Mark Helprin digs deep into Bush rhetoric and comes up empty.
The Wall Street Journal contributing editor and Claremont Institute Fellow cannot find anything for which to praise the Bush administration.
More below the fold:
Bush repeatedly denounced "nation building" in the manner of a street tough mocking a "girly boy", but then he engaged in it:
God help the army that must fight for an idea rather than an objective.
(...)
The more that nation building in Iraq is in doubt, the more the mission creeps into a doubling of bets in hope of covering those that are lost. Now the goal is to reforge the politics, and perforce the culture, not merely of Iraq but of the billion-strong Islamic world from Morocco to the South Seas. That--evangelical democracy writ overwhelmingly large--is the manic idea for which the army must fight.
(emphasis added)
Helprin tears apart any analogy between Iraq and Germany or Japan:
If we could transform Germany and Japan, then why not Iraq? Approximately 150,000 troops occupy Iraq, which has a population of 26 million and shares long open borders with sympathetic Arab and Islamic countries where popular sentiment condemns America. The Iraqi army was dispersed but neither destroyed nor fully disarmed. The country is divided into three armed nations. Its cities are intact.
In contrast, on the day of Germany's surrender, Eisenhower had three million Americans under his command -- 61 divisions, battle hardened. Other Western forces pushed the total to 4.5 million in 93 divisions. And then there were the Russians, who poured 2.5 million troops into the Berlin sector alone.
All in all, close to 10 million soldiers had converged upon a demoralized German population of 70 million that had suffered more than four million dead and 10 million wounded, captured, or missing. No sympathizers existed, no friendly borders. The cities had been razed. Germany had been broken, but even after this was clear, more than 700,000 occupation troops remained, with millions close by.
The situation in Japan was much the same: a country with a disciplined, homogenous population, no allies, sealed borders, its cities half burnt, more than three million dead, a million wounded, missing, or captured, its revered emperor having capitulated, and nearly half a million troops in occupation. And whereas both Germany and Japan had been democracies in varying degree, Iraq has been ruled by a succession of terrifying autocrats since the beginning of human history.
(emphasis added)
The occupation of Iraq is something like 1 soldier for every 170 citizens. The occupation of Germany was 1 soldier for every 7 citizens. The geographical, political, social comparison of Germany/Japan with Iraq comes up completely empty. Utterly different situations.
And, Helprin notes, Bush is ignoring the next threat around the corner: China. While Rumsfeld remakes our military into his version of lean, mean, and quickly deployable, he is cutting ship-building, cutting advanced weapons, cutting what we may need if we ever have a mid-Pacific face off with China.
Defence procurement and weapons systems can work 20 years out. The cuts being made today will have a profound impact on our defenses from now to 2025 and beyond. Just the situation we found ourselves in before WWII.
If anything, I believe that Bush is repeating World War I as the First World War on Terror. All the same mistakes are being made: horrific battlefield casualties. Cruel and harsh treatment of defeated societies - recall punitive sanctions on Germany that forced their economy to tank, building bitterness toward the west? Today it is torture and Quran abuse, building bitterness toward the west. Imperialistic language about "the war to end all wars" is now "You are with us or against us" in the Global War on Terror.
We are doomed to repeat WWII as well. Hopefully, our leaders by that point will have learned from Bush's mistakes, treat prisoners as we'd like our troops treated, and generally behave decently to our enemies as we did with Germany and Japan after WWII ended.
But, last night's speech ended all hope that Bush would ever change course. Bush is dooming us to a second, more ghastly war. Bush is leaving us open to many more vulnerabilities - unnecessarily - as Helprin points out. And the consequences will be enormous.
If we cannot convince your conservative, your Bush loving, your Republican friends and family with Helprin's article, what will ever work?
(This is my first diary. I hope it's been done correctly.)