... And When "Quagmire" Only Referred to Vietnam.
(Photo The White House: President Bush at Fort Hood, Texas, January 3, 2003)
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you for your warm welcome, and thank you for this jacket.
AUDIENCE: Hooah!
THE PRESIDENT: I'm proud to wear it.
AUDIENCE: Hooah!
For readers who haven't experienced the joys of hearing a room full of soldiers in "BDUs" (Battle Dress Uniforms, American for camouflage) shout "HOOAH," the helpful White House link above has video and audio versions along with the text of the President's pep rally.
With this post, I borrow a title and an idea from a great TV program that ran from 1989 to 2001 on Arte, the Franco-German public service channel that is a lifesaver for those who miss the likes of PBS in the States. "Histoire Parallele" traced the week's news from exactly 50 years before, i.e. the lead up to war, the years of World War, and the early Cold War. No shortage of B&W Allied and Axis newsreel footage, of course, put into context by international experts and host Marc Ferro, a great French historian.
My focus over the next months will not be as ambitious as that of the Arte program, since I'll only be reaching back five years. 2008 - 5 = 2003: the year of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I thought a nice round figure like five years to be an appropriate marker, given that many of the "players" - George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, primarily - are still very much in office. Others - Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair, Hans Blix - have moved on, so to speak. It is also tonic to reflect that as of five years ago today, things might have gone differently. Counterfactual historians may one day put their imaginations to "what if" scenarios of alternative realities ("What if Saddam Hussein had never invaded Kuwait in 1990?" "What if George W. Bush had won a clear, landslide popular victory in 2000, instead of entering the White House via the Supreme Court?"). I will try to steer clear of such exercises, which are best left to the historians of 2050.
Five years ago today, President Bush had none of the uncertainties that plague today's politicians:
The Iraqi regime is a grave threat to the United States. The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American and to threats who are friends of America. Why do I say that? Well, first of all, the leader in Iraq has publicly proclaimed his hatred for our country and what we stand for. The Iraqi regime has a record -- a record of torturing their own people, a brutal record and a record of reckless aggression against those in their neighborhood. The Iraqi regime has used weapons of mass destruction. They not only had weapons of mass destruction, they used weapons of mass destruction. They used weapons of mass destruction on people in other countries, they have used weapons of mass destruction on their own people. That's why I say Iraq is a threat, a real threat.
"The Iraqi regime is a threat to any American and to threats who are friends of America" [sic]. Despite the grammatical stumbling, we get the message. It is still three months away from "Shock and Awe," but the Commander in Chief is pumping the troops. When they cross the desert berm into Iraq a few months later, according to longtime BBC Baghdad correspondent Andrew North who accompanied them as an "embedded" journalist, the Administration's umpteen pretexts (WMD, human rights, harboring Al Qaeda... anything but the fact that Iraq floated on a sea of oil) for preemptive war mattered little. According to North, the troops he accompanied were out for revenge, against a regime, they had been told, that carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks. Ironically, their jump-off points in the Gulf had provided the lion's share of Al Qaeda suicide crews of 9/11 - none were Iraqi, as was well known but conveniently unmentioned.
Since this is parallel history, I should also give the floor to the Iraqis of the day, quoted in the New York Times of January 3, 2003
"The inspectors did not find any prohibited activities nor any prohibited items in those 230 sites visited up until now," Lt. Gen. Hussam Muhammad Amin, the chief Iraqi liaison to the inspectors, told a weekly news conference. "All those activities proved that the Iraqi declarations are credible and the American allegations and claims are baseless," General Amin said. In his remarks, General Amin echoed comments by Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, who complained earlier in the day about troop buildups in the region, saying that the United States and Britain were forging ahead toward war despite the presence of the inspectors in Iraq.
"The American administration is trying to create some pretexts to attack Iraq, to exercise their aggression against Iraq," he said.
Today's NYT indicates that in election year America "Iraq War Taking Back Seat To Domestic Issues."
The article is illustrated by a photo of a soldier, no longer in BDUs, holding a sign "Back From Iraq." He is campaigning in Iowa for Hillary Clinton.
Parallel history to be continued...