In a recent interview with Essense Magazine, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice discussed to the current situation in Iraq, endeavoring to place it in the context of the American Civil War. Her remarks included an attempt to buttress the “stay the course” mantra of the administration by striving to liken critics of the current policies towards the situation in Iraq to those “people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War (in this country) to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold.”
As a long time student of history, I feel I am safe in making this statement: If the administration of President George W. Bush wishes to use historical parallels to bolster support for their policies, then they should read their history a bit more thoroughly and ensure they have a reasonable understanding before embarking upon their PR campaigns. This includes efforts at diminishing criticism by deliberately linking it to the historically, emotionally charged word “appeasement” (intentionally using the high level of fervor associated with the word to create the gut reaction desired, as merchants of fear will do), but I will limit my discussion here to the remarks by Secretary Rice.
Where does the simile they wish to promote fail? Unfortunately for Secretary Rice, the analogy breaks down almost immediately, because the “stay the course” path of President Lincoln did not include keeping incompetents in charge of prosecuting the war of his era. The position of General-in-Chief of the Army at the time of the American Civil War had powers over the conduct of war that are not unlike the role taken by the current office of Secretary of Defense. Lincoln removed from office many Generals-in-Chief when their incompetence was demonstrated until he finally found a man who could finish the war, ironically by making it even more bloody than before, but that man, Ulysses Grant, showed competence in his actions instead of the spending of lives uselessly that his predecessors had done. The current President, however much he wants to call to mind parallels with the American Civil War, fails utterly on that point, refusing to consider replacing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld despite his direct responsibility for the fiasco that the occupation of Iraq has become in the wake of victory on the battlefield.
Critics of Lincoln in the American Civil War certainly were not able to assail him on the point of not being willing to consider alternatives. Today, we are forced to wonder if we should apply the Einstein definition of insanity, continual repetition of the same actions with the expectation of different results.
Unlike the case where organized forces are in conflict, modern technology cannot replace boots on the ground when it comes to occupying conquered territory. There is a human factor in military occupation that gadgets do not address, and the long term refusal by Rumsfeld to acknowledge that simple fact in his quest to “transform” the military by using equipment to replace infantry has resulted directly in the descent of Iraq into a morass of conflicting militias and other forces that arose to fill the power vacuum created by the conquest, a vacancy left empty by the lack of people in the victorious army to impose their will everywhere, all the time.
If George W. Bush wants to mirror the light cast by Abraham Lincoln, perhaps he should consider actual emulation rather than simple-minded analogies that involve repetition of talking points that reflect neither reality nor history.
