BUSH AS ANOTHER WILSON?

We just got back from a week with my parents in New York. (More on that in further posts.) While there, I found myself picking up the NY Daily News. (Online, I prefer the New York Post.) In the print edition, I stumbled across two columns re-printed in the News by the Washington Post's Richard Cohen.

Those two columns by Cohen were, urrr, masterpieces . . . and I believe are worth noting.

In the first, as it appeared in the New York Daily News on Tuesday:

Here are the reasons Iraq is not Vietnam: It is a desert, not a jungle. The enemy is not protected and supplied by major powers such as the Soviet Union or China, not to mention a formidable front-line state such as North Vietnam.

The Iraqis are not, like the Vietnamese, a single culture fighting a long-term war of liberation from colonial masters. They are fragmented by religion and language, and they have been independent ever since the British left, lo these many years ago.

In almost every way but one, Iraq is not Vietnam. Here's the one: We don't know what the hell we're doing. . .

After further developing his notions on how the battle of Iraq and the U.S. experience in Vietnam are much the same . . . 'cept when they are different, Cohen managed to better himself a couple of days later, when, in Friday's Daily News he shared this gem with us all. I believe it is worth examining closely:

Bush's pipe dream

The term of the moment in Washington is "the wall." This is the legal barrier that once separated the CIA from the FBI and which may have contributed to the confusion that enabled the attacks of 9/11. A more interesting wall, however, was on view Tuesday evening in President Bush's news conference. It's the one between him and reality.

Never mind that even for Bush, this was a poor performance - answers that resembled a frantic scavenger hunt for the right (or any) word or, too often, a thought. Never mind that he really had very little to say - not, for example, an exit plan for Iraq, no second thoughts about 9/11, not even wonderment at the apparent disappearance of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and how that might have happened.

Like a kid who has been told otherwise, Bush persists in believing in his own version of Santa Claus. The weapons are there, somewhere - in a North Pole of his mind.

I watched the same news conference. To me, Bush's demeanor far more resembled a man who has apparently grown utterly weary of repeatedly having to explain to people like Richard Cohen just how and why "6 x 3 = 18."

Cohen continues:

What matters more, is the phrase Bush used five times in one way or another: "We're changing the world." He used it always in reference to the war in Iraq and in ways that would make even Woodrow Wilson, that personification of naive morality, shake his head in bemusement. In Bush's rhetoric, a war to rid Saddam of his WMD, a war to ensure that Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" did not appear over an American city, has mutated into an effort to reorder the world.

"I also know that there's a historic opportunity here to change the world," Bush said of the effort in Iraq. The next sentence was even more disquieting. "And it's very important for the loved ones of our troops to understand that the mission is an important, vital mission for the security of America and for the ability to change the world for the better." It is one thing to die to defend your country. It is quite another to do that for one man's impossible dream. What Bush wants is admirable. It is not, however, attainable.

Oh, good grief. One is left stunned. Did Cohen just deride, of all people, Woodrow Wilson, as that "that personification of naive morality?" Remember that, as you read on:

Several investigative commissions are now looking into intelligence failures - everything from the failure to detect and intercept the terrorist attack of 9/11 to the assertion that Iraq was armed to the teeth with all sort of awful stuff. But what really has to be examined is how a single man, the President, took the nation and part of the world to war because, as he essentially put it Tuesday night, he was "called" to do it.

If that is the case, and it sure seems so at the moment, then this commission has to ask us all - and I don't exclude myself - how much of Congress and the press went to war with an air of juvenile glee. The Commission on Credulous Stupidity may call me as its first witness, but after that it has to examine how, despite our vaunted separation of powers, a barely elected President opted for a war that need not have been fought.

So, in Cohen's world, Bush is "a barely elected President" (that one is president or one isn't president, that there is no "barely", is lost on Cohen -- but that's the least of Cohen's problems) and essentially a unilateralist, who pushed for an unnecessary war.

This is Bush's cause, a noble but irrational effort much like the one that set off for Jerusalem in 1212. It was known as the Children's Crusade.

The other day Iraq was a lot like Vietnam . . . except when it isn't like Vietnam. A couple of days later it is like the "Children's Crusade". We await eagerly Cohen's upcoming columns and his other tortured analogies.

Most interestingly, overall, is this: In Cohen's view, George W. Bush is both a flaming unilateralist and a Wilsonian idealist.

Hey, if it works for ya, right?

The problem is, it doesn't.

Presumably, Cohen is aware that a Wilsonian's goal is actually to make the world a better place THROUGH the USE of international institutions? President Wilson himself ultimately staked his presidency and physically and mentally wore himself out -- thus probably costing himself his own life -- trying to get the U.S. to join his "naive" League of Nations. (The U.S. never did join the League.)

And, presumably, Cohen knows as well that the defunct League formed the basis for the United Nations, when it was founded in 1945? If there is ONE person who might be considered the father of the League, and thus the grandfather of the U.N., it is that "naive" Woodrow Wilson.

If Richard Cohen and those like him are going to try to sound slick when tossing stones, they might at least help us out by getting their characterizations and definitions straight before trying to do so.

Indeed, is Cohen actually claiming that Bush is setting himself up to be another Woodrow Wilson? Hey, Bush could do much worse. After all, for Wilson's "naive" efforts "to reorder the world" -- which in fact did help change the world enough to lead to the creation eventually of the U.N., that body which today appears apparently to be the only repository of "international legitimacy" in the eyes of the Cohens out there -- Wilson won a Nobel Peace Prize.

And if Bush is another Woodrow Wilson, where then does that leave those who think as Richard Cohen?  ¶ by Robert, Saturday, April 17, 2004