Abraham Lincoln Bush
Over the course of its five-year fiasco in Iraq, the Bush administration in vain has tried to sell this conflict by referencing glorious American wars past. Its revisionist history has included failed parallels to the American Revolution, World War II, Korea, the Cold War and even Vietnam. Today, Vice President Cheney joined the conservative chorus comparing the calamity in Iraq to the U.S. Civil War. And in that ever-growing White House tall tale, of course, George W. Bush is Abraham Lincoln.
Back in September 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice introduced the shockingly inappropriate Civil War analogy to defend President Bush's stay the course strategy in Iraq:
"I'm sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold," Rice said in the new issue of Essence magazine.
"I know there were people who said, 'Why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves?'" Rice said.
Today, Dick Cheney tried it again. In an interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz on the five year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Vice President Cheney scoffed at polls suggesting overwhelming opposition to the war. In response, Cheney presented the quagmire in Iraq as comparable to the American Civil War, and President Bush as a modern day Abraham Lincoln:
RADDATZ: Let me go back to the Americans. Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: So?
RADDATZ: So -- you don't care what the American people think?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. Think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War. He never would have succeeded if he hadn't had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go, and he was willing to withstand the slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there. And this President has been very courageous, very consistent, very determined to continue down the course we were on and to achieve our objective.
The parallels, of course, are laughable. The Civil War saw the Union confronted with a threat to its very existence. After a total mobilization of men and resources, the North completely defeated and occupied the devastated South after a conflict that claimed over 600,000 American lives.
In Iraq, the United States instead plays referee in someone else's civil war, a sectarian conflict in which American national survival is not in jeopardy. There will be no - and can be no - fight to the finish when even the definition of "victory" itself remains elusive. As I wrote late last year:
More and more, President Bush's strategy in Iraq resembles an M.C. Escher illustration. Like the hands drawing each other or the elegant depiction of stairways that cannot possibly meet, the military progress of the U.S. surge is producing an image of a future Iraq that, while glorious to behold, can never be built. The very American alliances with Sunni tribal leaders that are reducing sectarian violence and the threat from Al Qaeda also threaten to undermine the Shiite majority government in Baghdad. And the "enduring" U.S. presence announced by President Bush this week may serve only to protect the Maliki government from its domestic enemies, not its friend and American foe Iran. If anything, the surge may be making the prospect of Iraqi national reconciliation even more remote.
But that doesn't stop President Bush himself and his conservative water carriers from equating Dubya with Honest Abe. As ThinkProgress noted, "the list of conservatives who have sought to frame Bush as Lincoln is long; it includes Newt Gingrich, John Gibson, David Brooks, and Rudy Giuliani." In February, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during an address at Washington University "repeatedly made references comparing himself and the Bush administration to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, suggesting that Lincoln was highly criticized during his presidency and is now highly revered." And just this past January, Fox News reporter Bret Baier portrayed Bush as a latter day Lincoln during the network's comically hagiographic special, "George W. Bush: Fighting to the Finish:"
"We talked a lot about President Lincoln. And there's going to be a lot of people out there who watch this hour and say, is he trying to equate himself with Lincoln?
I tell you what - he thinks about Lincoln and the tough times that he had during the Civil War. 600,000 dead. The country essentially hated him when he was leaving office.
And the President reflects on that. This is a President who is really reflecting on his place in history."
(That Lincoln didn't "leave office" but was instead assassinated just one month after his second inaugural is one of the more humorous errors produced by Fox News in its efforts to rewrite history on behalf of President Bush and the Republican Party.)
For his part, George W. Bush is quick to identify himself with the Great Emancipator. In August 2006, the White House with great fanfare announced that Bush would be reading two Lincoln biographies during his upcoming vacation at his Crawford ranch. At the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2005, Bush defended both his faith-based initiative and the struggle in Iraq by analogy to Lincoln:
In November 1864, after being reelected to his second term, Lincoln declared he would be the most "shallow and self-conceited blockhead" on Earth if he ever thought he could do his job "without the wisdom which comes from God and not from men." Throughout a terrible Civil War, he issued many exhortations to prayer, calling upon the American people to humble themselves before their Maker and to serve all those in need.
Not content to rest there, President Bush has argued that he and Lincoln did not merely serve as commanders-in-chief during times of crisis, but presided over a new American religious awakening in their times. As the Washington Post detailed in September 2006 told a group of conservative journalists that in this sense, too, he was Lincoln's heir:
President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil"...
...Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln's strongest supporters were religious people "who saw life in terms of good and evil" and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.
That's a far cry from Lincoln's message in the Second Inaugural, an address with which President Bush should be well acquainted. Bush, after all, in the summer of 2006 claimed to have read Ronald C. White's excellent analysis, Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. In his March 1865 plea to the American people for national reconciliation with their Southern brothers, Lincoln cautioned that "The Almighty has His own purposes." Bush must have skipped that part.
But then again, Iraq is not the U.S. Civil War. And to be sure, George W. Bush is no Abraham Lincoln.
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Bush as Lincoln? You've got to be kidding me.
Posted by Jasper on March 19, 2008 3:35 PM