New whine - old bottles

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

-T.S. Eliot-

George Bush’s new pose on Iraq seems to have the fools fooled again.  Always eager to look on the brighter side of life, the supporters of the occupation would like to make the question that of the half full Vs. half empty glass and sometimes have us looking at a cracked jelly jar full of dust while listening to someone call it a magnum of Clicquot.

Bush’s studied diminution of bravado is “. . .a display of candor that may help him to make up some of the ground he has lost with the American public by consistently pushing an overly optimistic line”  says an editorial in today’s Miami Herald ; happy to show us order and hope in chaos and hopelessness while trying to avoid the appearance of partisanship with a bit of faint damnation.  Was Bush’s quick trip to Baghdad a confidence builder as the Herald suggests, or was it an example of a con man dipping his big toe into shark-infested waters and declaring it just the place for a swim? Was it another cheap example of Bush trying to associate himself with an event by posing, as he did with New York firemen in 2001, while stonewalling any attempt to discuss the failures that allowed it to happen?

“The elimination of Zarqawi is an important milestone, but it does not turn the tide. It shows, though, that Iraq's enemies can be vanquished. Violence and despotism are not Iraq's inevitable destiny if Iraqis have the will to fight for a better future” says the Herald.

A skilled politician, like those who put words in Bush’s mouth, can use a true statement to make an unsubstantiated claim, to mislead and in this case to create unwarranted optimism.  The editorial neglects to point out that many and perhaps most of “Iraq’s enemies” are the people of Iraq and Iraq’s favorite sons.  It neglects that the Neocon crusade itself inflicted Zarqawi and al Qaeds upon Iraq in the first place. It neglects to mention that many Iraqi’s vision of a better future is despotism and they have a will to fight for it. It neglects to mention the difficulty of overturning a culture and its mores and its animosities and its visions and replacing it with a culture that has been seen as the enemy for over a thousand years.

For those of us who read identically fatuous articles about the doomed occupation of Viet Nam 40 years ago, the amnesiac gullibility of the nation today is frustrating, heartbreaking and infuriating.  I cannot say with certainty that there is absolutely no hope for Iraq, but I can say as I said then during the many years of the horror in Southeast Asia, that continuing the same thing that isn’t working and to appeal to patriotism and hope using fallacy and fraud will result in failure.  We did not win the “hearts and minds” of Viet Nam by devastating their country, propping up crooked government and slaughtering their women and children, and we will not remake Iraq in our image by doing the same thing.