genuine error, which is the version being spun by the neocons today - that the White House did believe it had solid evidence for Iraq's alleged weapons programs, and that the "intelligence failure" was the fault of the CIA. Instead, the "best available evidence" now indicates that the US government either actively manipulated the intelligence or - and this is the most charitable interpretation possible - came to believe in its own propaganda. You decide which is worse.

The Horror! The Horror!

The Iraq/Vietnam analogy that was launched as a new talking point last week by the White House has had holes torn into it by far more competent people than myself, but I would like to add a few thoughts nevertheless - inspired by Mr. (Colonel) Kurtz and Joseph Conrad as well as other luminaries that motivated this blog in the first place.

No doubt President Bush, from his hard-won frontline experience with the Texas Air National Guard, has better first-hand knowledge of the horrors of war than I, who was too young to be drafted into the US armed forces at the time. As the Vietnam War drew to a close, I was but a wee Hippo frolicking with other amphibious mammals of my age, many of whom were American army brats. My conception of war in 1975 was limited to playing with Marx plastic soldiers.

My level of understanding at that age as to what armed confrontation was all about can be gauged by the fact that the difference between "soldiers" on the one hand, and "cowboys and indians" on the other, was still pretty blurry to me. Nevertheless, I have a clear memory of my parents explaining to me in hushed tones one day that my friend was having a bit of a rough time, as his dad had just returned from Vietnam and was behaving strangely. What was Vietnam, and how was he behaving strangely, I wanted to know. I was told that Vietnam was a place where American soldiers, like my friend's dad, were fighting in a jungle (a big forest, as far as I understood) and had bombs thrown at them on a regular basis. And my friend's dad was exhibiting unusual behavior because he had had bombs thrown at him too many times. It seems that the first night after he returned, a police car went by their house with its siren blaring. The next morning, when his wife woke up, he was nowhere to be found. After searching the whole house for her husband, she finally found him fast asleep under the bed. He had heard the siren in the night and, without waking up, had rolled off the bed and back under it to take cover from the "incoming shells".

Before discussing the merits and flaws of a comparison between the Vietnam and Iraq wars, a few words about the White House spin machine. It is notable that up until last week, anyone who compared the two conflicts was dismissed by the neocons as a defeatist or worse, since the ignominous end of America's engagement in Southeast Asia is still remembered as one of the deepest humiliations of US military power ever - until Iraq, that is. Although... there are some who still insist that it was not a defeat for the US, and their worldview is captured pretty neatly in this dialog between Archie and Otto in A Fish Called Wanda:

- You know your problem? You don't like winners.
- Winners?
- Yeah. Winners.
- Winners like... North Vietnam?
- Shut up! We did not lose Vietnam! It was a tie!
- I'm tellin' ya, they kicked some ass there. Boy, they whupped your hide real good!
- No, they didn't.
- Yes, they did.
- Oh, no, they didn't.
- Oh, yes, they did.
- Oh, no, they... Shut up!

The highest form of propaganda consists of not just distorting the truth a little bit, but of proclaiming the opposite of what everyone knows to be true. (Thus, for example, commenting on the resignation of disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer has the gall to accuse the Democratic Congress of "dangerously politicizing the Justice Department", which is of course exactly what Gonzales has been doing.) So it should come as no surprise that after years of pooh-poohing any resemblance between the Vietnam debacle and the Iraqi quagmire, the White House now turns around and cites the example of Vietnam as a reason for supporting the continued occupation of Iraq. You gotta hand it to these guys: They distort reality at breathtaking levels of altitude, where most ordinary mortals would find it difficult to operate even with oxygen masks and sherpas carrying their bundle of lies for them.

Of course, such obviously false parallels can easily be shown to be wrong by anyone with even the most basic knowledge of history and international relations. Refuting the lies of the Republican spin machine is easy; but one wonders whether it is worth the effort, since by the time their claims are exposed as false, the spin doctors will have moved on to the next mind-boggling distortion. Nevertheless, here goes; we will first of all discuss why the parallels that Bush drew between Iraq and Vietnam in his recent speech are wrong, and then look in detail at some of the real differences and similarities between the two conflicts.

