Friday, June 04, 2004
Metaphors Gone Bad
Okay, Mr. Analogy Man. Let's look at this statement:
The New York Times > Washington > The President: Addressing Cadets, Bush Sees Parallel to World War II
The New York Times > Washington > The President: Addressing Cadets, Bush Sees Parallel to World War II: "He compared today's efforts to those in Europe immediately after World War II, noting that two years after the Nazi surrender there was still starvation in Germany and reconstruction appeared to be faltering. In 1948, he added, Stalin blockaded Berlin. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon and the Communists in China won their revolution."
We dealth with the Vietnam analogy a while ago. What's wrong with the WWII reconstruction analogy? Well -
1. We weren't continuing to fight an ongoing insurgency after defeating the Nazi's.
2. Americans didn't take over Auschwitz and Buchenwald and use them to hold and torture innocent German citizens.
3. We didn't enact a policy to re-insurt Nazi's into the re-constructed German government while attempting to marginalize (and fight) pockets of insurgent Communists.
4. We didn't attempt to do all this inside an "unreconstructed" Europe that was still largely pro-Nazi and rabidly anti-American, and also plotting continued infiltration and attacks on American civilians.
5. All the problems we did face in WWII reconstruction weren't largely of our own making, as they are in Iraq.
If we had, I think the situation might have been rather different, don't you?
Maybe Bush's point is that situations have been dire before and what....we continued to plod along without a strategy or a prayer? No, I think in those other situations we had a plan for getting through the muddle, we didn't creat the muddle.
While I don't think Vietnam is a very good analogy for Iraq either (maybe the closest is the French in Algiers), it certainly fits a lot better than Bush's analogy here. Hell, if you're going to fit the facts to your rhetoric that much, why not compare Iraq to a clam bake or a bundt cake? It makes about as much sense.
The New York Times > Washington > The President: Addressing Cadets, Bush Sees Parallel to World War II
The New York Times > Washington > The President: Addressing Cadets, Bush Sees Parallel to World War II: "He compared today's efforts to those in Europe immediately after World War II, noting that two years after the Nazi surrender there was still starvation in Germany and reconstruction appeared to be faltering. In 1948, he added, Stalin blockaded Berlin. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon and the Communists in China won their revolution."
We dealth with the Vietnam analogy a while ago. What's wrong with the WWII reconstruction analogy? Well -
1. We weren't continuing to fight an ongoing insurgency after defeating the Nazi's.
2. Americans didn't take over Auschwitz and Buchenwald and use them to hold and torture innocent German citizens.
3. We didn't enact a policy to re-insurt Nazi's into the re-constructed German government while attempting to marginalize (and fight) pockets of insurgent Communists.
4. We didn't attempt to do all this inside an "unreconstructed" Europe that was still largely pro-Nazi and rabidly anti-American, and also plotting continued infiltration and attacks on American civilians.
5. All the problems we did face in WWII reconstruction weren't largely of our own making, as they are in Iraq.
If we had, I think the situation might have been rather different, don't you?
Maybe Bush's point is that situations have been dire before and what....we continued to plod along without a strategy or a prayer? No, I think in those other situations we had a plan for getting through the muddle, we didn't creat the muddle.
While I don't think Vietnam is a very good analogy for Iraq either (maybe the closest is the French in Algiers), it certainly fits a lot better than Bush's analogy here. Hell, if you're going to fit the facts to your rhetoric that much, why not compare Iraq to a clam bake or a bundt cake? It makes about as much sense.
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