"Well If You've Learned So Much From History-How Did You Get Us Involved In Another Quagmire?"

[kpete]

Ex-Nixon advisor blasts Bush's Vietnam comparison David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Wednesday August 22, 2007


'Well, if you've learned so much from history, Mr. President, how did you ever get us involved in another quagmire?'

In his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Wednesday, President Bush surprised many people by invoking the example of Vietnam in arguing against a withdrawal from Iraq. CNN invited David Gergen, who served as an advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, to comment on that aspect of Bush's speech.

"He may well have stirred up a hornet's nest among historians," Gergen stated. "By invoking Vietnam, he raised the automatic question, 'Well, if you've learned so much from history, Mr. President, how did you ever get us involved in another quagmire?' ... It's surprising to me that he would go back to that, and I think he's going to get a lot of criticism."

"This is not a man who's talking about compromise," Gergen emphasized "This is not a man who's talking about a Plan B. ... This a man saying, 'I'm hanging tough.'"

more at:
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/ExNixon_advisor_rejects_Bushs_Vietnam_comparison_0822.html

[CBHagman]

1. I suspect Bush was reacting to David Halberstam's last article.

If you haven't read the late David Halberstam's "The History Boys" from the August issue of Vanity Fair, you can find it here. It is utterly scathing.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/08/halberstam200708


Ironically, it is the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before, he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually he does this in the broadest—and vaguest—sense: History teaches us … We know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee, or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to read his Gibbon.

I am deeply suspicious of these presidential seminars. We have, after all, come to know George Bush fairly well by now, and many of us have come to feel—not only because of what he says, but also because of the sheer cockiness in how he says it—that he has a tendency to decide what he wants to do first, and only then leaves it to his staff to look for intellectual justification.

Note Halberstam's description of how the Republicans responded to Harry Truman, and recall that Bush in today's VFW speech mentioned the Republican reaction to the Korean War. This is Bush's idea of fighting back, rhetorically speaking -- not that it renders him either competent, honest, or humble.