Blogger Will Bunch had a good post recently analyzing the statement Unca Dick Cheney made recently, namely that,
- “We want to complete the mission [in Iraq], we want to get it done right, and we want to return with honor.”
Bunch quite appropriately recalls the eerily similar use that Richard Nixon made of the same term “honor” in his presidential nomination acceptance speech in August 1968.
Bunch writes,
- For Richard Nixon, “peace with honor” was not synonymous with “peace.”
It meant “war.” A lot of war.
Not long after taking office in 1969, Nixon — without authorization from Congress — initiated a secret air campaign against enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia that dropped 2,750,000 short tons of bombs, more than the alllies used during all of World War II. He later undertook a massive bombing campaign of Hanoi and Haiphong, and his efforts didn’t bring much peace on the homefront, culminating in the slaughter of four bystanders during a 1970 protest at Kent State.
Finally, in January 1973, Nixon declared “peace with honor.”
There are three things you should know about this.
1) When Nixon gave that speech at the GOP convention, it had been 1,467 [days] since the alleged incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that triggered the American escalation of the war. When he finally achieved his “peace with honor,” it was another 1,633 days later, so more than half the fighting came after the “peace with honor” promise.
2) More importantly, from the start of 1969 through the end of the war, some 20,604 American soldiers died in pursuit of “peace with honor,” more than one-third of the total (58,202) for the entire war.
3) In the end, “peace with honor” didn’t look all that different than “peace” — i.e., if Nixon had merely brought the troops home on Jan. 20, 1969. As we all know, Saigon still fell, in May of 1975.
So I think that a necessary first question should be, what on earth does Cheney mean when he talks about a return with “honor”? Let’s please have no repeat of the same kind of damage, destruction, and dishonor that followed Nixon’s use of that term.
Secondly, long-time JWN readers will be well aware that I’ve always supported the idea that the US troops should be allowed an orderly withdrawal from Iraq– provided a total and speedy withdrawal according to a well-publicized and verifiable timetable is indeed the path ther administration chooses to pursue. To me, it is less important whether the administration chooses to try to describe this withdrawal in some form of slightly sugarcoated terms. (When they withdrew from Beirut in February 1984 they called it a “redeployment offshore.” H’mmm.) The important thing is that it happens, and happens soon.
But please let’s not completely debase (or dishonor) the concept of honor in human affairs by going down the path established in Vietnam by Richard Nixon.
Finally, this time around, given that the Cold War has now completely ended and the world has been moving into a new stage, one of the main things we need to do is ensure that this withdrawal from Iraq is followed by a rational and radical downsizing of the US military and the building of new, much more globally accountable structures of international security in all the various areas of the world through which the Pentagon’s generals still swagger as though they own them.
They don’t.
Any “honor” that I can in US strategic affairs in the coming 20-year period will come from the US realizing it needs to work in good faith with other powers to ensure common security interests around the world, and in working diligently to make that happen.
Otherwise, G-d save us all from the possibility of any further repeat of the crimes of 2003.
To me, it is less important whether the administration chooses to try to describe this withdrawal in some form of slightly sugarcoated terms…The important thing is that it happens, and happens soon.
Was it the late Senator George Aiken re Vietnam that said we should declare victory and withdraw? Maybe a variant of that for Bush would be to declare Mission Accomplished and then, most important, withdraw.
Helena, if you think what Egypt did is remarkable when they jailed bloggers and Islamists, you should be equally concerned about “Sami al-Hajj, of the Al-Jazeera TV network, [who] was stopped at the Afghanistan border by Pakistani authorities in December 2001, turned over to U.S. forces and hauled in chains six months later to Guantanamo, where about 390 men are held on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban.”
Here are the 2 claims the U.S. makes about this man from Al-Jazeera:
“But military documents sketch at least a partial outline of al-Hajj’s experiences at Guantanamo and the U.S. grounds for holding him – that he transported money between 1996 and 2000 for a defunct charity that allegedly provided money to militant groups, and that he met a “senior al-Qaida lieutenant.””
So basically this means that they think they have a right to throw Mr. al-Hajj into this hellhole because he may have gave some money to some shady charity, or met some mysterious person. We need a mass internet campaign to free this man.