Speaking before the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) association in Kansas City, Missouri, Bush claimed that

“America’s withdrawal was paid for by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’”

Concerning the vengeance of the Communist regime on Southern Vietnam after the US retreat, it is worth noting that the Viet Minh movement was not always an implacable enemy of the US or the West. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor organization of the CIA, cooperated with Ho Chin Minh and the Viet Minh against the Japanese occupiers of Vietnam in 1945. It was only when they realized that the US would not support their bid for independence that the Viet Minh and their successors of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam turned towards Communism. That is to say, the refugee crisis and re-education camps were largely an outcome of US intransigence since the end of the Second World War and Washington's sustained support for a corrupt South Vietnamese regime after France pulled out of Indochina; to blame these deplorable developments on the US retreat is simply a reversal of cause and effect.

It is similarly ahistorical to attribute the "killing fields" to the US withdrawal from Southeast Asia. The rise of the Khmer Rouge to power in Cambodia, culminating in the capture of the capital, Phnom Penh, on 17 April 1975 (a mere two weeks before the fall of Saigon), can largely be attributed to the US bombing capaign against Cambodia during the previous years. In order to interdict North Vietnamese resupply routes through the neighboring country, Nixon ordered a secret strategic bombing campaign against Cambodia, which in turn enhanced the popularity of the Communist Khmer Rouge guerillas, whose rule of terror later led to hundreds of thousands of deaths on the so-called killing fields. Notably, it was the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that ultimately ended the reign of Pol Pot with an invasion of Cambodia in 1979. Again, the notion that the deaths of approximately 1.5 million Cambodians were due to the US withdrawal from Vietnam is a gross distortion of reality.

Having established that it was US interference in Southeast Asia, not the decision to withdraw, that caused the phenomena wrongly attributed by Bush in his recent speech, we should also look at some of the actual historical similarities and differences between Vietnam and Iraq.

The main difference is that the Iraqi resistance has no support from a superpower, unlike North Vietnam, which received supplies and diplomatic backing from Moscow as a Soviet proxy in the context of the Cold War. Despite the attempts by the neoconservatives to frame Iran as acting in such a manner, both the Maliki puppet government in Iraq and the Karzai regime in Afghanistan report that Iran has been a constructive force in the recent regional turmoil, meaning that Tehran has not been extending significant support to insurgents in either country. On the one hand, Iran certainly retains that option if certain parameters should change - for example, if it should become the target of US attacks. On the other hand, Tehran's long-term interests include the establishment of a stable situation in the region, preferably with an enhanced role for itself.

A secondary difference is one of geography. Iraq has no forests offering cover and retreat areas for large bodies of insurgent fighters, and the various militias and armed groups cannot move across the desert in sizeable formations. Of course, that means that there are no massed targets for the US military to attack and destroy in open engagements. This is also why most of the US casualties have been incurred in urban environments, and due to roadside bombs. The densely built-up areas of Iraqi cities are the contemporary equivalent of the Vietnamese jungle.

Conversely, the similarities between America's two worst military debacles in the past 50 years are fairly evident.

In both cases, the justification to go to war was based on patent lies. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing US President Lyndon B. Johnson to use force in Southeast Asia was obtained by distorting and inflating a minor or non-existent confrontation between the US Navy and Vietnamese ships; the Iraq War Resolution was based on many months of sustained propaganda and disinformation campaigns directed at the US Congress, the American public, and a skeptical world at large. Among the outright lies disseminated by the White House were

• the claims about 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta having met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague;
  
• lies about alleged Iraqi attempts to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger (leading to the Plamegate scandal);
  
• Bush and Blair referring to a non-existent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency supposedly claiming Iraq was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon;
• plagiarized reports on Saddam's Iraq, some of which referred to the state of affairs 12 years earlier.

None of the above falsehoods were due to "faulty intelligence"; they were all known to be wrong at the time they were made.

Also, just as in the case of its support for the Diem regime in Southern Vietnam, the US is repeating its mistake of over-reliance on weak and corrupt local allies that lack legitimacy among the Iraqi population. Ahmed Chalabi, the designated puppet at the start of the war, was convicted of bank fraud in Jordan after the collapse of his Petra Bank. He managed to convince the neocons surrounding Bush in 2002 that his opposition group of Iraqi exiles, the Iraqi National Congress, should be installed as the new government as soon as Saddam was overthrown. He was reportedly exposed in 2004 as a spy for Iran. Chalabi's nephew Iyad Allawi was subsequently named prime minister, but has since fled the country and now lives in London.

