Wordyard

Hey, I’m a little late on this, but I cannot let it stand: Ex-Bush speechwriter David Frum, op-edding in Sunday’s New York Times, compared Bush’s war on Iraq with Lincoln’s war on the Confederacy. Yes, that’s right. This is the key passage:

It sometimes seemed to me, as I watched the debate between the administration’s hawks and doves from the inside, that I was witnessing a reprise of the great strategic debates of the Civil War. Back then, official Washington was divided between the realists, who wanted to fight the smallest possible war in order (as they said) to save the Union as it was, and the idealists, who sought the biggest possible victory, even if it meant smashing the old order in the South forever. Today’s realists, like their 19th-century counterparts, are more frightened of change than they are of defeat. At every step, President Bush has opted for the course that offers the hope of a bigger victory — even at the price of a wider war.

So let’s unpack this argument. Frum is telling us that those on the Bush team who believe that we should invade Iraq not just to defend ourselves from Saddam Hussein’s (reported) “weapons of mass destruction” but in order to craft a new, pro-American Middle East order are the contemporary equivalents to those “idealists” in Lincoln’s Washington who wanted to smash the old order of the South. (That would make Paul Wolfowitz a latter-day abolitionist!)

It’s hard to know whether to be insulted on behalf of the anti-slavery idealists — or just to point out the vast difference between fighting a civil war on the soil of one’s own country against secessionists and fighting a war halfway around the world to overthrow an admittedly unjust, but decidedly foreign, ruler.

There may be good arguments to be made by those who feel that the U.S. can depose Saddam and impose a new democratic order in Iraq without making the same mistakes we have made in the past every time we have sent in the Marines to secure Uncle Sam’s interests. (The presence of tons of oil in Iraq makes one suspicious, but never mind that for now.) It does no good, however, to pretend that this is not an imperialist venture at heart, or to try to mask it with absurd historical comparisons to the Civil War and Lincoln’s gradual embrace of emancipation.

Maybe, with the Republican Party just coming off its Trent Lott debacle, Frum is simply doing his best to wrap his team in the old “Party of Lincoln” colors. It won’t wash. The very same issue of the Times that featured Frum’s desperate rhetorical ploy also boasted a lengthy magazine cover story by Michael Ignatieff headlined “The American Empire: Get used to it.”

As far as I can tell, the Bush administration drew a line in the sand for North Korea, North Korea stepped over it and called the U.S. bluff, and now the president’s gang are saying, “Gee, we don’t have any choice but to negotiate here, otherwise North Korea will incinerate Seoul.”

It’s the worst possible position for an international power to be in — with its credibility shot and no apparent plan for either diplomacy or force. How can the otherwise bellicose Bush team have found itself in this mess?

It looks like another example of Bush Syndrome — that way our president has of responding to major events by saying, “Don’t bother me with reality, I’ve already made up my mind.” The syndrome has hitherto been on display in the administration’s economic policy, which has doggedly stuck to precisely the measures least likely to lift us out of the lingering recession because, well, they are what Bush embraced back in 1999. In the case of North Korea, Bush has already determined that Saddam is public enemy number one. Who cares that North Korea is more volatile, closer to nuclear capability and less predictable?

Josh Marshall’s comments today are worth reading.