It's all starting to come out. The late President Ford disagreed with the Bush policy on Iraq. I'm not surprised. Unfortunately, the current administration has typically been hostile to the ideas of other people. "BB's off a rhino," as we used to say.
Now that Rumsfeld is gone and Cheney has dropped out of sight, we might see a change in Bush. It'll be interesting to see what his new plan is going to be for Iraq. Based on past policy, it will probably lack a clear goal and call for more violence.
It's clear already to most Americans...we should not have entered Iraq. It's going to fuel violence and terrorism for at least another generation of Arabs.
There were multiple other options, as Ford suggests in the AP article, but I think Cheney is the biggest creep in this story. I think he saw the whole Iraq endeavor as a lucrative power play, and this is the proper role of a CEO, right?
Even hanging Hussein seems hollow at this point, when compared to the devastation that this war has caused to Iraq. I mean, he was convicted of killing 150 people (although it's clear that he killed many more). With all respect to the dead, 150 seems like a small number when compared tot he ~100,000 (or more?) Iraqis that have been killed as a result of the current war.
Plus, 2,900 American troops have been killed (so we've doubled the number killed in the World Trade Center catastrophe....is that what we wanted?). What a mess.
In conclusion, President Ford, rest in peace and please stand by the United States as we go through these dangerous and difficult times.
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2 comments:
I'm not sure what to make of all this "Ford was a hero" stuff. I was always under the impression the guy was a sellout for pardoning Nixon, now it's being painted like that was the right thing to do to move along the "healing of the country?" Are we witnessing some more revisionist history here? My instincts tell me yes. Similar to the way they told me Bush, Condi, and the lot were making up all those reasons to invade Iraq...
Ralph,
Fox News seems to be pushing the "Ford as Hero" stuff. I'm not promoting that. That's because Ford was Republican and Fox News is unabashedly elephantine, so they're using his death to capitalize.
Actually, Ford was not much of a hero. He was never elected president, and probably did not have the chutzpah to win a battle for the presidency.
The reason he served as president was because he was third in line behind Nixon and Spiro Agnew, if I rememeber correctly. Agnew was crooked, too, but I'm not exactly sure what brought him down. Maybe I'll look it up.
Richard Reeves puts Ford's Nixon pardon in perspective in this article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucrr/20061228/cm_ucrr/jerryfordnotagreatmanbutagreatamerican.
Reeves claims Ford realized that allowing Nixon to be dragged through the American legal system for years would have done more harm than good, so I don't think this is an example of revisionist history.
By the way, revisionist history occurs all the time, depending on which voices were muted at the time of the happening and what evidence has come to light since.
History, despite our desire for it to be fixed, is fluid to a great degree. The job of the scholar is to listen to all the viewpoint and sort out the patterns, not just automatically embrace the historical perspective of the dominant culture.
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