It’s All So Familiar
Jun 30th, 2005 at 7:25 am by Susie
Bush sounded downright Johnsonian in talking about progress in Iraq. He cited rebuilt “roads and schools and health clinics,” not to mention improvements in “sanitation, electricity and water.” This, too, had a familiar ring. We got the same sort of statistics in Vietnam. Some of them were simply concocted, but most, I think, were sort of true. Roads were paved, schools were opened and village councils were elected — and yet, somehow, it never mattered. The newly elected village council could meet in the newly opened school and get there on a newly paved road — and spend the night planning an attack on U.S. forces. It is all so depressing.
In Vietnam, it took the United States forever to recognize that it was fighting not international communism but a durable and vibrant nationalist movement led by communists. Something similar may be happening in Iraq. Yes, foreign terrorists are flocking to the country. But the Sunni insurgency is a different thing. The Sunnis may work with foreign terrorists and gladly use their expertise, but their goals are not the same. The salient and depressing fact remains that no insurgency can survive for long without either the cooperation or the apathy of the populace. Someone’s making bombs, and someone’s not turning him in. Bush may extol Iraqi democracy, but at the moment not enough Iraqis feel it is worth dying for.
Finally, Bush descended to Vietnam-speak. This is the language used by the Johnson and Nixon administrations to obscure the truth by emitting a fog of numbers. Thus Bush cited the “8 million Iraqi men and women” who voted, the “30 nations” with troops in Iraq (a total joke, and the president knows it), the “40 countries” and “three international organizations” that have pledged “$34 billion” in reconstruction assistance (another joke), the “80 countries” that recently met in Brussels to aid Iraq, and the “160,000 security forces trained and equipped for a variety of missions” — one of them being, clearly, to stay out of harm’s way.
The key word here is, yet. It is too bad that Cohen did not say so more clearly. The course we are on ends with the equivalent of helicopters lifting off the roof somewhere in the Green Zone.
What Cohen heard…
He cited rebuilt “roads and schools and health clinics,� not to mention improvements in “sanitation, electricity and water.�
What Bush said…
“We’re improving roads and schools and health clinics. We’re working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity, and water.”
Cohen heard what the Bushies wanted him to hear - inprovements in sanitation, electricity and water. But that’s not what Bush said. He said they were “working” on it. That doesn’t mean theyre succeeding; in fact, measurably, they are NOT succeeding. But they chose phrasing to obscure that, and Cohen fell for it.
Lots of other did too, I bet.