David Halberstam: The History Boys

[Wetzelbill]

His last article. RIP David. -WB


The History Boys
By David Halberstam
Vanity Fair

August 2007 Issue

In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman - unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated - while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.

We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over - indeed before it really began - and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale - and perhaps most surprisingly - Bush has become Harry Truman.

We have lately been getting so many history lessons from the White House that I have come to think of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the late, unlamented Rumsfeld as the History Boys. They are people groping for rationales for their failed policy, and as the criticism becomes ever harsher, they cling to the idea that a true judgment will come only in the future, and history will save them.

Ironically, it is the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before, he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually he does this in the broadest - and vaguest - sense: History teaches us … We know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee, or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to read his Gibbon.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070507A.shtml

[genie_weenie]

1. Kick for a well written

exploration of the bush cabal's lack of compassion and care for regular people and the bunker mentality of bush.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. Excellent read

Too much of the time, America thinks of history only when it is involved. Remembering Stalingrad and its impact on WWII puts Yalta into perspective--and shows how out of touch Bush is.

The paragraphs on Bush's psychology are excellent, too.

[KoKo]

3. The Perils of Empire.......from the article....good points..

III. The Perils of Empire

You don't hear other members of the current administration citing the lessons of Vietnam much, either, especially Cheney and Karl Rove, both of them gifted at working the bureaucracy for short-range political benefits, both highly partisan and manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in understanding and learning about the larger world. As Joan Didion pointed out in her brilliant essay on Cheney in The New York Review of Books, it was Rumsfeld and Cheney who explained to Henry Kissinger, not usually slow on the draw when it came to the political impact of foreign policy, that Vietnam was likely to create a vast political backlash against the liberal McGovern forces. The two, relatively junior operators back then, were interested less in what had gone wrong in Vietnam than in getting some political benefit out of it. Cheney still speaks of Vietnam as a noble rather than a tragic endeavor, not that he felt at the time - with his five military deferments - that he needed to be part of that nobility.

Still, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn't see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world. As in Vietnam, our military superiority is neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their weaponry fits an asymmetrical war, and they have the capacity to blend into the daily flow of Iraqi life, as we cannot. Our allies - the good Iraqi people the president likes to talk about - appear to be more and more ambivalent about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to share many of our geopolitical goals.

The book that brought me to history some 53 years ago, when I was a junior in college, was Cecil Woodham-Smith's wondrous The Reason Why, the story of why the Light Brigade marched into the Valley of Death, to be senselessly slaughtered, in the Crimean War. It is a tale of such folly and incompetence in leadership (then, in the British military, a man could buy the command of a regiment) that it is not just the story of a battle but an indictment of the entire British Empire. It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude. The arrogance of power, Senator William Fulbright called it during the Vietnam years.

I have my own sense that this is what went wrong in the current administration, not just in the immediate miscalculation of Iraq but in the larger sense of misreading the historical moment we now live in. It is that the president and the men around him - most particularly the vice president - simply misunderstood what the collapse of the Soviet empire meant for America in national-security terms. Rumsfeld and Cheney are genuine triumphalists. Steeped in the culture of the Cold War and the benefits it always presented to their side in domestic political terms, they genuinely believed that we were infinitely more powerful as a nation throughout the world once the Soviet empire collapsed. Which we both were and very much were not. Certainly, the great obsessive struggle with the threat of a comparable superpower was removed, but that threat had probably been in decline in real terms for well more than 30 years, after the high-water mark of the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. During the 80s, as advanced computer technology became increasingly important in defense apparatuses, and as the failures in the Russian economy had greater impact on that country's military capacity, the gap between us and the Soviets dramatically and continuously widened. The Soviets had become, at the end, as West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt liked to say, Upper Volta with missiles.

[Ms. Clio]

4. k & r

And it really emphasizes the tragedy of his death -- we can't afford to lose the truth-tellers.

[JitterbugPerfume]

5. K& R

because this needs to be read by every thinking DUer ( which is all of us or we wouldn't be here)

[Rex]

6. K&R

As a history boy, I take great offense everytime Dubya or one of his asshole cronies open their mouths to rewrite history or use it as a tool against the civilian population - hey George, history is based on the most valid facts we have at the present time.

What the FUCK do you think you're doing?

Do you and Cheney really think this stuff is going to work?

Really?

[Wetzelbill]

7. Shameless kick

:)

[tomreedtoon]

8. Didn't Bush say he didn't care about history?

Something about "when history comes around we'll all be dead" or something like that? Now he seems to be clinging to the idea of history.

[Bozita]

9. If I see David Halberstam's name in the OP, I reflexively K&R it.

Scottie Reston was my first idol from the print journalism world.

David Halberstam was the second.

[eppur_se_muova]

10. They make two basic mistakes --

1) They compare themselves to the good guys; and

2) They compare themselves to the victors.

DUer's who call him Bushitler or Chimpolini have hit on the more appropriate historical comparisons.

[Kurovski]

11. Kick.

:kick:

[never cry wolf]

12. Kick for a great read

Halberstam has it nailed.

[Wetzelbill]

13. he's awesome for sure

:)