Rove makes a fiery exit ("Democrats are headed toward repeating Vietnam-era mistakes")

WACO, Texas — A day after announcing he will leave government Aug. 31, an unrepentant Karl Rove said Tuesday that Democrats are headed toward repeating Vietnam-era mistakes that gave Republicans the upper hand on national defense for 30 years.

“The Democrats have a problem with national security,” the White House senior adviser said. “Too many Democratic leaders are opposing policies that will lead to America’s success in the Middle East.”

In an hour-long interview near the Crawford White House, Rove said congressional efforts to oppose President Bush’s “surge” strategy have clear echoes of Democrats in the early 1970s who cut off support for U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, a war that was even more unpopular than Iraq. In Rove’s view, the nation wound up with its prestige diminished and its adversaries emboldened.

“The Democrats have suffered since,” he said. “To the degree that the current circumstance has caused people to say, ‘Wait a minute. Are we seeing a rerun? And I don’t like how it ends,’ they could face the same problem.”

Rove’s critics agree that the country could be witnessing a repeat of Vietnam: a government that waged an unpopular war that ends without a clear American victory.

When asked about the House Democratic leadership, Rove said: “This last election was a very close election, and I think they misread the results,” he said. “They think they’ve got some mandate to raise taxes and blow up the budget. It’s just unbelievably out of touch with reality.”

Rove was at his most animated when discussing the president’s threat to veto spending bills if their totals exceed his requests. Republicans have predicted the dispute could lead to a partial government shutdown this fall.

“If there’s a decision to shut down the government, it’s going to be coming from Capitol Hill, not from us,” Rove said. “There are tools to make the government run when you can’t reach an agreement about a budget … My hope is that Congress decides to put the best interests of the country ahead of whatever political ambitions or schemes they’ve got.”

Coming after a remarkable run as the architect of Bush’s political career and now a White House deputy chief of staff, the assessments of Rove’s tenure following his surprise announcement on Monday have amounted to obituaries, and brutal ones at that. Tributes, even from Republicans, have been rare and almost all were balanced with qualifiers.

But holding forth at Ninfa’s restaurant, Rove was unswerving and even a tad mischievous as he previewed the case he will make with conservatives and scholars in his new role as burnisher-in-chief of a beleaguered president’s legacy.

Despite Bush’s lagging poll numbers, national unease about the war, the GOP ouster from congressional leadership last year and a 2008 electoral climate that seems to offer few positives, Rove said he believes history eventually will vindicate Bush. One example: improvements in reading and math scores since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act — a piece of legislation that even leading Republicans now view as flawed.

But Rove acknowledged that a positive view is probably years away — and said Bush knows it.

“I’ll rant and rave about the latest editorial abuse from The New York Times and its gross inaccuracies, and the president will say to me, ‘Don’t worry about it: History will get it right, and we’ll both be dead,’” Rove said. “I hope for a long life, but history will judge him kindly. I look at what he has done. In a time of war, he has utterly transformed the foreign policy of the United States. We take the economy today for granted because it’s so darned good. This is a guy who has overseen big changes.”

At a briefing for reporters near Bush’s ranch in Crawford, White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said Chief of Staff Josh Bolten does not plan to go outside the White House to replace Rove, but said it is possible two or three people may replace him.

“If you think about all of the things that Karl Rove was responsible for, he had, I think, maybe 60 people who reported to him directly,” Perino said. “So that's a lot for one person to handle.”

Rove said he remains optimistic about his party’s future no matter who fills his shoes. He said he disagreed with a news article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that said his resignation “all but certainly signals the end of whatever hopes [Bush] had of winning major political victories in a Democratic Congress in his remaining 17 months in office.”

“Somebody else will come and do my job — or several people will do my job,” he said. “But I’m a cog. I’ve served a useful purpose, I think. I know I have. I’m not the president. Once again, people are misunderestimating him. He’s going to use every bit of influence that he has in that office, every lever of power that he’s got — and there are a lot of them — right up to the time that he leaves office.”

So what can still be accomplished? “On the international front, I think we’ll be able to sustain support for the surge,” he said. “I think we’ll also be able to advance the democracy [abroad] agenda, which is a very complex set of initiatives, some of which require legislative approval, some of which do not.”

