Clift: Who’s Fooling Whom?(*'s Speech like Nixon's in Nov '69)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10298373/site/newsweek/

It’s hard to know which to admire more, the choreography or the chutzpah. White House spinmeisters put up banners that blared PLAN FOR VICTORY in case anybody missed the message in President Bush’s latest iteration of his Iraq policy in a speech on Wednesday at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The photo the following day on the front page of The New York Times showed Bush bathed in the Navy colors of blue and gold and heroically positioned as though standing on the bridge of a battleship. All he needed were some stripes on his sleeve and he’d be ready for the lead in "H.M.S. Pinafore."

No modern president has been as blatant about putting himself before military audiences, a setting meant to convey strength. But the ploy has run its course. What this latest speech before a captive audience of midshipmen conveys is weakness. Bush can’t go out before a more general audience. “The public distrust of him has grown so great, he’s become like Lyndon Johnson trapped in a policy that’s terribly unpopular,” says historian Robert Dallek. “And he’s as dogged as Johnson to staying the course and seeing it through to victory.”

<snip>

Dallek is working on a book about President Nixon, which means he is deep into research about the Vietnam era. Hearing Bush tout his policy of Iraqization reminds Dallek of Nixon’s Vietnamization speech, which he made to the American people in November 1969. The idea was to train and equip South Vietnamese forces to take over combat responsibilities, and to bring American troops home. Sound familiar? At that point, the war had been raging for four years; there were 540,000 troops in Vietnam, and 31,000 had been killed in action. The number of dead would swell to more than 58,000 before “peace with honor” was declared in January ’73. Secret messages since made public reveal that Nixon and his foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger, came to understand that Vietnamization was a failing enterprise well before Congress, tired of being misled by rosy scenarios, cut off funding for the war.

think much of monkeyboy's grasp on reality, does she?

And it's not just bush it's the corporate media, too..they're just as responsible as bush for all this carnage.

thinks it was something for bush* to be proud of, or that they thought it might swing popular opinion. This is a good article, I like Eleanor..a great name, by the way

"Looking back, Dallek cites two turning points in media commentary about the war. The first was an Aug. 7, 1967, front-page story in The New York Times by R. W. Apple, Jr., declaring Vietnam a "stalemate." The other was Walter Cronkite's broadcast on Feb. 27, 1968, when he reached a similar conclusion. "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," he noted. There are no comparable media figures today, but Dallek believes when the history of the Iraq conflict is written, it will recognize the impact of two very different figures. The first is Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mother who gave Bush the summer vacation from hell, when she camped outside his Crawford, Texas, ranch and broke through the sterile bubble that kept Bush at a safe distance from the war's impact. The other is Democrat John Murtha, who forced the debate that Republicans didn't want and Democrats were afraid to have: how do we end this war we can't win and can't afford to lose?

Nixon had a keener grasp of the dire situation he was in, and he didn't start talking to the portraits in the White House until he was engulfed by Watergate. Bush is so cut off as president that he was able to think Hurricane Katrina was not a big deal until an aide burned him a DVD of the television-news images. The commander in chief is so coddled as a leader that he’s probably sincere when he says we're winning in Iraq. He doesn't allow himself or anybody else to challenge his assumptions. Bush does not want to go down in history as the president who lost in Iraq. His strategy to the extent he has one is to hang tough and let whoever succeeds him take the fall.

Bush says he won't rest until there is complete victory and the Iraqis can take care of their own security, which nitpickers might wish to point out Iraqis were able to do under Saddam. The real question is not what we accomplish in Iraq, but at what cost. Is it worth the lives lost and maimed, American and Iraqi, and the billions of dollars that could have been spent here at home? It's going to take more than a slick advertising campaign to sell that as a victory."

and where it got us, and how remarkably similar this Irag strategy is.


Rec'd.

of ! They've made such a mess of things, as Gen Zinni said.