{"id":2547,"date":"2004-09-16T12:19:49","date_gmt":"2004-09-16T17:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2547.html"},"modified":"2004-09-16T12:19:49","modified_gmt":"2004-09-16T17:19:49","slug":"worsthistorical-analogyever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/worsthistorical-analogyever\/","title":{"rendered":"Worst…historical analogy…ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the rhetorical high points of Bush’s stump speech seeks to encourage voters to be patient with the lack of progress in Iraq and points to 1940s Japan as a key analogy. Here’s Bush on the subject, just last night<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“I believe in the transformational power of liberty. The wisest use of American strength is to advance freedom. One of the people with whom I’ve spent a lot of time is Prime Minister Koizumi, of Japan. We’re friends. We talk a lot. It’s amazing, though, to be having these discussions with Prime Minister Koizumi, because it wasn’t all that long ago in the march of history that we were at war with Japan. They were a sworn enemy. My dad, I suspect others’ dads and granddads fought against the Japanese.<\/p>\n

“But because of people like Harry Truman and other Americans, after World War II, people who understood that liberty could transform an enemy into an ally, because they doubted — they overcame the doubters, because they worked to build a democracy in Japan, today I sit down at the table with Prime Minister Koizumi, talking about the peace. Liberty is powerful. Liberty can change nations. Some day, an American President will be sitting down with a duly elected leader of Iraq, talking about the peace and our children and grandchildren will be better off for it.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As campaign rhetoric goes, this is pretty good stuff. As historical analogies go, it’s complete nonsense.
\n
\nI realize the analogy is intended to inspire optimism for the future, but I suspect Bush doesn’t want us to a) check our history to see what happened after World War II, or b) think too hard about Bush’s point.<\/p>\n

The truth is, as the New York Times’ David Sanger recently noted<\/a>, there was no insurgency in Japan after the war ended.<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of Japan’s surrender, there was no continuing insurgency. Instead, the emperor declared that the Japanese should cooperate with their occupiers — and they did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sound like Iraq right now? Not exactly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Just as importantly, Bush conveniently forgets to tell audiences that it’s been 59 years since the war with Japan — and we’re still there<\/i>. Is Bush prepared to take the Japan analogy forward and predict that U.S. forces will still be in Iraq in 2063?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the rhetorical high points of Bush’s stump speech seeks to encourage voters to be patient with the lack of progress in Iraq and points to 1940s Japan as a key analogy. Here’s Bush on the subject, just last night: “I believe in the transformational power of liberty. The wisest use of American strength […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}