Among the domestic accomplishments Rove said he’s still hopeful about reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, passing or implementing many of Bush’s energy proposals, preserving his tax cuts, expanding health savings accounts, increasing use of health information technology, and driving the budget toward balance.

The Rove retrospectives that dotted the media Tuesday bashed him for his cocky past prediction that Bush would help build an enduring Republican majority. But despite the party’s current straits, believe it or not, he still stands by his belief.

“We’re not in a period where realignment is going to be achieved by a sharp, decisive election like 1896, 1932, 1800,” he said. He said it’s more likely to be achieved in "a series of incremental gains that prove to be durable. Notice I didn’t say ‘permanent.’”

A March report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press concluded, however, that the GOP was losing ground. “In 2002," the study says, "the country was equally divided along partisan lines: 43% identified with the Republican Party or leaned to the GOP, while an identical proportion said they were Democrats. Today, half of the public (50%) either identifies as a Democrat or says they lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 35% who align with the GOP."

Rove said he retains his optimism that Republicans can improve their support among Hispanic voters, even though polls indicate Republicans lost significant ground with them in 2006, and many have reacted negatively to opposition from many GOP leaders to immigration legislation.

“The party can recognize that Latino voters are culturally and economically and, on security, disposed in a conservative direction,” he said, “and can make common cause and draw into our party a vital and growing part of the American electorate — if we understand it.”

Rove repeated his prediction that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) will be her party’s presidential nominee. “She’s strong and she’s got the establishment of the Democratic Party, and she benefits from having relatively weak or inexperienced opponents,” he said.

He declined to say whether Republicans would be better off running against her or her chief rival for the nomination, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). “It will be her, in all likelihood,” he said.

Rove waved off inquiries about the job performance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), but lavished praised on the House’s No. 4 Democrat, Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who was the party’s House campaign chairman in 2006.

“I think he did a very good job last year,” Rove said. “He’s smart, he’s relentless, he’s tough. For a member of Congress, he can be awfully mean, which is needed in a position like that sometimes — chairman of the campaign committee. His insight was a sense out in the country that the Republicans had a sense of entitlement, crystallized by Duke Cunningham and Mark Foley and Bob Ney and a bunch of other people who had gotten themselves in bad odor, and that that was capable of being run against. He was also smart enough to understand that they couldn’t make it about them being the party who would try to withdraw from Iraq, which is why he went after as many military people [as candidates].”

On the lighter side, Rove said the fresh haircut he sported when he appeared with Bush on the South Lawn on Monday cost just $20 before a generous tip. He said his place near Dupont Circle charged a total of $40 for him and his son.

Despite his apparent good cheer, Rove said he’s sad to be leaving. “I love the people I work with,” he said. “And I love the boss.” He headed off to the White House staff office on an upper floor of his hotel, where he was picking up a new spreadsheet of calls to return.

I’m a historian, golf. You nee donly read some history to see the parallels. I’ll list them for you to make it clear where I’m coming from;

1. It was assumed from the beginning of the War on terror, that the solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism was democracy, while neglecting the fact that, initially, that democracy would have to be enforced at gunpoint.

Like Vietnam, Islamic culture has no democratic history, no customs, no philosophy, nothing at all, that could, even at a stretch, be called “democratic”. It was simply believed that if you “give” people freedom, that a) they automatically know what that means, b) that they automatically know what to do with it, and c) if they don’t, they can be quickly taught.

Just as the United States supported corrupt but apparently-democratically-elected governments in Vietnam, it is doing the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, purple fingers do not a democracy make; democracy is a cultural phenomenon peculiar to the West. What needed to be changed was not governments and how they were selected, what needs to be replaced is an entire culture.

That can only be done by making it perfectly clear that the current culture (and the customs that come with it) are bankrupt and incapable of providing the conditions under which people may prosper peacefully. This lesson needed to be taught in the most painful and violent ways to both Germany and Japan in the Second World War (countries which had established democratic traditions, no less, but not to the extent that most Western nations had).

The problem was the same in Vietnam as it is in Iraq; what came before “democracy” has not been proven to be inferior, and therefore, many people are willing to fight against it. far more are prone to simply sit on the sidelines.

