Bush Fails History: Both the Exam and the Truth

Author's note: Yesterday I set about to do an analysis of Bush's flawed Iraq speech in which he exploited every major American military venture since World War II in a tortured justification of his Iraq blunder.  When I came to his lie about a statement from Senator J William Fulbright, I limited my post to that one item.

Yesterday, Todd Gitlin made reference to my post in his own blog. For forty years I have had tremendous respect for Gitlin. Today I provide Gitlin's commentary on the Bush speech as well as my own that I omitted in favor of the Fulbright post.

An exerpt from Gitlin (from link above):

...Necessarily missing from Bush's account: As anyone serious about history knows, a necessary condition for the triumph of the Khmer Rouge was the devastating American bombing campaign in Cambodia. If you're looking for Iraq-Vietnam analogies, you'd want to look to the growth of Al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia as one consequence of the American invasion.

Outside Bush's fairy-tale melodrama of the awful travails of Southeast Asia, this same serious person knows that the genocidal Khmer Rouge Vietnamese regime was overthrown by--Vietnam. (None less than George McGovern urged the U. S. to do it, but Gerry Ford wasn't buying.) In the early 1980s, the U. S., under "Dictatorships and Double Standards" author Jeane Kirkpatrick at the UN, was supporting the Khmer Rouge claim to occupy the Cambodian seat there--anything to stick it to their Vietnam-sponsored rivals...

My comments that I did not publish yesterday:

Lies, disinformation, and syntax changes populate the the speeches of President George W. Bush as he rewrites history as it occurs. For those who thought Karl Rove was gone, it is clear that he is still in the White House.

• Bush draws parallels with World War II. He describes an attacking an enemy, the Japanese, and likens them to al Qaeda. That we went to war against Iraq, not the followers of Osama bin Laden is lost upon this fraternity boy who slept through too many U.S. history classes. Our entry into World War II was motivated for reasons far from controlling Middle Eastern Oil.
• Tragically, Bush's wish that, "Once people even get a small taste of liberty, they're not going to rest until they're free," is flawed. I join the President in wishing that all people craved freedom, but as we have seen in our our country, liberty and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms are trampled in the name of security.
• "At the outset of World War II there were only two democracies in the Far East -- Australia and New Zealand. Today most of the nations in Asia are free..." Comment: what irony. If Bush had attended his Asian history course, he would know that virtually every nation liberated since World War II gained its freedom not from United States military intervention but from the withdrawal of British, French, and Dutch imperialists.
• "In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution." Comment: Cambodia was peaceful until we destabilized that nation, resulting in the toppling of its legitimate government and the ascension to power of the horrid Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. Can you say Iraq and Pakistan?
• "If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits."  Comment: Our entry into Iraq was the greatest recruitment gain for al Qaeda.

Comments

[antpoppa]

This type of speech, were you selectively borrow, and misinterpret statements, should be very effective for those youths in our society who have no comprehension of the Vietnam war. I believe that Bush is counting on one of Fulbright's further points, i.e. that most people would never believe that the government could lie to them about such important facts. This Orwellian doublespeak, that the Bush regime has now taken out of fiction and put into reality, will be more complicated by the current media corporatization. {I believe there are only five global networks of news}. You're blog, and dissident blogs such as yours, will become prime targets as this doublespeak continues. The electronic media is an easy target.

[Dan Sebald]

This discussion I like--because it gets to the heart of U.S. involvement in foreign countries, specifically regarding methodology. Disregarding the more difficult issue of justification and morality on the matter (oh and actually being prepared for the adventures you endeavor), I'll speak about when and where democracy can thrive and why the Bush doctrine about spreading democracy is so flawed. (Sounds like I'm preparing a thesis, but I hope to not pontificate too much.) I suspect that an altruistic desire to allow other countries to experience any benefits of democracy really wasn't a prime motivation for Bush to invade Iraq, just a way to get Americans to go along with them.

Gitlin mentions the Cambodia bombing campaign by, as he says, "America". But perhaps that more accurately should be stated as "by the Nixon administration", because I'm not sure the country or congress, for that matter, was aware of these missions. (I was too young to follow the events of the day.) In fact, Sen. Proxmire was on the armed services committee when that info began to unfold. Whenever presidents act on their own (e.g., taking money congress allocated for one thing and then using to, say, fund a bad war plan in Iraq), it's not a good thing. Impeachable, if you ask me, for otherwise what is impeachable behavior then? Well anyway, yes that is exactly destabilizing a country as Paul states and contributes enormously to civil unrest. The "If we leave now, civil war will occur." argument is worth considering, but so is the "Why in the world did you do that, and can this be fixed by us?" argument.

