Cragg Hines' wisdom
The Chronicle's Cragg Hines, with his perfect hindsight firmly in place, gave us this column last week that calls President Bush (surprise!) incompetent.
It's supremely easy — and facile — for President Bush to ridicule John Kerry's shifting positions on the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. For, unfortunately, the president has never had a qualm.
"Stubborn incompetence," as Kerry put it Monday in his speech at New York University.
The "stubborn" part we've known about Bush for a long time. It's, in some measure, genetic. And it has seemed over the years that the deeper Bush digs himself into a hole, the more stubborn he can get.
But the "incompetence" part, at least judging by pre-White House experience with Bush, is a more surprising and alarming development.
That, of course, was the italic subtext of Kerry's latest take on Iraq. Yes, the policy has gone awry. But why? "Stubborn incompetence."
Thankfully, Tom Kirkendall leads us to a very helpful Max Boot column in the LA Times:
Lest we be too hard on Bush, it's useful to recall the travails of the nation's two most successful commanders in chief, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
Lincoln is remembered, of course, for winning the Civil War and freeing the slaves. We tend to forget that along the way he lost more battles than any other president: First and Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Chickamauga…. The list of federal defeats was long and dispiriting. So was the list of federal victories (e.g., Antietam, Gettysburg) that could have been exploited to shorten the conflict, but weren't.
[snip]
Roosevelt had more than his share of mistakes too, the most notorious being his failure to prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor, even though U.S. code breakers had given him better intelligence than Bush had before Sept. 11. FDR also did not do enough to prepare the armed forces for war, and then pushed them into early offensives at Guadalcanal and North Africa that took a heavy toll on inexperienced troops. At Kasserine Pass, Tunisia, in 1943, the U.S. Army was mauled by veteran German units, losing more than 6,000 soldiers.
[snip]
And, no, I'm not suggesting Bush is another Lincoln or Roosevelt. But even if Bush hasn't reached their lofty heights, neither has he experienced their depths of despair. We are losing one or two soldiers a day in Iraq. Lincoln lost an average of 250 daily for four years, Roosevelt 300 daily for more than 3 1/2 years. If they could overcome such numbing losses to prevail against far more formidable foes than we face now, it's ludicrous to give in to today's fashionable funk.
It's interesting to note that Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi spoke to a joint session of Congress last week and decried the defeatism being offered by critics, especially in the media:
For the skeptics who do not understand the Iraqi people, they do not realize how decades of torture and repression feed our desire for freedom. At every step of the political process to date the courage and resilience of the Iraqi people has proved the doubters wrong.
They said we would miss January deadline to pass the interim constitution.
We proved them wrong.
They warned that there could be no successful handover of sovereignty by the end of June. We proved them wrong. A sovereign Iraqi government took over control two days early.
They doubted whether a national conference could be staged this August. We proved them wrong.
Despite intimidation and violence, over 1,400 citizens, a quarter of them women, from all regions and from every ethnic, religious and political grouping in Iraq, elected a national council.
And I pledge to you today, we’ll prove them wrong again over the elections.
Our independent electoral commission is working with the United Nations, the multinational force and our own Iraqi security forces to make these elections a reality. In 15 out of our 18 Iraqi provinces we could hold elections tomorrow. Although this is not what we see in your media, it is a fact.
(emphasis added)
The men and women of the military have a favorite saying: freedom isn't free. And Hines isn't in Iraq like our military personnel and the Iraqi prime minister. No, he sits comfortably in his office, giving us the benefit of his wisdom.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 09/26/04 09:44 AM | Houston Chronicle | Print | Comments (1)
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