2. When you go to war, make sure you mean it. This is not been “war” in the sense that we haven’t engaged in a campaign designed to show the futility of continued resistance, adherance to Islamic religion and culture and truly tried to push our ideological and cultural enemies off the battlefield. That entails bloodshed, much of it, and this administration has no stomach for it (not surprising since Bush 41 had no stomach for it after being shown video of the Highway of Death leading out of Kuwait).

In war, it is simply not enough to defeat your enemy on the field of battle (assuming he comes out to fight — in both conflicts, the enemy shows a reasonable reluctance to actually engage in a test of arms). You must hold the ground you how have won, so that you may install your system and culture upon it.

In Vietnam, we engaged (because of the terrain and logistical problems associated with it) in a campaign of limited war, with the emphasis on forcing engagements, not taking and holding ground. We simply went someplace, looked for the enemy and defeated him if we found him, and then left. The same thing has been done in Iraq; Fallujah, for example, was attacked SEVEN times. Everytime we had “cleaned out” a Fallujah, Anbar, Sunni triangle, etc, we simply left, only to have to come back to it again.

And just like in Vietnam where the Vietnamese government interfered with American military operations, the Iraqis have also done so, the most egregious example being the politically-engineered escape of Al’Sadr and his subsequent election to Parliament.

3. The basic axiom of the administration has been that “inside every Islamic, there is an American dying to get out”. This was also true of the leaders, both political and military, of the Vietnam era. There is a belief -— erroneous as it turns out -— and obvious to anyone with half a brain, that while most folks would appreciate freedom and democracy (assuming they could be taught exactly what those are and the benefits thereof), they do not want it to the same extent as we have it. Instead of making leaps and bounds, they’d rather take baby steps.

Having established some level of security for democratic traditions and methods to take root, we force them to move faster than they’re ready to go. There are a number of cultural, religious, tribal and political concerns that have to be reconciled, and we did not give either Vietnamese or Iraqis enough time to make these reconciliations, because the public pressure in THIS country does not allow for it. American s like quick victories and dislike long engagements. The wonder of the Vietnam war was that successive Administrations were able to string out involvement over a 21 year period. No matter how many victories we win in Iraq, no one is going to allow an American government another 21 years to finally “win”.

4. When you invade a country, make sure you have a) enough soldiers and b) enough of the RIGHT KIND of soldiers.

In Vietnam, we built a force of over 500,000 troops, the vast majority of which wereNOT front-line infantrymen. they were clerks, cooks, PR experts, civil engineers, and other rear-echelon types.

Despite all the high-tech whizzbangery of the American military, it still has not learned the lesson taught by the Second World War: no matter how far advanced your technology is, wars are still won by INFANTRYMEN who go mano-a-mano with the enemy.

In Iraq, we have a force of 150,000 or so, most of whom are also not infantrymen, but rather rear-eschelon types simply given a rifle and told to stand around as sniper bait or to be blown up by IED’s and EFP’s. Even in an infantry division, the proportion of actual infantrymen is not as great as you’d think it was; the great majority are drivers and logistical types.

Even when our (few) infantrymen DO find the enemy, the enemy fights in such a way as to diminsih the lethality of the individual American soldier, who relies on mobility (provided by vehicles), firepower (supplied by aircraft and artillery), and overwhelming material superiority (the supply line between the continental US and Iraq is what? 4,000 miles long?).

That situation can be easily corrected by engaging in what used to be called “Total War”, but that’s sooooo passe, so WWII, despite being the only truly effective remedy for an insurgency.

5. Set goals and stick to them.

The goals in Vietnam were to “establish democracy and defeat communism”, but no one was quite sure exactly when those goals would be met. The goalposts kept moving; the worst practicioner had to be Gen. Westmoreland whose definition of victory changed on a weekly basis. We went from “finding the enemy and defeating him in the field” to “hearts and minds”, and his “there’s light at the end of the tunnel” comment just before Tet cost him credibility, which hurt the oberall war effort.

In Iraq, GWB has put forward the following signs of victory:
a) an end to sectarian violence (which continues anyways), a “stable Iraqi government” which refuses to do any work and “democratic government’ in a place where none ever existed before.

When those goals can’t be reached, he switches them to: “defeating Al’Queda over there”, using Iraq as “flypaper for intgernational terrorists”, to, eventually, “leaving Iraq now would make us look bad and guarentee more 9/11’s”.

I hope this helps you to know where I’m coming from.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.