If a Civil War Fits, You Can't Acquit
SuzannePjam
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Maureen Dowd Links Bush to O.J.: If a Civil War Fits, You Can't Acquit
By E&P Staff
Published: November 24, 2006 11:35 PM ET
NEW YORK With a timely reference to the rise and fall of the O.J. Simpson tell-some book (and what she's calls the "Thanksgiving Day Massacre" in Iraq) Maureen Dowd in her Saturday column for The New York Times suggests that President Bush go on Fox News and declare, "IF I did it -- here’s how the civil war in Iraq happened.”
Bush, she writes, "could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team’s failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity." Is she suggesting that Bush, like O.J., has gotten away with murder?
Dowd also reveals that her own paper, along with other news outlets, "have been figuring out if it’s time to break with the administration’s use of euphemisms like 'sectarian conflict.' How long can you have an ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?
"Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation before our very eyes....
"It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that America’s troops should be in the middle of somebody else’s civil war than to convince them that we need to hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda."
Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Republican from Nebraska, in an op-ed for The Washington Post today, calls for preparing a U.S. pullout in Iraq.
Dowd, meanwhile, hits Bush for his "preposterous" lessons learned in Vietnam, and Tony Snow for "ludicrous" hair-splitting in denying a civil war: "Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the fighting is not taking place in every province and because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that’s like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took place in one small corner of the country, so there was no real American Civil War. And there were elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln was re-elected months before the war’s end."
The questions, she concludes, "are no longer whether there’s a civil war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to?
"At the moment, that would be no one."
By E&P Staff
Published: November 24, 2006 11:35 PM ET
NEW YORK With a timely reference to the rise and fall of the O.J. Simpson tell-some book (and what she's calls the "Thanksgiving Day Massacre" in Iraq) Maureen Dowd in her Saturday column for The New York Times suggests that President Bush go on Fox News and declare, "IF I did it -- here’s how the civil war in Iraq happened.”
Bush, she writes, "could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team’s failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity." Is she suggesting that Bush, like O.J., has gotten away with murder?
Dowd also reveals that her own paper, along with other news outlets, "have been figuring out if it’s time to break with the administration’s use of euphemisms like 'sectarian conflict.' How long can you have an ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?
"Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation before our very eyes....
"It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that America’s troops should be in the middle of somebody else’s civil war than to convince them that we need to hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda."
Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Republican from Nebraska, in an op-ed for The Washington Post today, calls for preparing a U.S. pullout in Iraq.
Dowd, meanwhile, hits Bush for his "preposterous" lessons learned in Vietnam, and Tony Snow for "ludicrous" hair-splitting in denying a civil war: "Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the fighting is not taking place in every province and because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that’s like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took place in one small corner of the country, so there was no real American Civil War. And there were elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln was re-elected months before the war’s end."
The questions, she concludes, "are no longer whether there’s a civil war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to?
"At the moment, that would be no one."
"Where there is sacrifice there is someone collecting the sacrificial offerings."-- Ayn Rand
"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
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