Well, as to the flaw in this strategy of spreading democracy, it is just what you (Paul) and Gitlin refer to with regard to Sen Fulbright's (mis)quote. Yes, the fact that the people living in the country in question are poor (for lack of a word, but poor is a relative sort of thing really, in some cases), uneducated by contemporary standards and detached from rule. BTW, that's the way China had been for eons, empires came and went while the main livelihood of the vast majority of people was farming in some remote village without much say or concern in who was their ruler. In fact, I love this quote of Fulbright that was provided by one of Gitlin's readers:

"At their current stage of undevelopment these
populations have more basic requirements. They
need governments which will provide medical
services, education, birth control programs,
fertilizer, high-yield seeds and instruction
in how to use them."

Yes, exactly. One would argue this would be a justification for ridding Hussein, but nothing is so straightforward and easy. Rather, I'd go so far as to question the wisdom of sanctioning the people of any nation. Sanctioning a country's *government* from military items (not that the free flow of weapons should be the norm) is one thing, but sanctions (as was the policy of the Clinton administration) simply take away strength from the populace, those who would break away from oppression. The biggest problem a dictatorship will always have is the oppressed becoming empowered by the very things Fulbright mentions. So, the question becomes, Does sanctioning the sale of goods to a country only enable the dictatorship that America derides so?

OK, so getting to the point of why democracy can't be "grown" in a week, or a year, or imposed on people. Simply put, without an intellectual base, democracy can't take hold. By "intellectual" I don't necessarily mean "intelligent". Is democracy *the* great government ideology? Who knows? Certainly seems suspect at times, especially if everyone acts in their own self interest. (Essay worth reading some time: "Rules Of The Game" by Carl Sagan.) But if we use the United States as an example of a successful democracy (humor me for a moment), the big thing we had at the beginning of the revolution--which had cultivated decades before--was people writing and thinking about the notion of taxation without representation, inalienable rights, etc. Paine, Adams... the list goes on and on. And it wasn't just the "founders" discussing this. These ideas filtered their way through the populace by the press and word of mouth. One could make the case that this, in fact, is *the* most important part of a democracy and your best hope of escaping tyranny. And Iraq doesn't have this base, from what I see. Decades of state-run television and propaganda probably flushed notions of parliament from peoples memory.

It's well and good for a president's speech writers and neoconservative commentators to wax philosophical about democracy. Unfortunately, none of these people live in Iraq! I'm reminded of one story (if it's true) in Afghanistan where a villager shows up on election day thinking his registration card can be exchanged for food. Reread the Fulbright quote. Wealth isn't a precursor to successful democracy, but it sure does seem to help. In short, empowering the base, not crushing the regime seems a more well-intentioned way to go... assuming democretization is a worthy cause.

Here is another good quote from a recent Isthmus blast-from-the-past:

http://isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=7921

She [Meredith Green] and her colleagues went in thinking
“we were going to make great changes in some poor country,”
but “some of what I had to share wasn’t anything they
wanted or needed,” she says of her two years in Ecuador .

For Green this was a valuable lesson: learning “to respect
people, respect their values and realize ours are different,
not necessarily better.”

Of course, I wouldn't classify warlordism or dictatorship as a respectable value, but Ms. Green spoke words of wisdom.

In Paul's second last bullet point, I believe he meant to analogize Pakistan and Iran (not Iraq) to the ascension of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. I just hope this isn't meant to label Pakistan and Iran, but rather point out the unintentional consequences of the Bush administration's actions. The thing is, the majority of people living in Pakistan and Iran aren't barbarians. In the least, Iran will have to play a role in stabilizing Iraq simply because of the shared backgrounds and familial connections. It seems ridiculous to expect Iran to keep from meddling in an unstable country on its border. I just wish it eventually comes in the form of something above the table (regional conferences) rather than under (covert operations). Antagonizing the region won't help. Why can't the state department turn the Iraq civil unrest into a "helping your neighbor" sort of thing (then leave... and finance Iraq since we owe them) rather than being so adversarial about the whole power struggle in the region?

[Gary]

Bush didn't sleep through his history classes. He was either drunk or stoned in addition to his brain being filled with holes.