Sidney Blumenthal at Salon - kinda looks like Bush is going to Europe empty-handed...
On his European visits, Bush will compare Iraq to rebuilding Germany and Japan after World War II. He will raise the specter of the West against communism in the Cold War. He will contrast Nazi atrocities to Islamist terrorism. He has even said that he will instruct Europeans that Iraq is like the United States before its Constitutional Convention: "I will remind them that the Articles of Confederation was a rather bumpy period for American democracy." Among the missing in today's Iraq, however, are analogous figures to Washington, Franklin and Madison.
Bush's principal analogy conflates al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein into a common threat of "weapons of mass destruction" and a "totalitarian political ideology" that is "not an expression of religion," as he explained in his speech before the Army War College on May 24. This is a world war of "two visions" that first "clashed in Afghanistan" and "have now met in Iraq." It was in this speech that he proposed tearing down and replacing Abu Ghraib prison, despite having neglected to provide for it in his budget. The grand gesture was widely reported, the grubby absence of funding little noticed. By means of a few words, Abu Ghraib was transformed at least for a moment into a gleaming Potemkin Village.
Prophetically, on the eve of Bush's appearance at the Army War College, its Strategic Studies Institute released a report, "Vietnam and Iraq: Differences, Similarities and Insights," observing the similarities as failures of strategy, maintaining public support and nation building. It also noted: "Prospects for creating a stable, prosperous, and democratic Iraq are problematic, and observers and decision makers should not be misled by false analogies to American state-building success in Germany and Japan after World War II."
"They haven't known what they've been doing since the statue of Saddam came down," a military strategist at the Army War College told me. "Bush's speech was a vision speech with no connection to facts on the grounds. That seems to be the limit of his understanding and ability. Even Vietnam doesn't look so bad in retrospect." But Bush will not make reference to "Vietnam and Iraq" in Europe.
