Sunday, October 22, 2006
...but we didn't. [edit: and still don't know, that is the point...]
Sorry for the lack of updates. You know how it is...got distracted by a few things -- including a slight re-formatting here (feedback welcome) and a little test of some new blog-posting software. Off to the zoo today, but back later with a couple of things in the pipeline.
Here's something before I go. Jeff Jacoby (who I saw speak the other night...may be posting audio on that) writes about the unknowns of the future: If we had known then...
...Iraq is not the first war to plummet in popularity. At the start of the Civil War, many Northerners giddily anticipated a quick victory. Secretary of State William Seward ``thought the war would be over in 90 days," writes historian David Herbert Donald in his biography of Abraham Lincoln. ``The New York Times predicted victory in 30 days."
Had they had an inkling of the carnage to come, would they have cheered Lincoln's bid to save the Union? Long before the war's end, the cheers would turn to censure. By 1863, the war was being denounced in Congress as ``an utter, disastrous, and most bloody failure," while Lincoln and his administration were despised for their incompetence. ``There never was such a shambling, half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government," Senator William Pitt Fessendon of Maine said in disgust, ``before or since the world began."
The point isn't that the violent mess in Iraq today is analogous to the Civil War in 1863, or to the Ardennes in 1944, or to the burning of Washington in 1814. The point is that we don't know. Like earlier Americans, we have to choose between resolve and retreat, with no guarantees about how it will end. All we can be sure of is that the stakes once again are liberty and decency vs. tyranny and terror -- that we are fighting an enemy that feeds on weakness and expects us to lose heart -- and that Americans for generations to come will remember whether we flinched.
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My dad tells a story about WWII that seems to apply today. He used to go to the movies with his grandfather and before screening the movie they would show newsreels that discussed the war efforts. Essentially, they were propaganda pieces meant to encourage Americans that the war effort was going well. My dad’s grandfather, who had grown up in Italy and witnessed the trauma of war didn't like the newsreels. My dad says that his grandfather would ridicule the newsreels with his own sarcastic explanation of the war that went something like this. He would say that every American bullet would hit its target and kill the enemy, but that each time a German soldier shot his weapon, the bullets would fall harmlessly to the ground and the American soldiers would pick them up and eat them because they were candy.
It seems to me that many Americans may have reached the same point as my father’s grandfather with regards to the war on terror and the war in Iraq...the math just doesn't work and most voters have come to that conclusion. Regardless, we'll know for sure soon enough.
Read more here:
www.thoughttheater.com
It's so hard living through it . . . 'Wish we had the wisdom of hindsight. The worst is the faintness of heart of so many on both sides of the aisle these days, fanned mindlessly by an enemy-aiding-and-abetting MSM.
I LOVE the new arrangement of the blog . . . Emphasis on your blog posts at left, with all that other invaluable stuff -- the link to my own blog, for example :-) -- available but not distracting.
Jacoby, and rather precisely, strikes the right tone, lends the right perspective and frameing.
Led by the MSM, the Left/Dems and the Left in general, it's particularly depressing to see that the electorate in America this November, according to the polls, is not likely to "throw the bums out" as might be hoped. "The bums" being not most of the Republicans, but the influence peddling which the MSM and the Left/Dems have successfully promulgated. It's the bums who inhabit the MSM and the bums comprising the Left/Dems who need to be shown the door, instead polls are indicating, at least to this point, that the bums are going to remain in place and are even going to gain some ground.
As pertains to analogies or lessons to be learned from prior conflicts, see Robert Elegant's How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam, opening excerpt:
"IN THE EARLY 1960s, when the Viet Nam War became a big story, most foreign correspondents assigned to cover the story wrote primarily to win the approbation of the crowd, above all their own crowd. As a result, in my view, the self-proving system of reporting they created became ever further detached from political and military realities because it instinctively concentrated on its own self-justification. The American press, naturally dominant in an "American war," somehow felt obliged to be less objective than partisan, to take sides, for it was inspired by the engagé "investigative" reporting that burgeoned in the United States in these impassioned years. The press was instinctively "agin the government"—and, at least reflexively, for Saigon's enemies.
"During the latter half of the fifteen-year American involvement in Viet Nam, the media became the primary battlefield."
See also Peter C. Rollins on Sheehan's profoundly mendacious and ideologically bigoted "Bright Shining Lie".
The electorate needs to be respected, but it's hugely depressing to see what is now occurring nonetheless.
H/t commenter Rich at A/F for the Robert Elegant essay
While Robert Elegant's and Peter Rollins's germinal analyses, cited above, represent negative lessons which might be learned vis-a-vis the MSM's and the Left's forays in Vietnam, Netanyahu's Knesset address following the recent cross-border conflict with Hizbollah provides a more positive analogy and lesson. Convictions need to be tested, and will be tested, during the course of any sustained conflict, that goes without saying, but throwing out the baby with the bath water, discarding the valuable with the dross, is not the answer.
It's more than a little regretful that far more among the electorate don't see the MSM's and the Left/Dem's dross for what it is. There is a highly manipulative and superficial quality reflected in all this, and that sums up the regret all too well.
We need look no farther than to North Korea for the reason to stay the course in Iraq.