Always W's War?
In response to this post, a reader comments:
Wrong. Never in our history has a war been so inextricably and justifiably attached to one man (at least one man's administration). This will ALWAYS be W's war, period. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.After the 1968 election, a foreign diplomat asked Henry Kissinger if the Nixon administration would make the same mistakes in Vietnam as the Johnson administration. Kissinger's jocular but prophetic reply: "No, we will not repeat their mistakes. We will make our own mistakes and they will be completely our own."
posted by The Cunning Realist at Thursday, June 14, 2007
28 Comments:
Well, that's an interesting anecdote, but I'm not sure how it bears on the issue at hand. I stand by my statement you quoted. Really, it's beyond me how somebody could believe we'll all forget how this war started. The Vietnam war's genesis is nowhere near as clear and obvious.
Hell, there were three different US presidents involved in Vietnam before Nixon ever got there to do his and Kissinger's unique form of bunglng.
People getting their news from the internet will probably not forget who started this war. The rest of America who aren't really sure why Saddam attacked the U.S. and then wouldn't let the U.N. inspectors into Iraq will be told it is the next president's war. And they will believe it.
Saddam attacked the US?
From the best of my record collection it seems that Paris Hilton and Osama Bin Laden drove the space shuttle into the world trade center causing Enron to go bankrupt. Scooter Libby tried to save us but the liberal media supported the terrorists and gave them amnesty.
Sounds like the inverse of how Bierce differentiated between liberals and conservatives. Bierce said in The Devil's Dictionary that "conservatives are enamored of existing evils" while "liberals wish to replace them with new ones."
Nope. This mess is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Whoever wins in 2008 will get much of the blame no matter what they do.
Since i'm certain the next president will not remove US forces, in 30 years you'll hear arguments about the Iraq that sound a lot like this: "Bush 1 started it, then Clinton made things worse by killing 100s of thousands of Iraqis with his non- stop bombing and sanctions. Bush 2 only continued the war, which [fill in blank] eventually expanded and then lost."
With all respect, i believe the first commenter is either very young, or hasn't been paying much attention.
Did Nixon want to end the war but somehow fail to do so throughout his first term? Or were his goals the same as Ike's, JFK's,and LBJ's, and so the war continued?
Likewise, do Republicans and Democrats differ on the goals in Iraq?
Wish I were young! But I'm afraid 60 doesn't qualify for that. (Is it your habit to belittle people whose opinions you don't share?)
I think you are, for one reason or an other, overlooking how much of an abberation this war is from all others in our history. Never has one man been so clearly and unabashedly its cause. Never. And no matter what happens in later years and presidencies, who can ever forget the way it was forced on us by this madman?
Don't forget, it's all on tape, and there are an awful lot of people who are heavily vested in reminding us, with proof, of the ugly facts about this war's cause. This ain't your father's war.
We'll see.
I think Nixon ended up owning the Vietnam War because he expanded it - invading Cambodia, mining Haiphong harbor and bombing Hanoi. I don't see any democratic candidate looking to expand the Iraqi occupation into something equivalent.
Well it takes two to pull a nation into a stupid war.
Our two donkeys are the GOP & Bush and they haven't gotten any smarter in the last 4 years.
Look, if the next President stays in Iraq for 4 or 5 more years in a combat role, then, yeah, it becomes his war (I say his because Obama is going to win the nomination, SHE will not). But if the next President gets out of Iraq in the first 18 months of their administration, then the chaos that follows will be Bush's chaos.
Sorry, i wasn't meaning to belittle you at all.
I doubt the next president will pull up stakes. It's politically tough to come in and lose a war, even if it was lost the day W started it (which it was). Most of the people running care more about the politics and party loyality than doing the right thing. Which is generally always the case (cynical!). Aside for Ron Paul and Graval, the two candidates being most ignored, none are calling for US troops to leave immediatly. Once in power, i don't see that changing.
As for this never happening before.... well your old enough to remember a certain incident, in a certain gulf in a certain small asian nation. This has happened before, and the prime culprit for initiating the mess shares blame with Nixon.
Again, there are what 15 or so candidates right now, and only two will openly say they will remove troops immediately. This despite the fact that most people in the country want the war to end.
Why would anyone think that the next president will get us out of this war? They only way we'll get the troops home is for congress to cut funds. They were scared to do it under Bush, why would they do it under the next president.
We're in for the long haul
Scary isn't it how history can repeat itself. I think we won't be under real pressure to leave until the casualties reach a certain number, say 10000 dead and over 100000 wounded. As everybody else has said, nobody wants to take responsibility for pulling the plug on this war. We'll leave when everybody across the whole political spectrum is sick of it. But we are a long way from that point, that's for sure.
It's beyond me how people like Andrew Sullivan and Greg Djerejian continue to opine after the monumental misjudgment they showed in voting for Bush and supporting the invasion. Some people have no shame.
It's rather difficult to respect an opinion from "anonymous," but here goes:
(You Said) Never has one man been so clearly and unabashedly its cause. Never.
Well, I think Mr. Anonymous needs to read a little more history. How about the Civil War? Wasn't that one man? It certainly wasn't a carryover from one administration to another.
And how about McKinley's war? The lies surrounding that war were pretty similar to what's going on now.
The difference between this war and all other wars is that the lies are so much in the open now and the Bush Administration is still denying them; then there's the awful fact that this was was sold as a "just war" but is so far from meeting any of St. Augustine's criteria for a just war that it's inextricably ridiculous to even dignify a response to anyone who claims that it is. And the pre-emptive strike doctrine that will surely be made a part of future foreign policy doctrine is spine-tingling to say the least. The future looks rather bleak, I'd say.
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