Robert Scheer - What Bush Has Wrought

[kpete]

What Bush Has Wrought
Robert Scheer


Robert Scheer is editor of TruthDig, where this essay originally was published.

Every time I hear President Bush railing against those who would "cut and run" in Iraq instead of pursuing "victory," as he does almost daily, I think back to similar claims being made for the Vietnam debacle when I reported from Saigon in the mid-'60s. Back then, the US troop presence was lower and casualties fewer than now in Iraq, but the carnage, on all sides, would escalate for the next decade, as we waited miserably for the corner to be turned.

Then, as now, calls for setting a timetable for an orderly withdrawal were rejected as emboldening our enemy to attack America. Instead of a dignified withdrawal, we plunged ever deeper into the quagmire, leaving 59,000 US troops and 3.4 million Indochinese dead as tribute to our stupidity. Finally, there was nothing to do but "cut and run" in the most ignominious fashion. With our US personnel being lifted by helicopter from roofs near our embassy, it seemed like a low point for US influence, and there were dire predictions of communism's global dominance--just as there is today for the "Islamo-fascist" bogeyman the president has seized upon.

.............

This time, we are led by a false warrior who insists on playing the simpleton, ignoring his prestigious education at Andover and Yale in favor of what he presumes are the prejudices of Middle America. Or is this giving Bush, the son of a president, too much credit? After all, we know from the various insider memoirs that Bush was unaware that Islam is roughly divided into two rival sects, Sunni and Shiite, while just last week he bizarrely announced that our Iraq policy had never been "stay the course--as if he was unaware of the invention of video-recording equipment that had captured him saying just that countless times.

Whatever you call it, his approach is a sham and a disaster. It is long past time to let pragmatic realpolitik find a patchwork solution that the region and Iraqis can accept, peacefully. That is the expected advice from Bush family consigliere and troubleshooter James Baker and his Iraq Study Group, which is to report soon after the election. Truly frightening on this Day of the Dead, though, is that Bush probably won't listen to reason, unless the voters first soundly repudiate him in next week's election.


more at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061113/truthdig

[goclark]

1. Sheer is one of the best reporters in the business

When they forced him out of the LA Times, I canceled my subscription that day.

What a TRUTH SPEAKER!