Rewriting History

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Now playing: Ben Folds - The Last Polka
via FoxyTunes In a recent ghost-written essay for the journal Foreign Affairs, Rudy Giuliani said the following:

"America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. … Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America."

The whole essay has already gotten all of the criticism it deserves from people much more knowledgeable than I am on foreign policy. But I wanted to point out this excerpt from Giuliani's ridiculous essay in light of a speech that our illustrious President gave today at the VFW convention:

"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush told members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at their convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

"Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields,' " the president said.

There are differences, of course. Giuliani says "Many historians say," while Bush chooses "[T]here is a legitimate debate." Giuliani speaks of dire consequences while Bush speaks of an unmistakable legacy. But they're really saying the same thing, and that thing is utterly insane. It leads me to only one conclusion.

Bush and Giuliani both have parts of history that they'd love to rewrite. Giuliani has been trying desperately (and, depressingly, successfully) to rewrite the history of 9/11, positioning himself as a hero who did no wrong, and who in fact stood proud guard over Ground Zero until the last rescue worker had left. Bush has been trying to rewrite the history of why we went to Iraq, why we stayed in Iraq, why we escalated troop levels in Iraq, and why we should be there indefinitely. Both of those revisions are bound to fail. So what do they do? Simple. In a classic Rovian move, they start to revise history that had nothing to do with them.

Remember in 2004 and 2006 when Rove had the GOP start spending all kinds of money in solidly blue states to make everyone think that the swing states were already locked up for the Republicans? It worked in 2004, but failed miserably in 2006. Well, Giuliani and Bush are doing the same thing. In talking about the controversy that exists over Vietnam (ed. note: it really doesn't exist), both Giuliani and Bush are taking their own revisions of history as givens. They're allocating their rhetorical resources to something that makes no sense, to make us think that they've already won their own battles.

In Giuliani's case, that 9/11-fresh sheen still hasn't worn off, so he's unlikely to be called on his lies and revisionism. But if this is an example of the Bush we're likely to see in the post-Rove era, trying badly to employ Rovian tactics, then if I might borrow a phrase, I hope he bring[s] it on.

Fargus...

Surge Protectors

No, not those kind of surge protectors. I'm talking about President Bush's "surge" of troops to Iraq (12/1/2006):

President George W. Bush admitted this morning that “mistakes have been made” in Iraq and “the responsibility rests with me” but insisted the only way out of the dire situation was to send 21,500 more troops into the country.

So two months ago, the President said we needed to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq. But today, we hear something entirely different from that:

The administration's estimate of approximately 21,000 extra troops only counts combat units, according to the analysis, and because combat units require support forces, the actual number of additional troops who will be in Iraq will likely exceed 35,000.

The way I see it, troops is troops is troops. Whether they're combat troops or support troops, they're going to the mess that is Iraq. It looks like we can add "21,500 troops" to the list of falsehoods that have been told to support the disaster that is the conflict in Iraq.

The real question, though, has to do only tangentially with Iraq. Our rhetoric against Iran is becoming increasingly inflammatory, and we're sending between 35,000 and 48,000 troops into Iran's direct neighbor. Anybody else see where this is going?

Fargus...

Hillary, Be Not Proud

Through Decision '08, the only conservative blog I can bring myself to read anymore, I found this incomprehensible criticism of some statements that Hillary Clinton recently made (I apologize for the length of the excerpt, but there's really not that much content to cut. Just tough it out):

In essence, Senator Clinton declared: The war in Iraq is Bush's mess, and it is his job to clean it up before I become President and have to do it myself.

More precisely, Senator Clinton argued that it was Bush's "decision to go to war with an ill-conceived plan and an incompetently executed strategy." That is, the Iraq war is Bush's mess. "We expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office." That is, we expect him to clean up his mess. Bush has said that this cleaning up the Iraq mess was "going to be left to his successor," namely, Senator Clinton herself, a prospect which explains the Senator's final outburst, "I think it is the height of irresponsibility and I really resent it." (Italics mine.)

And why shouldn't she resent it? Would you like to wake up one day, find that you are the President and that it is up to you to bring stability and order out of the chaos and bloodshed in Iraq?

The moral punch of the Senator's underlying analogy is obvious. We can all grasp it just as readily as Lincoln's compatriots could grasp his conceit about swapping horses in the middle of a stream. If someone else has made a mess, it's his job to clean it up—not yours or mine. For example, if mom comes home one day and finds that her sons have been playing paintball in the dinning room, it's their duty to clean up the mess they've made—not mom's. Nor could we blame mom for being resentful if, despite the obvious right and wrong of the situation, she ended up, as she often does, with the task of removing the splattered paint all by herself. Indeed, it is possible that Senator Clinton's analogy will have an especially potent appeal to women voters, since women have traditionally been assigned the thankless task of cleaning up the mess their men folk and boy folk leave in their wake. What woman can't say, "Been there, done that?"

There is, however, a problem with Senator Clinton's analogy—a problem so serious that it forces us to wonder if she genuinely understands the nature of the office that she is currently seeking, and to see what I mean let us go back to the case of Mr. Lincoln.

When Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President, he inherited a mess in comparison with which Iraq pales to insignificance. The states in the Deep South had already left the Union. The previous President, James Buchanan, had not lifted a finger to keep the vast majority of Federal forts and arsenals from falling into the hands of the new Confederacy. Buchanan's position was that the Constitution did not allow for states to secede, but at the same time, neither did it allow the Federal government to use coercion to keep them in the Union against their will. So what to do, except to do nothing?

The biggest mess of all, however, arose from the fact that the newly inaugurated President's government was still in control of two remaining military outposts in the Confederate States, Fort Moultrie in Florida and Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Had Buchanan given the order to evacuate both forts while he was still President, then Lincoln would not have been faced with the dreadful decision of whether to abandon them or to re-supply them when it was his turn to be President. By abandoning these forts, Lincoln knew he might avoid a civil war; by re-supplying them, he knew he would almost certainly begin one. Yet by abandoning the forts, Lincoln also knew that he would be abandoning the Union. Thus the choice that confronted Lincoln on obtaining the office of Presidency was the hideous alternative of disunion or civil war—in short, the mother of all messes.

Historians have, by and large, been exceedingly harsh on Buchanan. He should have done something decisive, the way Lincoln did. Yet Buchanan himself had no more choices than Lincoln did. Yes, Buchanan in theory could have acted decisively: he might have decisively let "the erring sisters" go in peace, or else he could have decisively started the blood bath that became known as the American Civil War. But in either case, Lincoln would have inherited the horrific consequences of Buchanan's very decisiveness—a raging civil war already in progress or a Confederacy of Southern States whose legitimacy had already been recognized by the North. In other words, no matter what Buchanan did or didn't do, Lincoln was bound to become President with an enormous mess on his hands. But that, we must remind ourselves—and Senator Clinton--is the nature of the American Presidency. If you become President, the chances are very good that you will have to start by taking responsibility for someone else's mess.

There are myriad reasons to dismiss comparisons of the current conflict in Iraq to the American Civil War, but only one really matters in this case: the complete disparity between the events leading up to the American Civil War and the events leading up to the current conflict in Iraq.

The author refers, near the end of the piece, to the fact that it was inevitable that Lincoln would have to clean up some mess, because no options that Buchanan had before him would have made for a tidy resolution of the conflict before Lincoln took office. Fair enough. I don't know enough about Civil War history to make a pronouncement on this, but I have no problem accepting it as given. It fits well enough into whatever historical narrative I have been taught over the years.

The problem, though, is that for the analogy to hold, all of the events that precipitated the mess that Buchanan handed to Lincoln would have to have been Buchanan's fault directly. The current conflict in Iraq is and always has been George W. Bush's conflict in Iraq. After 9/11, he pushed the war with Iraq. He shifted the focus from Afghanistan, and the people who actually attacked us. He's owned this "war" from the get-go.

In contrast, any student who wasn't asleep during U.S. History in high school could tell you that the events that precipitated the American Civil War had been brewing for over 50 years. Indeed, upon passage of the Missouri Compromise, Thomas Jefferson penned the following lines to John Holmes*:

"...this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper."

You may notice that I bolded all of the references to "Senator Clinton's analogy" in the article above. That was just to point out the fact that Senator Clinton made no analogy. The author of the article did, and it's a pretty easy one to dismiss as fatuous. But Senator Clinton made a statement about resenting the fact that George Bush got our country into the mess it's in now in the Middle East. No analogy there.

Fargus...

*Maybe it's indicative of the fact that I'm depraved, but when I saw the name "John Holmes," my immediate thought wasn't of a 19th century politician.

The Six-Grand Canyon?

I've posted about my religious beliefs before, so my reaction to this story should surprise absolutely nobody:

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

[...]

In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

[...]

“As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan,” Ruch added, pointing to the fact that previous NPS leadership ignored strong protests from both its own scientists and leading geological societies against the agency approval of the creationist book. “We sincerely hope that the new Director of the Park Service now has the autonomy to do her job.”

Any emphasis up there is my own.

I don't want this to be some kind of divisive religion vs. science post, but I don't see how it can't be. It seems that in our modern world, in order to get mainstream recognition, all you have to do is disagree with somebody and then point to the disagreement that you just expressed as evidence for why you should be taken as seriously as the people with whom you disagree. Example:

Scientist: Species developed over the course of millions of years, through the process of natural selection.

Creationist: I disagree. I think God did it all.

Scientist: The scientific community overwhelmingly backs my position.

Creationist: Why not just teach the controversy? There's definitely controversy. Please refer back to 10 seconds ago when I disagreed with you. See? Controversy. Are you just afraid of views that differ from your own?

That's, like, the template for how to get the media scared of denigrating your position, and how to ratchet your idiotic minority to the top of the media heap, all without having to exhibit one shred of evidence. Here's a site that goes more in-depth on the logical fallacies used by these people, and how to spot them.

This all puts me in mind of this very, very funny Mad Magazine spoof:

If only its humor weren't rooted so deeply in reality.

Fargus...