October 19, 2006
"He used his lances as pens; and the hearts of his enemies, as paper; their blood being his ink" -- Story of Nur-Ed-din
Remember when the members of Congress stuck their purple ink-stained fingers in our faces? Now their leaders in the White House are saying Iraq is like Vietnam. Bush mentioned up the Tet offensive in the same breath as he did the midterm congressional elections; not as some admission along the same lines as those of us opposed to the Iraq occupation who've been comparing the quagmire there to Vietnam from the beginning, but as a vain attempt to link the two. What Bush is saying is that the increased public awareness of the disaster in Iraq threatens to force an end to his dirty little misadventure if voters show up at the polls in November and throw out his republican enablers from their majority positions in Congress.
There's a driving obsession, from Cheney and Rumsfeld down, with re-fighting the Vietnam war and to re-pursue the MYTH that we could have WON the conflict if we had just applied MORE force and NOT withdrawn. White House spokesman Tony Snow continued the Vietnam ploy at his press avail by repeating Bush's insistence that there's something we can still 'win' in Iraq. "The surge in violence in Iraq is a reminder "that terrorists try to exploit pictures and try to use the media as conduits for influencing public opinion in the United States," Snow said.
"The important thing to remember is the president's determined to win," he said. "The administration will "make adjustments as necessary," he said, "but the one thing that nobody should have any doubt about is that we're going to win." Snow described a "flipover point" that Bush and his cabal fear will mark the end of their free reign in Iraq.
Bush "was making a point that he's made before," Snow said, "which is that terrorists try to exploit pictures and try to use the media as conduits for influencing public opinion in the United States," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "We do not think that there's been a flipover point," he said. "The president's determined it's not going to happen with Iraq, because you have a president who is determined to win."
How many times did Nixon try to convince Americans that he could 'win' in Vietnam. Nixon, like Bush, tried to deflect responsibility for his own escalation of his war by reminding Americans about Johnson's role. He called his own military muckraking, "winning the peace."
Robert Ellsworth, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, described Rumsfeld's own ambivalence about his own role in the Nixon war scheme in a 'Frontline' interview: "Rumsfeld could see that we were not figuring out -- all of us could see, I mean, not all of us, but there were a lot of people in the Nixon administration who could see that we had not figured out, and were not figuring out, a strategy to win in Vietnam, Ellsworth wrote. Neither could we figure out a strategy to withdraw. And it was very frustrating. Now if you want to call those people 'doves', I was certainly one of those and Rumsfeld was certainly one of those."
Dove no more, Rumsfeld has become a dedicated hawk toward his Vietnam in Iraq. He's determined to prove that there can be some sort of victory in Iraq, perhaps determined, as well, to prove his conservative credentials after his softness on Vietnam alienated him from the Nixon cabal (which kicked him out of the inner circle just in time for him to avoid becoming enmeshed in Watergate). But, Rumsfeld still harbors the same ambivalence that he displayed over the Vietnam war over the lack of any plan to go with the Bush administration's desire for a 'win' in Iraq.
"You've got a situation where it's not possible to lose militarily," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon this week. He quickly backed that up by qualifying that, "It's also going to require more than military power to prevail."
The grudging admissions that military force alone will not bring about the democracy they claimed would emerge from underneath the rubble of their "shock and awe" and oppressive occupation, are the latest retreats from the justifications Bush and the republicans have used to deploy and keep our troops hunkered down in Iraq, circling their wagons around Maliki's puppet regime. It will be incredible to hear the explanations for their sacrificing of the over 2700 U.S. soldiers who gave their lives in defense of Bush's "ideological struggle" in Iraq, just because Bush let 9-11 thugs convince him Iraq was the "center" of his contrived war on terror.
Nixon's lofty justifications for his continued involvement in Vietnam collapsed under the reality of a perpetual war that was being fueled by our very presence in Vietnam which only served to harden resistance to the U.S. and any forces allied with us. At the end of decades of war, and thousands of American lives sacrificed, North Vietnamese forces took Saigon in 1975. Communist forces occupied the South, renaming Saigon Ho Chi Minh City. It's not hard to imagine Baghdad, in the future, under the control of the very forces our troops are battling today, much like the 'rebel' leader Sadr was able to ingratiate himself into the new Iraqi government.
Like Nixon, Bush is saddled forever with the deaths of those who got caught up in the horror of his self-validating war, leaving the rest of us to travel the road to hell as he deflects and lies to preserve his power in a political campaign, and as he leaves our soldiers in place on the losing side of a bloody civil war just to highlight and politically enhance his role as military commander. Bush pushes on, mesmerized by his own hypocritical rhetoric about freedom and democracy.
It's more than clear to all in the Middle East that these lofty ideals mask the bloody reality that the U.S., under Bush's leadership, has become the type of oppressor that all the suffering people around the world fear. The bloody sear of Bush's imperious invasion and occupation which has been allowed to impress its stain on Iraq, has proved more indelible than the purple ink-stained elections held under the occupation of the foreign invaders. There is no exile's paradise promised by American hosts to expatriate Iraqis willing to pose as the face of their imperialism. There is no American protectorate firmly established there to effectively funnel remnants of U.S. hegemony into the region in the form of mercenary carpetbaggers from the military industry.
It's all set to crumble for the Bush regime if the will of the American people comes through at the ballot box in November. I'll be celebrating with my own ink-stained show of solidarity with our fourth branch . . . dipped in good-old red, white, and blue.
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