The hard sell

President Bush made a speech at the American Legion National Convention in Salt Lake City on Thursday and tried again to convince the nation that there is hope for success in Iraq.

The president's speeches are beginning to resemble infomercials. There's an enthusiastic audience, a lot of illustration, and a lot of repetition. And much like a product in an infomercial, you should look very closely before you buy what they're trying so hard to sell you.

It's one thing to identify a problem (Terrorists are breeding like rabbits in the failed and corrupt countries of the Muslim world! There's no time to cook but no one likes leftovers!), it's another thing to identify a solution (Free and democratic governments should replace the failed and corrupt governments! We need a quick and easy way to turn leftovers into a tasty treat!), and it's something else again to prove that what you're selling will actually get it done.

For all the talk about completing the mission, the president has yet to explain how the U.S. military can make a foreign government function effectively, even if we keep our troops in Iraq forever. (And save your money, an electric contact grill is not likely to turn last night's meatloaf and a tortilla into anything you want to see again.)

Last November, President Bush spoke at the U.S. Naval Academy and said the Iraqi police and army were making great progress. Yet on Friday the Pentagon released a report admitting that sectarian violence in Iraq is the worst it has been since we've been there.

In other words, thanks to the efforts of U.S. troops and taxpayers, the Iraqis are fighting each other with much better skills and equipment.

The speeches last week by President Bush and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld emphasized the similarities between the war on terror and World War II. But the real parallel increasingly looks to be the Vietnam War.

In historian Barbara Tuchman's 1984 book The March of Folly, she points out that American policy-makers were not unaware of the "hazards, obstacles and negative developments" during the thirty years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam:

The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.

The real solution for Iraq, and for the problem of worldwide terrorism, is economic, not military. Last November, following the president's speech at Annapolis, America Wants To Know published a post titled "Why the Iraq Policy Isn't Working." Nothing that has happened since has proved it wrong. Read it here.

Copyright 2006


Source note: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara W. Tuchman was published in 1984 by Alfred A. Knopf, New York. The quoted passage can be found on page 234 of the hardcover edition, at the start of chapter five, "America Betrays Herself in Vietnam."

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