Michael Currie Schaffer: Wait a Minute, Crocker: Iraq Today is America from 1776-1965?
[Michael Currie Schaffer is working on a book about the pet industry.]
George Bush's acolytes have never been particular sticklers for accuracy when it comes to their analogies. Supporters have variously compared the president to such different personages as Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill. They've been just as varied in evoking bygone parallels for Bush's mission in Iraq. The situation there has over the past four years been likened to post-surrender Germany, post-armistice Korea, and post-Tet Vietnam. But perhaps the most troubling metaphor was the one rolled out on Capitol Hill last week by Ambassador Ryan Crocker: Iraq, he explained, is just like ... the United States of America....
The essence of Crocker's reasoning declares that the situation in Iraq between 2003 and the present is roughly akin to the situation back home between, oh, 1776 and 1965. In the United States, dealing with the fallout from George III's overthrow required a failed first government, a complex Constitutional convention, several grand compromises over the expansion of slavery, a devastating civil war, a constitutional amendment over suffrage, and blood on the bridge at Selma before we got the open democracy we now have. In Iraq, he suggests, the fallout from Saddam Hussein's overthrow will take similar amounts of heavy lifting. They'll have to accomplish all those same tricky acts of statesmanship that faced us--splitting up revenues, agreeing on national economic policies, juggling individual rights against state needs, and, you know, learning not to slaughter one another in large numbers.
So if it's all a nice neat parallel, it must also hold that the strife of those painful nineteen early decades would have been eased by the presence of 160,000 heavily armed foreign troops. After all, the Iraqis aren't so different from the Americans--and the administration insists our presence is a boon to them, right? ...
Read entire article at New Republic
George Bush's acolytes have never been particular sticklers for accuracy when it comes to their analogies. Supporters have variously compared the president to such different personages as Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill. They've been just as varied in evoking bygone parallels for Bush's mission in Iraq. The situation there has over the past four years been likened to post-surrender Germany, post-armistice Korea, and post-Tet Vietnam. But perhaps the most troubling metaphor was the one rolled out on Capitol Hill last week by Ambassador Ryan Crocker: Iraq, he explained, is just like ... the United States of America....
The essence of Crocker's reasoning declares that the situation in Iraq between 2003 and the present is roughly akin to the situation back home between, oh, 1776 and 1965. In the United States, dealing with the fallout from George III's overthrow required a failed first government, a complex Constitutional convention, several grand compromises over the expansion of slavery, a devastating civil war, a constitutional amendment over suffrage, and blood on the bridge at Selma before we got the open democracy we now have. In Iraq, he suggests, the fallout from Saddam Hussein's overthrow will take similar amounts of heavy lifting. They'll have to accomplish all those same tricky acts of statesmanship that faced us--splitting up revenues, agreeing on national economic policies, juggling individual rights against state needs, and, you know, learning not to slaughter one another in large numbers.
So if it's all a nice neat parallel, it must also hold that the strife of those painful nineteen early decades would have been eased by the presence of 160,000 heavily armed foreign troops. After all, the Iraqis aren't so different from the Americans--and the administration insists our presence is a boon to them, right? ...