And Another Invidious Comparison...

We had friends over to dinner last night, Bush. A lovely evening. We strolled in the garden, drank a glass of wine in the early evening cool down under the flowering pear trees at the end of our property, and had dinner out on the balcony overlooking the city of Hollywood. A sliver of moon, our two tall eucalyptus swaying in the breeze, a deep blue, darkening sky... Beautiful.

And good conversation. Our friends had just returned from an extended trip down Mexico way, with plenty of time to read. Which brought us, after yesterday's Vietnam analogy, to this other invidious comparison: one of the couple had taken along a biography of Napoleon to read, and aside from admiring the extraordinary dedication of a good biographer and the kind of time needed for the detailed research necessary to do a book of this kind, he was struck by the similiarities between your invasion of Iraq and Bonaparte's march into Spain. Same underestimate of the number of troops required, same over-reaching and under-preparation... The comparisons, he said, were endless.

His final, exasperated question: "Doesn't Bush read history?" he asked.

I guess a lot of us have asked that same question, Bush. I confess I don't know much about Napoleon in Spain either, but I am sure that the current conflict in Iraq has deep roots in the region's history, and that we marched in without any real understanding of that history, still less of the culture, the religion, or of tribal loyalties. We thought--you seem to have thought, Bush, in your simplistic way--that American democracy is the right model for every other country in the world, and that (your) American values are universally shared.

Wrong. In doing so, and in assuming that the tyrant Saddam Hussein alone was the problem there, you discounted centuries of history and tradition which led us now to the current impasse, where the new "government" can't even get past their sectarian squabbling to agree on appointments to the most urgently needed ministries. And meanwhile, yesterday, ANOTHER fifty people died.

As to the question my friend posed yesterday, "Doesn't Bush read?", you may have noticed that a number of our daily readers have been raising that same issue. There have been teasing, painful reminders of that little goat and the level of your reading skills. One reader even offered to make you an illustrated version of "The Real Bush Diaries" so that you'd be able to read it!

Unkind, Bush, perhaps. But you have made not too fine a public point of your disinterest in reading. As with the apparent pride you take in mangling the language, your arrogant hostility to anything approaching intellectual effort may play well to your base. To those of us who believe that thought, and planning, and a sound sense of history are vital to the well-being of this country and the future of this vulnerable planet, it's a lot more troubling.