Writing the war

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m still reading Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, about the second half of our involvement in Vietnam.

It’s slow going, for many reasons. One of them is that it’s painful to read it and think what might have been.

Not what inevitably would have been—we can’t rewrite history and know what would have happened had public opinion in the US not turned so heavily against the war. But Sorley’s account of Creighton Abrams’s implementation of a totally different—and far more successful—policy than that of his predecessor, William Westmoreland, convinces this reader that there was a very good chance of South Vietnam having staved off the North’s incursion if we had kept up our financial aid during the mid-70s.

In this respect, as I’ve written here, Abrams and his policies are somewhat parallel to General Petraeus and the surge. Continue reading →

Leadership, Bush: not an oxymoron

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s common knowledge that President Bush’s approval ratings still hover somewhere in the 30th percentile, where they’ve lingered for the last two years, with only short forays into the 40s.

One would think this proves that Bush is a lousy leader. But then again, leadership is not synonymous with popularity. although there can certainly be overlap.

Whatever leadership Bush may or may not exhibit, it is agreed that he is extremely flawed in the all-important matter of communicating with the public. It’s also common knowledge that many people think of Bush as dumb, and almost all agree he is inarticulate.

But glibness and intelligence are not synonymous either—although, once again, there is often overlap. The idea of Bush as stupid extends to the notion that he is some sort of puppet of handlers such as Rove or Cheney, who are the evil intelligences behind the moronic Bush.

The idea that Bush could actually study an issue in depth and make a courageous and informed decision is laughable to people who ascribe to these latter notions, and I doubt anything they could read or learn about Bush would change that opinion. Continue reading →

Liars and the lying liars who tell them

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not new information. But this seems to come straight from the horse’s (Saddam’s) mouth and, if true, ought to obliterate the “Bush lied about WMDs” meme.

Yeah, right. Dream on, you say.

To recap: if Saddam took steps to make the world believe he had WMDs even though he did not, and in fact did retain the ability and intent to make them as soon as sanctions were to be removed (as even the much-misunderstood Duelfer report made clear), then the WMD justification for the war holds even if Saddam possessed no actual WMDs. Continue reading →

The fickle political public

The New Neo Posted on by

Have you noticed how unpopular Bill Clinton has become of late, even with Democrats who formerly were charmed by him? Michael Weiss has.

What’s going on? Most Republicans always hated him, and I must confess I was never especially fond of him. But most Democrats had been pretty loyal till recently, when Bill has planted his foot firmly in his own mouth a few times too often while campaigning on behalf of his wife.

Perhaps he’s such a narcissist that he only warms up to the stump when he’s shilling for himself. Continue reading →

The course of true blogging never did run…

The New Neo Posted on by

…smooth.

I’m having some connectivity problems today, so this post will be quick. I plan to be back at full speed tomorrow.

As any of you who are trying to sell a house right now or who have watched the stock market do loop-de-loops lately know, the economy appears unstable. And, of course, in this election year, that has consequences for the candidates.

There’s no death of opinions about what those consequences will be, or where the economy is really heading, although there’s also no consensus. This is hardly unusual in economic matters.

One thing that’s clear is that things have changed lately. This piece by Michael Barone makes the excellent point that ideas about the economy used to be shaped by a populace the bulk of whom had lived through the Great Depression, but are now shaped by a very different group.

If you want to feel old, just take a look at this: Continue reading →

The MSM should know

The New Neo Posted on by

The blurb for this AP article on Yahoo News caught my eye, so I clicked on it. It indicated that a new study had documented that during the lead-up to the Iraq War the Bush administration had made hundreds of “false statements” about the security threat Iraq represented.

I was expecting, at the very least, something new. Even perhaps something significant.

And I was certainly expecting evidence of lies on the part of Bush and company, although I should have understood that the phrase “false statements” was ever-so-carefully chosen to conjure up the idea of a lie in the reader’s mind but to stop short of actually saying it. Continue reading →

Sarkozy, the Heartbreak Kid

The New Neo Posted on by

Can’t resist some more gossip.

I’ve been following Sarkozy’s latest uncouplings and recouplings with some fascination. But until I read this piece I wasn’t aware of the histrionic history of how he’d met and married his previous wife, Cécilia.

It’s either romantic or abominable, depending on how you look at it—or perhaps both:

[Sarkozy] had famously fallen in love with his second wife, Cécilia, while officiating at her wedding in his capacity as mayor of Neuilly, a well-to-do inner suburb of Paris. He was 28, Cécilia was 26, and her groom–Jacques Martin, France’s answer to Johnny Carson–was 51. Sarkozy later recalled thinking: “What am I doing marrying her off to someone else? She’s for me!” Still married at the time to his first wife, Sarkozy pursued Cécilia relentlessly for four years. Where he departed from the usual pattern was in eventually suing for divorce even though he was mayor of a famously conservative town. It would take him eight years to secure a divorce from his devout Catholic, Corsican-born first wife, Marie; but in the meantime, including his stint as budget secretary under Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, he lived, sometimes in official residences, with Cécilia, who called herself Madame Sarkozy.

