[KB] "Trivial Repetition," "Dull, Daily Reenforcement"

[Gregory Desilet]

While I admit I venture skeptically and cynically into the can of worms that is American politics and foreign policy, I have to disagree with you on this posting, Ed. I think Obama has done a reasonable job in attempting to extricate us from our military involvements in the Middle East. No matter what course of action chosen, the likelihood of broad approval would be slim (damned if he does this, damned if he does that). 

American and British involvement in the Middle East has had a long and tortured history—due to alliances there and dependency on oil. The Gulf War was, in my opinion, a necessary action and it rightly received broad international support. The big mistake we made—the mistake made by Colin Powell and Bush Sr—was to leave Saddam in power. Granted, the U.S. did not have international support to go all the way to Baghdad, but after Saddam set fire to the oil wells in Kuwait, Bush Sr. had the high ground for pursuing him and no one on the international scene would have had substantial moral or political ground to oppose such action. At that point in time, due to the international coalition created for the Gulf War, the U.S. could have removed Saddam from power and left the U.N. and the international community with the task of overseeing nation re-building in Iraq. If, subsequently, the political scene in Iraq blew up, the international community would have been as involved as the U.S. in overseeing and cleaning up the mess. The U.S. would not have had to go it alone—as was the case following the Iraq War. 

As things happened, Bush Jr. had to confront the mess left by his father and the poor decision he and Powell made. If Bush Jr. had not acted, the Saddam problem would have continued to fester until another American president would be forced to confront him and his militant aggression in the Middle East again—and possibly under worse circumstances. Bush Jr. seized an opportunity to do what should have been done previously—remove Saddam from power. Unfortunately, the situation no longer drew international support and Bush should have backed off until he could get such support. That he did not do this was his big mistake. 

Whether we like it or not, the U.S. has an intricate set of involvements and commitments in the Middle East and there is no easy short cut political way to change that history. The only good thing to do at this point is attempt to learn from past mistakes and make better decisions regarding our actions there. Thus far, Obama has been reluctant to repeat mistakes of the past. He is building international support for American actions regarding Iraq and Syria. I doubt very much he will commit any large number of boots on the ground there during the rest of his term. He will let the various factions fight it out among themselves, while lending modest and cautious support to the factions that appear closer to our interests. That few hawks or doves in the U.S. will like this approach is a given, and Obama knows this. But thus far he has had the courage to chart the unpopular course—one that exposes him to criticism from every side. I think he deserves credit for that since, as I say, I believe it’s the better from among a lot of ugly options.

Greg Desilet



On Sep 12, 2014, at 10:00 AM, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com> wrote:

> Burkophiles,
> 
> 	I asked in a chapter in Praeger’s Venomous Speech last year, “Where Is the Democratic Narrative, FDR Style?”  That piece had mainly to do with the polemical malfeasance of the Dems in dealing with, rhetorically pretty much ignoring, what globalization has done to aggravate the income gap in USAmerica the past three and a half decades.  (Tax policies are culpable, too, we know, in multiple ways.)  Senator Warren appeared on Moyers on PBS last Sunday.  She listed four Democratic proposals she thinks are winning issues going into the Fall elections.  Moyers asked her why, then, aren’t we hearing more about them from Democratic candidates and their spokespersons?  Warren really had no good answer.
> 
> 	Burke says in the Rhetoric (p. 26), “Often we must think of rhetoric not in terms of one particular address, but as a general BODY OF IDENTIFICATIONS that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reenforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill” (emphasis in original).
> 
> 	I monitor Fox News daily.  That propaganda network masquerading as a news channel (I know, we can say the same thing about MSNBC) is near-fanatically repetitive in promoting its conservative, anti-Obama agenda.  Fox is relentless.  Case in point: Bill O’Reilly has invidiously targeted the President in his opening “memo” for as many nights as I can remember.  Another: Wish I had even one dollar for every time I’ve watched our consulate in Benghazi burn on my Channel 48.  They don’t let up.
> 
> 	Add this mantra to the list: Bush 2 “won” our righteous “War on Terror” with the surge in Iraq.  Obama came into office, took our troops out of that country, and now has “lost” a war that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz had brought a U.S. victory and peace to!
> 
> 	The rhetorically inept, more accurately altogether missing, response by Obama in his “leading from behind” speech on Wednesday, and in his fumbling precursors to that address, are dispiriting.
> 
> 	First and foremost, Obama was and is uniquely situated to characterize the Iraq War for what it plainly was: A mendacious military adventure, foisted on USAmerica by subterfuge and deception, a cynical exploitation of the shock of 9/11, not merely a “dumb war.”  Fifteen Saudis and four Egyptians, under the leadership of a wealthy Saudi, trained in Afghanistan, highjacked four commercial jetliners and perpetrated the mayhem of that frightful day.  Saddam, we knew even then, had nothing to do with it.  Nor did his chemical weapons, if they even had existed and they didn’t, nor did his so-called “mushroom cloud” potential, pose any real threat to this nation.  Again, we knew even then that Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, even if real, were as yet no more than hope, if not fantasy.  And, for anyone paying attention, the Bush-Cheney fear-mongering had already been shot down in an op-ed in the NYTimes by Ambassador Wilson, and by clear-headed reporting
> by the McClatchy News Service.
> 
> 	So, what happened after waste of a trillion dollars (it will be three trillion or more after medical expenditures are exhausted a half-century from now), loss of thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of maimings and woundings, and destruction and shattering of this jerry-built nation of warring sects that only a tyrant like Saddam could hold together—what happened after the candidate who promised to end the Iraq War came to power?  He stopped calling the war what it really was and started treating it pretty much like a somewhat legitimate enterprise we had to bring to an end “responsibly.”  Obama was even planning to keep fifty thousand (or was it eighty thousand?) troops in Iraq in perpetuity, before al-Maliki said “no way” to our insistence on military immunity.  (And Obama doesn’t even defend himself on that issue.)
> 
> 	You may object that Obama had to metamorphose into a “war president,” since he was then Commander-in-Chief.  Can’t in any way imply that our soldiers died in vain in a conflict subversively motivated by oil, Israel, Bush family score-settling, or plans for victorious re-election in 2004 by a flight-jacketed president after “Mission Accomplished.”
> 
> 	Upshot: There exists a corrupt context to what Obama and USAmerica face in the current chaos of the Middle East.  It is a context that requires repetition and more repetition still by leadership that has some semblance of the near-self -destructive insanity of America’s vaunted “War on Terror.”  As he takes us into yet another phase of this resource-draining, quick-sand tugging, tar-baby of a conflict, someone with a megaphone has to stand up and shout down the McCains and Foxies who current occupy the rhetorical terrain uncontestred.
> 
> 	I have no hope that Obama’s the one.
> 
> 
> 	Ed                       
> 
> 
> 
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