Yesterday, George Bush completed his doughy pretzel of logic: as recently as early fall it was “we’re winning in Iraq”; then, in the wake of compelling election results & the findings of his own Iraq commission he admits it’s time to listen & be open to alternative ideas; now, while confessing he’s ultimately responsible for the war’s dire state, he manages to ignore all the best advice & con’t with precisely the same strategy that’s created this mess, only with a handful of more ground troops—

Whenever the president starts stuttering on about Iraq, my mind can’t help shifting back to that other war zone, much on the minds of Canadians, now absent from American news: Afghanistan. & fortuitously, my friend Adnan Khan just posted on his blog about his recent excursion to the Pashtun tribal lands, travelling both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. Adnan, who contributes frequently to Macleans, is my go-to-guy when it comes to Afghanistan. Back in August he wrote his prescriptions for what to do in Afghanistan & it still sounds like the most sensible thing I’ve yet heard on how to transcend the region’s historical inevitabilities. Not the kind of things our leaders like to hear, such as the necessity of eventually bringing the Taliban into the political process, but I trust Adnan’s reporting, and thus feel obliged to give his thoughts their due.

Back on the Iraq front, check out the site IraqSlogger, produced by a former news director at CNN. All the news that evidently isn’t fit to print… and all the better for it.

As I’ve written previously in this blog, one wants to avoid making knee-jerk comparisons between the Iraq and Vietnam Wars. But upon catching Errol Morris’s Fog of War again late one night on television recently, I couldn’t help it.

Exhibit A: Bad Information
Just as the attack which didn’t actually happen on U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin (August 1965) was used as a pretext to commence bombing North Vietnam, Saddam’s development of non-existent WMDs and fictional links to al-Qaeda were provided as justification.

Exhibit B: Think Positive!
As the war in Vietnam continued to escalate, President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara both claimed U.S. forces were winning. Privately they knew otherwise, as now declassified audiotapes of conversations have revealed. Only recently has Bush conceded all ain’t going according to plan in Iraq. I can’t help thinking we’ll be hearing a replay of those same conversations twenty years from now.

Exhibit C: Bad Information, Part II
Let’s call this “ignorance of history.” The White House justified the escalation of bombing in Vietnam as part of its domino theory. That fighting the Viet Cong was necessary to containing communist China. In fact, Vietnam and China had been enemies for as long as anyone cared to remember. The Vietnamese believed they were fighting a war of independence against all outside influence. In Iraq, we have seen the same aloof disregard for local animosities. The insistence on seeing historic realities far away through the neo-con’s narrow prism.