Unlike JFK's war, Bush fights for Iraqi liberty

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2003 15:59:36 -0800
From: Einar Stefferud <Stef () nma com>
Subject: Unlike JFK's war, Bush fights for Iraqi liberty
X-Sender: stef () ns1 vrx net
To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>

Perhaps for IP, if you wish...  It does take a different path...
And, it deserves consideration...\Stef
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  At the Royal Banqueting House in London last week,
>    George W. Bush gave one of the best presidential speeches
>    of modern times. "Your nation and mine, in the past, have
>    been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for
>    the sake of stability," he told his British hosts.
>
>    "Long-standing ties often led us to overlook the faults of
>    local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make
>    us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and
>    ideologies of violence took hold. As recent history has
>    shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just
>    because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No
>    longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is
>    temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its
>    victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny
>    wherever it is found."
>    . . . <snip>
>    It's easier to organize a coup than to create the institutions
>    of liberty, but the latter are the only real bulwark against
>    the horrors of the age.

_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _
Chicago Sun-Times - November 23, 2003

Unlike JFK's war, Bush fights for Iraqi liberty
By Mark Steyn, Sun-Times Columnist


On Saturday, America remembered the day it's never forgotten: Nov. 22, 1963.
Everyone, as they say, can recall where they were when they heard the news
that Kennedy was shot. Even if you weren't born, you can recall it: the
motorcade, Walter Cronkite removing his spectacles, LBJ taking the oath of
office, all the scenes replayed a million times in untold documentaries and
feature films.

History is selective. We remember moments, and, because that moment in
Dallas blazes so vividly, everything around it fades to a gray blur. So
here, from the archives, is an alternative 40th anniversary from November
1963:

8 a.m. Nov. 2: Troops enter a Catholic church in Saigon and arrest two men.
They're tossed into the back of an armored personnel carrier and driven up
the road a little ways to a railroad crossing. The M-113 stops, the pair are
riddled with bullets and their mutilated corpses taken to staff HQ for
inspection by the army's commanders. One of the deceased is Ngo Dinh Diem,
the president of South Vietnam. The other is Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and
chief adviser.

Back in the White House, President Kennedy gets the cable and is stunned.
When Washington had given tacit approval to the coup, the deal was that Diem
was supposed to be offered asylum in the United States. But something had
gone wrong. I use "gone wrong" in the debased sense in which a drug deal
that turns into a double murder is said to have "gone wrong."

Kennedy had known Diem for the best part of a decade. If he felt bad about
his part in the murder of an ally, he didn't feel bad for long: Within three
weeks, he too was dead. Looked at coolly, there seems something faintly
ridiculous about cooing dreamily over the one brief shining moment of a
slain head of state who only a month earlier had set in motion the events
leading to the slaying of another head of state. The noble ideals of Camelot
did not extend to the State Department or the CIA.

Unless you're a Vietnam scholar, you won't remember the pros and cons of an
anti-Diem coup as argued in Washington through the summer and fall of 1963.
They barely made sense at the time, and Kennedy's bewildered reaction to the
Buddhist unrest earlier that year sums up the administration's grasp of the
situation: "Who are these people?" he said. "Why didn't we know about them
before?" "Big Minh," the general who led the coup, lasted two months before
he was overthrown by another general. He moved to Thailand, where the
American taxpayer picked up his tab, including for some expensive dental
work.

But that was the way they did things back then. Find the most promising
local client, before Moscow or Paris or Beijing does. As the classic
realpolitik line has it, he may be a sonofabitch, but he's (set italic) our
(end italic) sonofabitch. As I wrote a couple of weeks after 9/11, apropos
the House of Saud and President Mubarak, "the inverse is more to the point:
he may be our sonofabitch, but he's a sonofabitch." Trying to cherrypick
local strongmen is a fool's game.

So, at a time when lazy leftists keep comparing Iraq with Vietnam and artful
conservatives have begun comparing Bush with Kennedy, it's worth noting the
big difference between the two men and their wars. At the Royal Banqueting
House in London last week, George W. Bush gave one of the best presidential
speeches of modern times. "Your nation and mine, in the past, have been
willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of
stability," he told his British hosts. "Long-standing ties often led us to
overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring
stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered
and ideologies of violence took hold. As recent history has shown, we cannot
turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own
backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is
temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our
great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found."

President Bush has repudiated half a century of U.S. policy in the Middle
East. The State Department and the CIA no longer sign off on the Coup Of The
Month the way they did in JFK's day -- the CIA seems to be too busy covering
its posterior to do much of anything, and the State Department evidently
feels it's easier living with the old thugs --Yasser, Assad, the mullahs--
than trying to spot the up-and-coming ones. But the president is right: the
"temporary convenience" has long ceased to be so.

In this season of anniversaries, here's another one: the liberation of
Grenada, October 1983. When Maurice Bishop deposed Sir Eric Gairy and set up
a "People's Revolutionary Government," it was the first ever coup in the
British West Indies. Coups breed coups. Bishop in turn was murdered by a
dissident faction of his New Jewel Movement, which set up a new Marxist
junta. Had the United States not intervened, it's easy to see how the habit
might have spread -- to Jamaica, and the Bahamas and St Lucia, and the rest
of the English Caribbean.

In reversing Grenada's double-coup, America helped preserve the work of
centuries in the region -- the islands' toytown Westminster Parliaments with
their wigs and maces and speakers, the quaint symbols of peaceful
constitutional evolution that underline the difference between those
countries and the likes of Cuba and Haiti. Replacing President Loon E Toon
with General Sy Kottik gets you nowhere.

That's especially true given the realities of today's world when ramshackle
basket-case states can pick up terrible weapons on the cheap. All that
stands between an Islamist nutcase and Pakistan's nukes is General Musharraf
and the handful of chaps he trusts. Ultimately, it's not enough -- as the
general understands. It's easier to organize a coup than to create the
institutions of liberty, but the latter are the only real bulwark against
the horrors of the age.

It would be nice to think the so-called "progressives" of the left might
find this a worthy project. Instead, in London, they waved their silly
placards showing Bush and Blair drenched in blood, even as the real blood of
the British consul-general and others had been spilled in Turkey that day.

It's one thing to dislike Bush, it's one thing to hate America. But it's
quite another to hate America so much you reflexively take the side of any
genocidal psycho who comes along. In their terminal irrelevance, the
depraved left has now adopted the old slogan of Cold War realpolitik: like
Osama and Mullah Omar, Saddam may be a sonofabitch, but he's their
sonofabitch.

Copyright © The Sun-Times Company   All rights reserved.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn23.html 

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