“Deja vu all over again”
Upon assuming the presidency after Nixon’s resignation former President Gerald Ford pointed out: “Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”
Today, the people do not rule. More than two months after Americans spoke decisively on election day, Bush is determined to overrule them. Apparently, our long national nightmare in Iraq is far from over.
Gerald Ford recognized when he took office, that it was too late to make a symbolic gesture by trying to send in additional American troops. He admitted: “We can and we should help others to help themselves. But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands, not in ours.”
Bush remains oblivious to those images of helicopters fleeing our embassy in April 1975. Not unlike Vietnam, Iraq is in chaos, beyond the control of our government or the “political fiction” we’re desperately trying to prop up.
Our principal achievement in Iraq has been to empower a jihadist in place of Saddam’s secular regime. The radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr is the thug responsible for the deaths of untold Iraqis and Americans alike.
In 2004, a spokesman for the American occupation promised al-Sadr’s arrest on a months old warrant for his earlier assassination of Abdel Majid al-Khoei, a rival Shiite who had fiercely opposed Saddam. Today, al-Sadr and his forces control 30 seats in the Iraqi Parliament, four government ministries, and a militia more powerful than the Iraqi army. He controls the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, who Bush supports. It was al-Maliki, who shut down a search for an American soldier kidnapped at gunpoint in Sadr City last fall.
Gerald Ford concluded: “America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam” but not “by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” He added: “We, of course, are saddened indeed by the events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.”
Today, the people do not rule. More than two months after Americans spoke decisively on election day, Bush is determined to overrule them. Apparently, our long national nightmare in Iraq is far from over.
Gerald Ford recognized when he took office, that it was too late to make a symbolic gesture by trying to send in additional American troops. He admitted: “We can and we should help others to help themselves. But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands, not in ours.”
Bush remains oblivious to those images of helicopters fleeing our embassy in April 1975. Not unlike Vietnam, Iraq is in chaos, beyond the control of our government or the “political fiction” we’re desperately trying to prop up.
Our principal achievement in Iraq has been to empower a jihadist in place of Saddam’s secular regime. The radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr is the thug responsible for the deaths of untold Iraqis and Americans alike.
In 2004, a spokesman for the American occupation promised al-Sadr’s arrest on a months old warrant for his earlier assassination of Abdel Majid al-Khoei, a rival Shiite who had fiercely opposed Saddam. Today, al-Sadr and his forces control 30 seats in the Iraqi Parliament, four government ministries, and a militia more powerful than the Iraqi army. He controls the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki, who Bush supports. It was al-Maliki, who shut down a search for an American soldier kidnapped at gunpoint in Sadr City last fall.
Gerald Ford concluded: “America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam” but not “by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” He added: “We, of course, are saddened indeed by the events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.”
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