Smacking Around Richard CohenOur buddy at
Blue Crab Boulevard gets angry at Richard Cohen, for a
particularly stupid column even by Cohen's miserable standards.
Cohen:
In several ways -- some obvious, some not -- the war in Iraq has been likened to Vietnam. Certainly, it has opened the same credibility gap, has been funded by deficit spending and has turned into a quagmire. Maybe, though, this sense of deja vu is felt most keenly at the Pentagon. Within that building, it must be Vietnam all over again -- another asinine strategy, another duplicitous civilian leadership, more conformity and careerism, and, of course, more unnecessary loss of life.Blue Crab Boulevard:
Let me clue you in to another forgotten lesson from Vietnam, Mr. Cohen. The North Vietnamese did not win the war. We Americans lost it. The media helped us lose it here at home. And they are trying to do so again.I'd note too that Cohen's point about the Vietnam War and the Iraq War being funded by deficit spending is silly; almost all wars are funded by deficit spending--certainly World War I, II and the Civil War were.
Cohen:
Now, some have -- although from retirement. In recent days, three former senior officers have called for Rumsfeld to be sacked. The most recent is Marine Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, who does not stop at faulting Rumsfeld but blames himself as well. "I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat -- al-Qaeda," he writes in a Time magazine article this month. He joins Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who commanded the training of Iraqi security forces and who has also called on President Bush to fire Rumsfeld. "President Bush should accept the offer to resign that Mr. Rumsfeld says he has tendered more than once," Eaton wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece.BCB
goes on to point out another article
by a military man who is in favor of the war.
The vast majority of Iraqi people are incredibly grateful to the United States for saving them from a bloody and brutal dictatorship. There are, granted, those who do not share this same gratitude, namely the former regime and those who benefited from it, as well as foreign militant Islamists who see Iraq as the battleground for their extremism. That's who we're fighting, not the majority of the people of Iraq.
