Does Rumsfeld really want to go there?

November 7, 2005

Ever the loyalist, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to defend Bush’s plummeting national support last week by comparing his boss to another president who suffered in the polls.

“President Harry Truman,” Rumsfeld said at a press briefing, “now remembered as a fine president, would leave office in 1953 with an approval rating of about 25 percent, one of the lowest recorded ratings since folks started measuring those things.” That’s even lower than Bush’s 35 to 39 percent ratings these days.

“Back then,” Rumsfeld recalled, “a great many people questioned whether young Americans should face death and injury in Korea, thousands of miles from home, for a result that seemed uncertain at best. And today the answer is the Korean peninsula.”

The WaPo’s Al Kamen suggested the Bush gang isn’t thrilled with the comparison because “a half-century is a long time for a politician to wait for vindication.”

But it seems to me there’s a different reason to be uncomfortable with the association between Truman’s Korea and Bush’s Iraq. If Rumsfeld’s right, by the year 2057, the United States will still have 37,000 troops in Iraq and the country will still be among the most dangerous places on the planet.

Sometimes, it seems, Rumsfeld goes with the comparisons he has, not the comparisons he wants.

Read the Project for a New American Century stuff: that is exactly what Rumsfeld wants — a permanent American presence in Iraq, shaping the country’s long-term political and economic development.

While liberal democrats have been fighting among themselves over whether liberal hawks should do public penance, the right has continued to nod in satisfaction over the course of events in Iraq. It sounds bizarre, but the Right believes that all we need do, in Iraq, is stay the course. The difference between Korea and Vietnam, in their view, is the difference between staying and leaving. And, if Democrats should get us out of Iraq at some future point, then the Democrats will be blamed by the Noise Machine, for ever after for “losing Iraq.” All of Bush’s failures in the Iraq Occupation and Reconstruction, all of the corruption and incompetence and bad planning will be forgotten, and the Democrats will be blamed for “losing” because they cut and ran.

Stab-in-the-back-theories are an old, tried-and-true Right-wing strategy, and Democrats smugly assuming that the polls indicate that everyone knows that Iraq is a thorough-going failure, do so at their own future peril.

  • And today the answer is the Korean peninsula?!

    Is this one of the known knowns, the known unknowns, or the unknown unknowns?

  • One very important difference between Korean War and Iraq Quagmire is that the former was fought in compliance with a policy, the Kennan-inspired Policy of Containment. Unlik today, we knew when we had “won” (achieved our goals): when the North Koreans were driven back above the 38th parallel. Much of the public (and a very popular five-star general) wanted to “go all the way”, but Truman stood his ground (and made domestic enemies) because he had a policy. Beyond that, the enemy was not fabricated or lied about, nor did anyone attempt to link it to anything like 9/11, nor did Truman have a hunger to look like a “war president”, nor did he bankrupt his nation, nor did he shit on the UN, etc., etc. Truman was hated by isolationist racists, Bush panders to them. Truman integrated the Armed Forces; Bush (and Rummy) are doing everything possible to ruin them (to “privatize” them). Truman’s cabinet (even excluding carry-overs from FDR’s) contained such noteables as George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, Averell Harriman; Bush’s contains … what? None of Truman’s Secretaries of State ever referred to him as “my husband”. I’m sure his chief legal counsel never praised him as the most brilliant man she’d ever known. Except for his 1-mile walk every morning, Harry Truman was a full time president who worked tirelessly to chart a domestic and international future for the United States in a world which was changing rapidly in all respects. Is there a single positive thing the dry drunk Shrub has contributed in the limited time he allows for his job? Comparing one to the other is insane.

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