So my friend Livy emails me this GWB-George Senior tidbit, titled "The Case for Literacy":
In his memoir, A World Transformed, written more than five years ago, George Bush, Sr. wrote the following to explain why he didn't go after Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War:
"Trying to eliminate Saddam ... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible ... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq... there was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see, violating another of our principles.
Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."It's a little edited from the original, which you can read at Snopes.com, but it says essentially the same thing without complicating the issue.
The punchline in the email is "If only his son could read...," which, given his administration's relationship with writers is sad all on its own. The startling part of this quotation is that it makes George Senior look like a moderate, which he wasn't, and Junior look like a power-hungry, blood-thirsty . . . rebelling adolescent.
I'm not saying anything that others haven't thought before. Imagine, though, what GWB might be like if he'd grown up in the age of video games and worked off some of his inferiority and aggression there? A geek president would be so much better. Or even if he'd been a pot-smoking hippie instead of a drunken frat boy?
It also reminded me of this great line from a Dorothy Sayer's mystery, Busman's Honeymoon, in which Peter Wimsey's mother ponders whether Mussolini was spanked too much or not enough as a child. Oddly enough, Barbara Bush has always reminded me somewhat of the Dowagaer Duchess. Once again, life imitates art. Now, if only GWB loathed war as much as Peter.
Maybe we could just give him a video game instead.
Just a postscript, courtesy of Dr. Emily, in the form of a very powerful Flash animation on the number of casualties we're amassing in this non-war. Dont' miss it.
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