The whole “honour” rigmarole of the militant GOP is very interesting indeed from a History of Western Thought perspective, yet after all, these are the History-is-Bunk folks, the Brave New Iraq devotees of Mr. Aldous Huxley’s ‘Our Ford.’
The important thing is that [withdrawal] happens, and happens soon.
Well, yes, sure, of course, that is how most of us think nowadays, “Sticks and stones may break my bones / But words can never hurt me.”
You’d expect a priori, or anyway, I’d expect,that the bottom-line artists of the GOP would care even less for “honour” than we run-of-the-mill Yanks do. Respice initium! Did they not forfeit all Second Estate Old Euro claims to Honour when they went into “trade” in partnership with Lord Mammon?
A maintainer might maintain that they did not, that there exists a Third Estate “honour” as well, perhaps even more edifying than the aristo sort, a firm and steady and sober affair of pacta sunt servanda and “sanctity of contract” that has very little to do with whippersnapper duelists blazing away over points of H. and a great deal to do with paying one’s tailor’s bills promptly.
But again I say, respice initium! In March 2003, did their Party and their Dubya invasionize what subsequently has become neo-Iraq as Dubya’s Daddy conducted the 1991 War for Kuwait, rectifying an intolerable violation of previously contracted-for borders with wise and salutary and moderate measures?
Did Boy and Party not rather “go hog-wild” in March 2003,runnin’ amok to CHANGE established régimes rather than defend any coherent principle of stability and regime-establishment and legitimacy? Was it not more a matter of Not kennt kein Gebot and salus populi suprema lex?
These are old and venerable maxims, the Latin one perhaps a bit more so than the Prussian, and I do not mean to despise or deny them, but I fail to see that they have anything worth mentioning to do with “honour” in its traditional acceptance. I had thought it the gallant epitome of Old Euroism to declaim “Better death than dishonour!” Our present Boy-‘n’-Party crew seem rather to take the Darwinian side: presented with even the faintest hint of something that might be exaggerated by ignorance or Party zeal up into an “existential” threat, they worship Survival first, not Honour.
Well, OK, sure, so does everybody else chez nous nowadays except V. D. Hanson, that distinguished AEIdeologue and Hoovervillain, and even he only preaches his geistige Militarismus on alternate Wednesdays and Fridays of late, filling up the rest of his copy with boilerplate Boy-‘n’-Party abuse of us liberal capitulationist wimps.
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And then there is “[what]we need to do is ensure that this withdrawal from Iraq is followed by a rational and radical downsizing of the US military and the building of new, much more globally accountable structures of international security in all the various areas of the world” &c. &c. &c.
I’m all for that, but I fear I’m a gloomy Gus who wants to have “this withdrawal from Iraq” firmly in hand first. Why should the Boy-‘n’-Party crew every withdraw half a centimeter more that they are forced to? They did not enter this arena with any Old Euro “honour,” they entered with hot and hasty gland-basing’ after the Pentagon/WTC attacks.
The Boy-‘n’-Party crew understand nothing more about “honour” than M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí do far off in their undisclosed Khurasánian caves. A contest between GOP geniuses and al-Qa’ida jihád fiends about “honour” would be most extraordinarily ridiculous: what’s to be said after you explain that neither Tweedledumb nor Tweedledee has really much clue clue what he’s talkin’ ’bout when he talks about Old Euro “honour”?
To look at their competing fantasy-fulfilment Party videos, perhaps Usáma wins, horses being accounted rather more traditionally military that Little Brother’s bicycle is accounted. Yet what Usamatite can maintain with a straight face that bicycles are somehow intrinsically “dishourable”?
quite erudite.
JHN colourfully argues, American foreign policy demonstrates no true honour, and cannot defend something non-existant.
Trying to argue such a point with ones likely opponents, who one might reasonably expect to simply misinterpret, label, hair-split and assert, if they respond at all is in keeping with such platonic notions of honour. Sadly, as even the ancient emperors knew, “Honores mutant mores”. You’ll find that in the “H”s along with “Habeas corpus”