WHO NEEDS HISTORY? GEORGE BUSH

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Arrogance breeds disdain for history which guarantees failure, as George Bush is proving with his disaster in Iraq.

By Stewart Nusbaumer

When history doesn’t exist, anything is possible. You can charge into a war with too few troops who are poorly equipped with paltry international support and an incoherent plan to secure the country and no idea how to develop the peace and you will still win. That is, if your commander-in-chief is from Texas.

In Texas, toughness is a birthright -- “Don’t mess with Texas.” In Texas, there is no need for history because the enemy will soon be “history.” In Texas, people are different.

But Iraq is not Texas and Iraqis aren't impressed with Texans. And in Iraq we’re getting beat like a snake that --

“Just hang on there buddy,” the outraged voice of Texas rudely interrupts. “Things ain’t bad like you guys say. The cotton-picking media can’t recognize success if they saw it.”

As a more or less legitimate member of the profession -- Society of Professional Journalists card number 522057 -- I feel this hypothetical outraged voice of Texas is addressing me. Actually, it is addressing me. The voice is correct, however, that the only way bona fide journalists can make it in this profession is by cultivating a torrid love affair with chaos and misery. The good has no future in journalism, has little presence.

“OK,” I instruct the voice, “in the name of journalistic fairness, let’s take a quick tour of the positive turning points that have rushed out of Iraq.”
“Bring them on,” Texas bellows.

There was the fall of Saddam’s statue, we were told that was the end of the war. There was Bush's “Mission Accomplished” speech on the aircraft carrier that was also the end of the war. There was a provisional government with an appointed prime minister that was the beginning of the end of the war. There was the election last January that was almost the end of the war. There was the victory of Falluja that might be the end of the war. There was 1,861 killed Americans -- for them that was the end of the war.

Sidestepping the dead soldiers -- the American way to duck this unfortunate reality is by continuously reciting the cliché “freedom is not free” -- did you notice that in Iraq we appear to be sliding backward? We have gone from the end of the war, to the beginning of the end of the war, to almost the end of the war, to might be the end of the war. Fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson gave us the same performance in Vietnam, backward to failure.

But that’s OK, since any day now the Iraqi military, which for over two years we have been training, will learn what end of the rifle that bullets come out of.

Then they will take care of everything, just like the South Vietnamese army took care of everything. But Americans are an impatient lot, so a new turning point in the war is being rolled out, as soon as the Pentagon finishes writing the paper. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, unable to contain his exuberance, has proclaimed that the Iraqi Constitution “may be the most powerful weapon we have against the terrorists.” Now our “possibly most powerful weapon” is a piece of paper written in northern Virginia? Things are not sounding good to me.

“You guys,” the voice of Texas sighs, “are just whipped by this negative thinking.”

“I admit it, I admit it,” throwing my hands up. “I’m hooked on reality.”

“There you go again. It just ain’t worth talking to you boys.”

The New History

I'm sorry, I got carried away and said a, well, untruth. There is history in Texas. It’s the history of the Alamo and the history of the cowboy. And there is a new history brewing in the tumbleweed mind, a history that not unusually comes on the desperate heels of a lost war. It’s a history that will intoxicate the faithful and spike them into a wild frenzy of Texas-size hatred.

I received a preview of this miserable history a few months ago in a bar somewhere on the outskirts of Dallas, or maybe it was Austin -- all Texas looks the same to me, not good. But I do remember the dive was called Those Damn Yankees, or maybe that is just what the drunks kept screaming. Texans don’t make good drunks. Anyway, this new history, it turns out, is an old history written in 1968 or 1969 after the fantasy of Vietnam had been stomped brutally by reality. So what the cowboy yokels did was to simply put a line through Vietnam and write Iraq -- presto there is the new history. These people are not keen on imagination.

This history says the following. The Vietnam Iraq War was lost by the American press -- our soldiers were stabbed in the back by our own lowdown media. It claims that the Vietnam Iraq War was lost by those drugged-up un-American antiwar protestors. Although beaten unfairly on the home front, our troops never lost a single battle on the battlefield in Vietnam Iraq. This history insists the Vietnam Iraq War was lost by the politicians -- those Washington weasels double-crossed the heroic Vietnamese Iraqis in their struggle for freedom. And now Evil Communism Arabs will take over the world.

So a new nasty history is brewing in the hinterlands of America, the same history that America had in the wake of Vietnam, a history that will burst upon the country as the Iraq War slips into the drain of the impossible and becomes another failed Texan-led American war. Texas leadership is on a real roll, two for two. The real purpose of this history is to distort Iraq to avoid the lessons of Iraq and to distort America to hate Americans. The lessons of history have no role in the mind of this history. Most of all, this ugly distortion of history is to justify slamming those who lost our “noble cause.” Those lowdown, un-American, weasel liberals.

But that is the nasty political future exploiting history for hate, hardly worth considering when the present is so gruesome and depressing. There is something worth considering: the history of the man who led America into its second quagmire in less than a half century.

If the Texan in the White House had studied the Vietnam War -- many in his generation studied Vietnam on field trips -- he would have understood the strength of guerrilla warfare and the limits of U.S. power. He would have understood low-tech asymmetrical warfare stymies our high-tech military and then grinds down public support for a war. But in Texas there is no history, except the Alamo and cowboys, neither of which know anything about today. And there is the history of hating liberals, which George Bush knows a lot about. But hating liberals won’t win the war in Iraq. It only wins political wars in America.