THE PARALLEL UNIVERSES IN BUSH'S LIBRARY

ROGER MORRIS, GLOBE & MAIL, US - One of the books in the backdrop of the
White House Library must have been on quantum physics. As President
George W. Bush stood awkwardly at his podium on Wednesday night,
nervously drawing breaths at each sentence as he began his long-awaited
speech on Iraq, Washington's parallel universes seemed to crowd the
room.

I used to go to that library often, fleeing the commotion of another
stationary policy. It was 1969. My universe was the National Security
Council staff under then-president Richard Nixon and his adviser, Henry
Kissinger. We were fresh from another election in which America voted to
end a war. Yet, in another abhorrence of defeat, the familiar lure of
some redeeming if only cosmetic victory, we met in secret to plan
another escalation. "I can't believe," Mr. Kissinger told us, "that a
fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn't have a breaking point." As
we plotted a massive blow -- the carpet bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong
that happened three years later -- the war America voted to end was only
half over, with only half the dead whose names would fill the long black
wall of Washington's Vietnam Memorial.

There were other universes then, too. I sat across from the angry
deflecting bravado of another military unable to admit defeat, impotence
and its own ample share in the common disaster, officers who became
mentors of our puerile Power Point generals of Mesopotamia. After I
resigned from the White House over the invasion of Cambodia, I saw
another universe of careerism, of craven equivocation in a Democratic
opposition ever cowed by Republican chauvinism. I sat then across from
maimed Vietnam veterans come to Capitol Hill to scream and murmur for
peace, their bodies shaking in rage, yet legs and arms strangely still,
frozen in paralysis. Iraq is not Vietnam. Not just in the far wider
geopolitical ruin, but in sheer blind repetition of behavior expecting a
different result, a mark of madness in nations as in individuals, it is
worse.

The universes around Mr. Bush's speech still tell the story. There is
his, a feast for future biographers. At one of the most challenging
moments in history, we cheered, and chose again, the most ill-equipped
president and advisers of the most tragically uninformed and desperately
held presumption. When those who ruled as his regents, Vice-President
Dick Cheney and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, were dominating
the Ford administration and seeding much of today's calamity three
decades ago in their own universes of ambition, 29-year-old George W.
Bush, the lineage's least fortunate son, was in Midland, Tex., partying
heartily and scrounging for some role on the rusty panhandle fringes of
the oil business.

Then the others: In its plush offices, the American Enterprise
Institute, so typical of Washington's think-tank warriors so near power,
so far from Baghdad and the consequences of their prolix urgings to
invade and surge -- and now with many neo-cons venomously jumping ship,
nearly the last of that relentlessly deficient claque, or any other
constituency, to tell Mr. Bush what all failed politicians hope to hear,
that he still has a chance to retrieve history. Or the Democrats with
their "symbolic," but hardly substantive, rejection of escalation,
calculating as usual that to not to commit, to await disaster without
obvious complicity, will protect tenure in the Capitol if not lives in
battle. Or the anti-war critics who in symmetry often match the
Democrats in cravenness and Mr. Bush in their self-delusion (about
Democrats), and who now face the choice of mounting their own
insurgency, their own saving escalation. Not least (though least it is
for many) the universe of ordinary soldiers and their families, small
hometowns and military post housing, overcrowded hospitals and sleepless
nights so far from richly carpeted think tanks, interviews of
presidential hopefuls in the stately Capitol Rotunda, or the muted,
faux-manly tones of White House briefings. The ordinary universe can
meet those others in a sense, of course -- the parallel lines of a
soldier's life and the policy made by others with sleek impunity
converging in a burst of blood in Fallujah, Najaf, Karbala. . .

http://www.greeninstitute.net/subpages/breflect.asp

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