Perhaps the most dangerous misjudgement both in Vietnam and in Iraq has been a near-complete misconception, or perhaps misrepresentation, of the US enemies' motivation. Concerning Vietnam, US defense secretary Robert McNamara claimed that if the country were allowed to fall into the hands of the Communist Ho Chi Minh, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow (the "domino theory"). Of course, that never happened; even after the ignominous defeat of the US, most of the neighboring Asian countries remained safely in the capitalist camp, and until the 1990s, the "Tiger states" of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan displayed some of the world's biggest economic growth levels. Vietnam today has become a de-facto capitalist state, though it retains its one-party government. Most historians agree that Uncle Ho was fighting a war of national liberation, which had started with resistance against China and Japan and continued through the French colonial period until the conquest of Saigon and the US withdrawal. That is, Communism was an ideology used for mobilizing the Vietnamese people against foreign domination, but the National Front was essentially a national liberation movement rather than conceiving itself as part of a global movement or aiming to export revolutionary fervor to the region.

Similarly, the Bush White House insists that the armed groups resisting the US occupation of Iraq are "jihadists" (the latter-day "Commies") and al-Qaida franchises, since acknowledging that most are local sectarian militias opposed to the US presence would undermine the rationale for the war effort, which has been implicitly, and wrongly, linked to the 9/11 attacks. Bush claims that "we are fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here"; that narrative would implode if it were acknowledged that 95% of the Iraqi resistance have no ties to al-Qaida or other foreign Wahhabi groups.

This blog post is growing far longer than intended, so I will sum up a few of the other more important similarities in brief. The Iraqi militants, like the Vietcong, are flexible and employ asymmetrical tactics against the US occupation forces; as a result, after losing its sense of invulnerability in the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US is now experiencing the destruction of its myth of invincibility on the battlefield, together with its international reputation, both of which it had painstakingly rebuilt after the humiliating experience of Vietnam.

"The smell of victory"

Some other obvious similarities between Iraq and Vietnam were noted by Martin van Creveld, one of the leading military historians of our times, as early as September 2004 in an article on "Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did". This paper describes a trip to Vietnam undertaken by Israeli general Moshe Dayan in 1966 at the invitation of Walt Rostow, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and McNamara. Having spent several weeks in the country, including patrols on swift boats as well as on foot with the Marines and the 1st Air Cavalry Division, Dayan came to the following main conclusions: The US effort was going badly because it

• lacked intelligence,
• was losing the battle for hearts and minds, and
• was seen by global public opinion as a bully "beating down on the weak".

Van Creveld also offers this stark assessment of how Dayan, who had a great degree of admiration for the US in general and especially for the US troops he had encountered, regarded the justification for the war:

As to what he was told of the war’s objectives, such as defending democracy and helping the South Vietnamese people, he considered it “childish” propaganda; if many of the Americans he met believed in them, clearly nobody else did.

In conclusion, I would like to refer to Barbara Tuchman's excellent book "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam", which dissects America's blunder into the Vietnam conflict as an example of why and how governments pursue policies that are contrary to their own interests. She attributes the mistakes of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to "follies", including over-reaction ("the invention of endangered 'national security', the invention of 'vital interest', the invention of 'commitment' which rapidly assumed a life of its own..."); the "illusion of omnipotence"; "wooden-headedness", which she also describes as the "Don't-confuse-me-with-the-facts habit"; a refusal to "take the enemy's grim will and capacity into account; and "'working the levers' as a substitute for thinking", or the "absence of reflective thought about the nature of what we're doing".

If all of the above "follies" are strongly reminiscent of the current US "surge" strategy, it is surely no coincidence. These are the only comparisons between the Vietnam war and the Iraq occupation worth making, and the only ones from which tangible lessons for the present quagmire can be drawn. However, I fear that we are soon to see a final historical parallel: As Bush attempts to postpone a withdrawal of US forces into the administration of his successor, we can discern the beginnings of a blame-shifting process.

The White House is trying desperately to pin responsibility for the disastrous course of the neoconservative Iraq adventure on anybody but the neocons themselves. The Republican Party, supposedly the party of individual responsibility, now blames its own catastrophic failure on the Iraqi government, al-Qaida, Iran, and - in a final twist of propagandistic desperation - the Democrats, as well as anybody else who is opposed to the war or dares call for a withdrawal of US forces. And here we can expect a final repetition of history: The Dolchstosslegende.


