David Halberstam: Romney's unlearned lesson
[David Halberstam is the author of ``The Best and the Brightest." His 21st book, ``The Coldest Winter," about the entry of Chinese troops into the Korean War, will be published in the fall of 2007.]
HOW LUCKY we are to have the governor of the state instructing the junior senator on the issue of Iraq, and making the case for the Al Qaeda-Baghdad connection, the very case the president and all his men tried to make so disingenuously a few years ago. How generous of him to shed his own credibility for party and president.
The Iraq war, of course, was a vast miscalculation from the start, as much of the senior uniformed military cautioned at the time. We punched our fist, quite predictably, into the largest hornet's nest in the world; are still operating at a complete deficit in intelligence on the ground; are watching a civil war spiral out of control; and are doing Al Qaeda's recruiting for it throughout the Arab world. We have in sheer geopolitical terms done Iran -- a much more dangerous country -- a great favor, removing the one regional counterbalance to it, and making Iran almost surely the long-range beneficiary of our miscalculations. What an extraordinary adventure it has been.
Governor Mitt Romney should take a page from the book of his father, one of the most attractive and admirable political figures of his era, and a man whose good name has surely made the son's political career a good deal easier. George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan and a presidential candidate, had made the mistake of endorsing the war in Vietnam early on, back when it was the fashionable thing to do, and then changed his mind, based on mounting evidence that it didn't work and that we, for a variety of historical reasons, were fighting nothing less than the birthrate of the nation. When attacked for changing his mind and asked why he had done it, he said he had been brainwashed by American officials in Saigon....
One night Kennedy and I had a very heated argument on his campaign plane. I had just come back from a second tour in Vietnam and knew all about how the brainwashing worked. I told Kennedy he had no right to attack Romney; it was brainwashing and was performed by high American officials whom the governor normally had every reason to trust. You were brainwashed too, I told Kennedy, and the people who did it were absolute experts at their craft. It was nothing less than a profession to them, and, by the way, they worked in your brother's administration. He subsequently dropped his attacks on Romney. There was a very good reason -- as Romney had changed his position on the war, so had Kennedy....
Read entire article at Boston Globe
HOW LUCKY we are to have the governor of the state instructing the junior senator on the issue of Iraq, and making the case for the Al Qaeda-Baghdad connection, the very case the president and all his men tried to make so disingenuously a few years ago. How generous of him to shed his own credibility for party and president.
The Iraq war, of course, was a vast miscalculation from the start, as much of the senior uniformed military cautioned at the time. We punched our fist, quite predictably, into the largest hornet's nest in the world; are still operating at a complete deficit in intelligence on the ground; are watching a civil war spiral out of control; and are doing Al Qaeda's recruiting for it throughout the Arab world. We have in sheer geopolitical terms done Iran -- a much more dangerous country -- a great favor, removing the one regional counterbalance to it, and making Iran almost surely the long-range beneficiary of our miscalculations. What an extraordinary adventure it has been.
Governor Mitt Romney should take a page from the book of his father, one of the most attractive and admirable political figures of his era, and a man whose good name has surely made the son's political career a good deal easier. George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan and a presidential candidate, had made the mistake of endorsing the war in Vietnam early on, back when it was the fashionable thing to do, and then changed his mind, based on mounting evidence that it didn't work and that we, for a variety of historical reasons, were fighting nothing less than the birthrate of the nation. When attacked for changing his mind and asked why he had done it, he said he had been brainwashed by American officials in Saigon....
One night Kennedy and I had a very heated argument on his campaign plane. I had just come back from a second tour in Vietnam and knew all about how the brainwashing worked. I told Kennedy he had no right to attack Romney; it was brainwashing and was performed by high American officials whom the governor normally had every reason to trust. You were brainwashed too, I told Kennedy, and the people who did it were absolute experts at their craft. It was nothing less than a profession to them, and, by the way, they worked in your brother's administration. He subsequently dropped his attacks on Romney. There was a very good reason -- as Romney had changed his position on the war, so had Kennedy....