The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Thursday, October 26, 2006
The Elite Media and Revisionist History
Will the Center Hold?
Depression apparently abounds these days. In the latest Time, Robert Galluci, the present Dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, pleads with us to talk to North Korea (“Let’s Make a Deal…”)—as if their present plutonium stockpiles did not originate during the Big Talk of the 1990s under the Carter/Clinton shuttles, or that a regime that has recently starved to death over 1 million of its own cares much about either talking or honoring anything that might come out of such discussions.
And why should Pyongyang concede anything, when its past talking, dissimulation, and nuclear enrichment earned it both a bomb and billions in food and fuel? All the communists need to do is update the discussions: instead of promising not to build a bomb, they can now promise not to test another bomb in exchange for more largess. Then after they let off accidentally, kinda of a second blast, they will promise not to launch a three-stage missile—for more cash, and on and on, all in the Rhineland/Anschluss/Sudenland/Poland manner.
Short a horrific war, about the only thing that will make Kim Jong Il cease is Chinese pressure—and about the only thing that might prompt the Chinese to pressure North Korea is the specter of successful, rich, and angry democracies, such as Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan pointing their newly acquired nuclear missiles at Beijing. All things considered, the thought of such states making nukes like Toyotas is a far scary nightmare for China that North Korea’s Taepodong missile is for us.
On the same pages, Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations, writes an essay “Would Defeat in Iraq Be So Bad?” in which he harkens back to Vietnam circa 1975, concluding that after we were defeated and fled ignominiously, the dominos did not fall in Southeast Asia and thus things were not all that “bad”. He is apparently forgetting the 1.5 million who were the boat people, and those sent to reeducation camps or executed, and the millions who lived since under communist totalitarianism rather than something like South Korea, and the holocaust in Cambodia that a chastised United States did not dare address, and the other late 1970s’ ripples like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Central American mess, the Iranian hostage crisis, and a nearly ruined and disheartened American military that followed from the perception of a defeated and demoralized United States.
The Metrosexual Mob
Watching and reading the recent Washington punditry, whether in print or on television, is a depressing spectacle. Almost all—Charles Krauthammer is the most notable exception—have somehow triangulated on the war, not mentioning why and how in the B.C. days they sort of, kinda, not really called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. For some the Road to Damascus was the looting or Abu Ghraib, for others the increasing violence. Still more now say the absence of WMD did the trick.
But almost none of the firebrands of 2003 speaks the truth behind the facade: They supported the war when it looked like few casualties and a quick reconstruction and thus confirmation of their own muscular humanitarianism—and then bailed along the way when they realized that wasn’t going to happen and the unpopular war might instead brand them as “war mongers”, “chicken-hawks” or just fools.
Instead of that honest admission, we get instead either cardboard cut-out villains of the “my perfect three-week war, your screwed-up three-year occupation” type—a Douglas Feith, Gen. Sanchez, or Paul Bremmer—or all sorts of unappreciated and untapped brilliance: from trisecting the country to “redeploying” to Kurdistan, or Kuwait, or Okinawa?
Apparently pundits think that the entire country has gone crazy and lost its memory that almost every cable news talking head, Time magazine pundit, Washington Post insider, and syndicated columnist—other than those at the Nation and the American Conservative—at the beginning supported the present war.
I have no problem with the notion that the perceived pulse of the battlefield governs ongoing attitudes toward the wisdom of conducting war—only with the denial of that truth. Pericles, after all, was fined after both the plague and Spartans roaming the fields of Attica disabused once zealot supporters that “his” war was going to be short. And a motion for censure of Churchill in July 1942 was discussed when the British were depressed after the fall of France, Singapore, and Tobruk, and knowledge that neither Bomber Command nor British forces in North Africa had done much to check Hitler. In contrast, had the United States had a republic secure and up and running in Baghdad 3 months after the end of the three-week war, at a cost of say, 400, fatalities, missing Weapons of Mass Destruction and all other the other complaints would not have been real issues, as supporters would have pointed to the other 22 writs of war in the October 2002 Congressional resolutions that are as valid now as they were then.