Just as the German military reactionaries after the First World War blamed the Social Democrats for having signed the peace treaty with the Allies and thus having delivered a cowardly "stab in the back" to the brave soldiers on the frontline, "unvanquished in the field", as the legend went ("im Felde unbesiegt"); and just as the right-wing conservatives in the US until today blame "peaceniks and hippies" for having lost the Vietnam War, the current administration and its lackey pundits will try to pass the buck to those who have tried to inject a voice of reason, rationalism, and realism into the debate.

America must avoid repeating this historical mistake, or its refusal to face up to its own failures may lead to a Weimar Republic scenario. Already today, ultra-conservatives in the US have a good deal of contempt for democracy, pluralism, and progressive politics - including the notion that military force is not always the best approach to solving foreign-policy problems. If the US should choose to continue the present course or even to embark on a military adventure in Iran, for example, and if it should end up suffering a complete defeat in the Middle East, it is not inconceivable that American democracy itself would be under threat, as the nascent German democracy was in the 1920s and 1930s.

Let us hope that 40 years from now, this historical analogy will turn out to be just as flawed as Bush's preposterous remarks before the VFW last week.

***********************

A postscript, 10 September 2007: I am currently reading Pausanias, "Description of Greece", and came across the following passage that I felt should be included with this discussion of Vietnam and Iraq.

About sixty stades from Marathon as you go along the road by the sea to Oropus stands Rhamnus. The dwelling houses are on the coast, but a little way inland is a sanctuary of Nemesis, the most implacable deity to men of violence. It is thought that the wrath of this goddess fell also upon the foreigners who landed at Marathon. For thinking in their pride that nothing stood in the way of their taking Athens, they were bringing a piece of Parian marble to make a trophy, convinced that their task was already finished. Of this marble Pheidias made a statue of Nemesis [...] Neither this nor any other ancient statue of Nemesis has wings, for not even the holiest wooden images of the Smyrnaeans have them, but later artists, convinced that the goddess manifests herself most as a consequence of love, give wings to Nemesis as they do to Love.

Protecting the Bush Bubble

The Washington Post reports on a manual handed out in advance of George Bush's public appearances, to ensure that the Republican Beloved Leader is protected from dissent and to prevent the ugly reality from intruding on the White House's carefully stage-managed events:

A White House manual that came to light recently gives presidential
advance staffers extensive instructions in the art of "deterring
potential protestors" from President Bush's public appearances around
the country.

Of course all members of the audience are carefully screened ahead of such events, as they should be; it is not inconceivable that someone might so actively dislike the Frat Boy President that they would try to hurt him, which would not only be wrong, wrong, wrong, but the ensuing backlash would actually help his party. So I'm not against tight security at public POTUS appearances. And that is also why I'm not surprised that prospective audience are mainly handpicked ticket-holders, i.e., loyal Bushies, and that placard-wielding hippie types are generally not admitted. But, as the WashPost continues:

that does not mean the White House is against dissent -- just so
long as the president does not see it. In fact, the manual outlines a
specific system for those who disagree with the president to voice their
views. It directs the White House advance staff to ask local police "to
designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferably
not in the view of the event site or motorcade route."

Adds a new twist to the ages-old cop cliche "Move on, there's nothing to see here." Also, the local event organizers are encouraged to set up Conformity Squads (my own label) to prevent any disruption, i.e. dissent:

To counter any demonstrators who do get in, advance teams are told to
create "rally squads" of volunteers with large hand-held signs, placards
or banners with "favorable messages." Squads should be placed in
strategic locations and "at least one squad should be 'roaming'
throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems,"
the manual says.

However, as the immortal Robert Burns reminds us, even "The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men / Gang aft agley". In a worst-case scenario where Islamofascistodefeatocrats have been able to insinuate themselves into a visible spot and are disseminating their heinous opinions, the White House manual recommends that the Conformity Squads move to Plan B:

"These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators," it
says. "The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as
shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the
demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive
chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort,
security should remove the demonstrators from the event site."

Republicans - you gotta love them. Didya hear me, son? You GOTTA love them! Or you're out on your ass!

By the way: The heavily redacted manual was acquired by the ACLU

as part of a lawsuit filed on behalf of two people arrested for refusing to cover their anti-Bush T-shirts at a Fourth of July speech at the West Virginia State Capitol in 2004.

Remember: They hate us for the freedoms we enjoy.