Wow. Continue reading →

Be wary of inspiration: the Age of Aquarius dawns again

The New Neo Posted on by

Many liberals I know are enthralled with Obama.

In New Hampshire during the primary campaign, where voters get to see the candidates up close and personal, he made a very strong impression. As far as I could tell, this was based primarily on the feeling he gave his supporters: hope, trust, excitement. It was as though the optimistic part of the 60s had come back after a long absence and many dashed dreams.

A lot of people who went through the 60s keep yearning for that special feeling they’d gotten back then (when they weren’t stoned, that is, or maybe when they were stoned): a sense that wonderful things were possible and just around the corner, that all it would take was the right attitude and the casting off of the old and fusty, that charismatic leaders with inspiring words and good intentions would lead the way.

The way to where, and to what? The goals were fairly clear: liberty and justice—and equality of outcome, not just opportunity—for all. Oh, and the end of bigotry, war, and the economic exploitation by the nasty rich of the noble poor.

Not too much to ask.

Exactly how this was to be accomplished wasn’t as clear. Continue reading →

The Sanity Squad: where have all the soldiers gone?

The New Neo Posted on by

Click here to listen to tonight’s Sanity Squad live at 8 PM Eastern time. Or click later to listen to the recording of our latest foray into commentary.

The topic is the soldier, as seen by Left and Right: victim, villain, hero, protector. We’ll also be discussing—what else?—the election.

Join Dr. Sanity, Siggy, Shrink, and me for another half-hour of Blog Talk Radio.

The decline of the $400 purse—and the streetwalker

The New Neo Posted on by

The $400 purse isn’t dead yet, not by a longshot. But in the current economy, fewer people are able to easily afford them.

Although I suppose designers have got to eat, too, please excuse me for not being able to shed a tear on this one.

Luxury designer items have always seemed exceptionally silly to me. During regular visits to New York over the years, I’ve watched prices climb to astronomic heights. The last time I was there I visited stores where fairly ordinary-looking people saw nothing odd about purchasing a purse with a price tag of $2000—oh, why not take two? They’re small.

This upward creep of prices seems to have little relation to the quality of the clothes. Nowadays women’s fashion resembles a cross between something a color-challenged little girl might choose for herself (wildly-printed pinafores over ragged t-shirts with clashing colors over leggings with high boots), the garb of a heroin addict, and something that used to be found only on streetwalkers peddling their wares.

And, while we’re at it, whatever happened to streetwalkers? Not that I much miss them, but they used to be a fixture in all the big cities.

I’d been wondering whether the internet and cell phone has largely replaced them, and a brief bit of research indicates that this is indeed so. It also turns out, if you follow the article, that some of those $400 bags are being wielded by those very same internet prostitutes. Hmmm.

[CORRECTION: Oops, I grossly underestimated the price of a Louis Vuitton bag, the internet prostitute’s choice for holding those all-important items. Four hundred dollars would be a bargain, it seems.]

Landes confronts Enderlin at Harvard

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who have followed the Al Durah controversy and the lawsuits instigated by French journalist Chrarles Enderlin against bloggers accusing him of lying (see my posts under the category “Paris and France2 trial” on the right sidebar) will be interested to learn that Richard Landes has written about Enderlin’s recent talk at Harvard.

Landes’ post makes for sobering reading. It also contains the interesting tidbit that Enderlin casually mentioned that those famous photos of Arafat giving blood after 9/11 were staged, and that Enderlin and the press were well aware of that fact.

Enderlin doesn’t seem to be the least bit apologetic, or even aware that there might be something wrong with this. So much for journalistic ethics—“higher truth” and all that, you know. Continue reading →

Collateral damage, Vietnam-style (sound familiar?)

The New Neo Posted on by

jane_gun.jpg

I’ve been reading Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, an examination of what I’ve referred to as the “second act” of the Vietnam War, the period of Vietnamization under General Creighton Abrams.

I have a feeling I’ll be writing quite a few posts based on this book before I’m through. But for now I’ll just offer a quote or two.

The following is tossed in almost casually on page 44 of Sorley’s 388-page tome:

Military facilities, such as the antiaircraft gun on which Jane Fonda posed, were deliberately crowded in next to civilian areas, almost ensuring extensive collateral damage if they were attacked, thus using American scruples against causing such injuries to inhibit attack.

Sorley’s book was written in 1999, so it includes no comparison to the techniques of Islamic totalitarian terrorists, Palestinians, or the like. But reading it now, one cannot escape the similarity.

When our press focused on civilian casualties during the Vietnam war, the connection between this enemy technique of locating their forces among civilians and the resultant collateral damage could have been made clear. It was not.

For that matter, why pick on the press? Perhaps it’s my memory that’s at fault, but I certainly don’t recall our own government making the excellent point of emphasizing the details of the pernicious nature of the enemy we faced. It would have helped ordinary American people understand who we were fighting, and the reason it was extraordinarily difficult to avoid civilian casualties. Continue reading →