The Emperor's Old Rags

[saavedra77]

"President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

'Neither assertion is wholly accurate."

When I heard Bush's speech, the other day, I wondered whether anyone in the mainstream media would have the cajones to actually call him on this crap.

But I guess that when 58% of the public already question the President's integrity, and only 37% approve of his job performance, it becomes a lot easier to say he's full of it ...

Comments

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

We win!

Yanno why?

All good wars aren't controversial.

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Military historians like to say that "we're always fighting the last war."

Politicians are more flexible: they'll say we're fighting whichever previous war supports their argument. That's why the right really, really wanted this to be like World War II--"the Good War."

And the left decided pretty early that it was Vietnam, which is the one war in U.S. history to date that we pretty undeniably lost (unless you're from Dixie, but that was a war we lost to ourselves, so it kind of doesn't count).

The trouble is, Iraq didn't attack us on 9/11 the way Japan did at Pearl Harbor, and no foe that we've faced since the end of the Cold War represents anything like the military-industrial powerhouse of an Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany (let alone the U.S.S.R.).

So the White House and their cheerleaders have always had to embellish the facts to make their WW2 analogy work, spuriously linking Iraq to this generation's Pearl Harbor and dressing it up as some kind of Great-Power threat hell-bent on nuking us.

Of course, Iraq isn't really Vietnam, either, but the strategic situation just keeps becoming more and more reminiscent of that war: it was based on a Tonkin Gulf-like pretext, is being fought against a Third World country whose government wouldn't in Saddam's frothiest dreams have dared to actually attack a nuclear superpower (he had a return address & something to lose, after all), has sparked a nationalist guerilla war, etc.

We've just fast-forwarded to "Vietnamization" sooner, this time.