In today's Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich compares Bush to Lincoln, and the current international situation with the Civil War, World War II, and, World War III. At first glance, this sounds like another cluster bomb in the ongoing right-wing propaganda campaign to drum up dwindling uspport for the war in Iraq. A closer, reading, however, may be that the right wing, through Gingrich, is beginning to signal the end is near for the U.S. in Iraq.
For years George Bush's supporters have been trying to supersize the President into world historical stature -- Bush has been compared to Lincoln,Churchill, Roosevelt, Reagan. The implication is clear: If Bush is so important, then so are his supporters, and those who oppose Bush are the moral equivalent of appeasers, isolationists, Nazi sympathizers, and Communists. Call it both an exercise in ego-inflating and smearing by association.
In today's WSJ, Newt Gingrich, who is seen by the right as a "man of ideas" and is, if your idea of an idea is a soundbite or platitude that been's poll and focus-grouped; writes that Bush is comparable to Lincoln, and today's international situation is comparable to the Civil War era, with some of World War II thrown in, adding up to "World War III."
Never mind that if Gingrich and his conservative supporters had been around back in 1861, they probably would have been calling the states in the Confederacy "agents of change" and Southern plantation owners "agricultural entrepreneurs" who didn't need federal subsidies to succeed. Gingrich argues that the "Kerry-Gore-Pelosi-Lamont bloc" (and you know who you are) are defeatists, unable to recognize the dangers posed by "militant Islam" and to sustain the necessary will for a long, difficult war with virtually every nation and every Muslim viewed by Washington as "the enemy", whether they pose a direct threat ot the U.S. or not. The confiict will be long and difficult, Gingrich warns, not for the fainthearted, otherwise known as the "Kerry-Gore-Pelosi-Lamont-bloc."
Cutting through the boilerplate of Gingrich's polemic is the interesitng thought that the right wing propaganda machine may already be looking ahead to a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in less than total victory. After all, if Iraq is the only front in the "war on terror" and we lose there, then we've lost the "war on terror." If, however, we're really in "World War III," then a lose in Iraq is not losing the war, just a battle. The U.S. lost battles in World War II, the Civil War and the Cold War. Conservatives may be willing to believe that someday Iraq will be seen as the Fredericksburg or Vietnam of the so-called war on terror, a setback but not a fatal blow. It may all be a rhetorical slight of h and, but as we've unfortunately learned these past few years, conservatives excel at those. And if Gingrich's essay is a signal the conservatives may be willing to write Iraq off, this is one slight of hand we may all benefit from.