By way of recommending Maureen Dowd's op-ed piece ("
Aux Barricades!") in today's
New York Times, in which she says:
It’s unnerving to be tutored by an educator in chief who is himself being tutored. The president elucidating the Iraqi insurgency for us is learning about the Algerian insurgency from the man who failed to quell the Vietcong insurgency.
During his “60 Minutes” interview, Mr. Bush mentioned that he was reading Alistair Horne’s classic history, A Savage War of Peace, about why the French suffered a colonial disaster in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algiers from 1954 to 1962.
The book was recommended to W. by Henry Kissinger, who is working on an official biography of himself with Mr. Horne.
Mr. Horne recalled that Dr. Kissinger told him: “The president’s one of my best students. He reads all the books I send him.” The author asked the president’s foreign affairs adviser if W. ever wrote any essays on the books. “Henry just laughed,” Mr. Horne said.
It seems far too late for Mr. Bush to begin studying about counterinsurgency now that Iraq has cratered into civil war. Can’t someone get the president a copy of Gone with the Wind?
I quote my friend Keith S's comment on the piece:
Hoo-boy! Zing!
My comment to the twig [i.e. Bush] on all his new-fangled book reading...the final exam is over, you didn't pass, stop studying. But it is so typical of this administration. Throw out the baby with the washwater, trip over the baby, fall in the mud, and then try to develop a plan for cleaning the baby without using washwater.
I found the comparison to DeGaulle interesting on many levels. To think that the defacto leader of the French Resistance would think that a guerilla force would recognize defeat and give up...well, I just don't know what to say. It is an impeccable comparison of two people with more ego than intelligence who refused to learn from history, personal or otherwise.
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