“Failure”
Posted on | August 25, 2007
The Washington Post editorial page, conveniently silent when we went to war, has now come out against it—in a backhanded way, using the word “failure” as though such a disastrous policy ever had a chance of succeeding (whatever the latter word could possibly mean for anyone not a Halliburton executive).
“Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric — which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq,” Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland begins his today’s editorial.
In the piece, Hoagland argues President Bush was unwise to invoke a comparison to the Vietnam War in pushing for a continuation of the US occupation of Iraq.
“For Americans, the most important comparison will be this one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms — whatever those terms are at any given moment,” Hoagland writes in the most-read story on the Post’s Web site Friday morning.
“Bush’s comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon’s ‘I am not a crook’ utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,’ in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president,” he writes.
Hoagland says Bush’s invocation of the “indisputably horrific consequences” for the Vietnamese and Cambodians in 1975 misses the point that “US involvement in Indochina became untenable when that engagement itself became a threat to America’s social fabric and national cohesion.”
Not to mention a threat to fifty thousand American lives.
Hoagland is still missing the point, then, or lives on so comfortable a planet that he has never had to consider the horrors of war. Rather than criticizing the neocons’ violent fantasies themselves, he has mustered the insight only to notice that the war in Iraq has been mishandled. Rather than lamenting the humanitarian catastrophe itself, he seems content to chide Bush for dishonesty. Had Hoagland been in charge, no doubt, the unprovoked invasion and conquest of a nation that was no threat would have been run differently, killing, wounding or rendering homeless fewer hundreds of thousands of people.
As usual, the Post is years behind the thinking world, and as always implicitly supporting the notion that might makes right.
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