Blumenthal: Bush takes refuge in history

[kskiska]

Images of the second world war pepper the president's rhetoric - but the one word you won't hear him say is Vietnam

Shock and awe was more than the first phase of the invasion of Iraq. It was the premise of Bush's foreign policy. Fear of unrivalled power would prompt the dominoes to fall - the dominoes being the traditional western allies. Unilateralism (depicted as the coalition of the willing) would yield in submission. The spectacle of Iraqi democracy, a beacon to the Arab world, would refute argument and opposition.

On this gamble, the entire edifice of Bush's policy rested. From the "cakewalk" would follow the collapse of Iranian influence, the rescue of Saudi Arabia from radical Islamist threat, Palestinian quiescence and instant solution of the Middle East crisis, the rapid spread of democracy across the former Ottoman empire, the US blessed by the grateful Iraqi street as it withdrew its military forces, leaving the leader of "free Iraq," former exile Ahmad Chalabi, in charge, and the French reduced to anxious waiters only seeking to please Bush with his order.

Now the FBI investigates neoconservatives in the Pentagon to discover who may have given secret US intelligence to Chalabi that he allegedly passed to the Iranians. The Iraqi governing council, a US creation, has transmogrified itself into the interim government, having shed Chalabi, hoping that its new identity will lend it a mask of legitimacy. Al-Qaida has found fresh fields for its deadly work. The Saudis cannot protect western businessmen from terrorism. The Middle East peace process is in ruins. The US casualty rate reached and then exceeded 800 dead soldiers on Memorial day. The French case that there was not a WMD threat, and invading Iraq would lead to fragmentation of the country and trigger more terrorism, has been vindicated.

Bush's emissaries cannot decide whether Iraq can be a democracy or at best a warlord state like Afghanistan. They plead before the UN, once spurned, for symbolic justification. Meanwhile, Bush launches a month of European travel, less diplomacy than a tableau vivant of international cooperation that, upon his departure from the stage, will instantly dissolve into grim realpolitik. As polls show him at his low ebb, he hopes that the American public will accept the illusion as reality and reject the reality as illusion.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1230306,00.html

[Demeter]

1. History Doesn't Suffer Fools Gladly

History reams them out and hangs them up to dry. Bush's only hope is the Aryan Nation and its ilk, who have an uncanny ability to distort reality for itself and hide in the cracks of society.