Reading the transcript of President Bush's speech last night, I was struck by how much it sounded like the reasons Richard Nixon gave the nation in 1970 for sending troops into Cambodia; it was a last-ditch effort to win the war in Vietnam by invading a neutral country and widening the war. The military benefits were overwhelmed by the politics at home, leading to domestic unrest, including the murder of four student demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio, and the first real moves by Congress to limit the funding of the war without Congressional approval. Sound familiar?
May 1970
The familiarity does not end there. The president's supporters are all ready to blame the Democrats if this newest effort does not succeed; vide David Brooks:
If the Democrats don’t like the U.S. policy on Iraq over the next six months, they have themselves partly to blame. There were millions of disaffected Republicans and independents ready to coalesce around some alternative way forward, but the Democrats never came up with anything remotely serious.The fact that the Republicans and the president have been running the war for nearly four years and the Democrats have been in power for a week is irrelevant when there's a political battle to be won.
It is the same scenario Richard Nixon faced in 1970 when he was entering the mid-term elections and did so with a vengence and a strident tone that painted the opponents of the war in Vietnam as anti-American commie pinko hippie-types. History proves that that tactic was a failure; the Republicans lost seats in the House in the 1970 mid-term elections. Nixon's paranoia, never far from the surface, emerged full-blown as he prepared to run for re-election in 1972 and set in motion the events that would eventually lead to his downfall. This time, however, President Bush has already lost the election and he can't run again, so the best he can hope for is find someone else to blame: the Iraqi government, the Democrats, or anybody else.
What came through loud and clear in the president's address last night was his sense of desperation. It's not about the future of Iraq, it's not about the lives that have been lost and will be lost. It's not even about the threats, real or imagined, of global terrorism that have exploded since the Bush administration decided to swat the hornets nest with a stick or the destruction of America's credibility or role in making the world safer and more democratic. It never has been. Last night Mr. Bush may have dressed up his reasons in the tortured rhetoric that he is so fond of using (at one point saying "our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary" when there is ample evidence to prove it is neither), but what it came down to was a case of prime time flop-sweats when, like Richard Nixon, he found himself unable to end the war because it would make him look bad. So forget the advice of the generals, the Iraq Study Group, and the American electorate; he will forge on so that future generations will look back and not judge him too harshly.
What a terrible price to pay for a legacy.
