Friday, August 24, 2007

Good Snark

Rosa Brooks is back, and in great form. Her column in today's Los Angeles Times would make Molly Ivins proud.

Oh yes. You thought the Bush administration was fresh out of ideas? You thought that with Karl Rove leaving, the administration that brought us the war in Iraq and "Mission Accomplished" had no more tricks up its sleeve?

Think again.

On Wednesday, speaking before a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience, President Bush did something he had previously avoided: He compared the Iraq war with the Vietnam War, agreeing that Vietnam does hold lessons for U.S. policy in Iraq.

Can't argue with that. For most Americans, the lessons of Vietnam were reasonably clear before we invaded Iraq and have been painfully reinforced by the ongoing disaster there:

Don't fight needless wars; don't go blundering around in countries where you don't know the language, history or culture; don't underestimate the power of nationalism, ethnicity and religion to bind together -- or tear apart -- people whose interests otherwise seem to diverge or converge; and, most of all, don't imagine that military force can solve fundamentally political problems.

But the president, who has his own very special set of history books, drew the public's attention to some entirely different lessons from Vietnam. To Bush, the "unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens." ...

Bush went on to assert that "another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam" was the rise of "the enemy we face in today's struggle, those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens" on 9/11.

Yup -- it's so obvious! The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam caused the rise of Al Qaeda -- and, by extension, "our withdrawal from Vietnam" ultimately turned Iraq into "the central front" in "the war on terror."


Our Ms. Brooks then proceeds with the kind of dissection of Bush Logic (which flows from Bush Speak) that would have done Jonathan Swift proud.

I'm thinking of emailing the entire column to every member of the California delegation, just in case any of them were impressed by Mr. Bush's erudite speech yesterday. And if I could figure out a way to get the column to Molly Ivins, I would. She'd approve.

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