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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (61584)	8/3/2007 1:36:02 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Bush = Napoleon Jules Crittenden Here, for your reading pleasure, is one of those truly idiotic essays that demonstrates how accomplished academics with clever ideas about how current events compare to their particular historic specialty can be utterly ignorant of the realities of the present, which of course calls into question how well they possibly can understand the realities of the past. Columbia U. dolt Richard Bulliet compares Bush to Napoleon, determines bolting like a defeated Napoleon did is the right idea. <<< What does George W. Bush share with Napoleon Bonaparte? Perhaps only one thing. Both men launched spectacular attacks on Arab countries, won stunning initial victories, and then became bogged down in a hopeless military occupations. If Bush has the wisdom to do what Napoleon did, he may yet be remembered as a leader of historic stature. All he has to do is cut and run. >>> Times have changed. Someone needs to explain the genocide thing to Richard Builliet. Maybe the terrorism, WMD, Saddam preying on his people and surrounding nations, oil wealth, etc., assorted other developments. Someone needs to explain that Napoleon was an a colonial, wealth-grabbing venture, as opposed to an effort to limit actual threats to the United States. <<< His initial war plan a shambles, Napoleon, like Bush, still had a pseudo-rationale for war to fall back on. In an Arabic propaganda broadside printed aboard ship while his army crossed the Mediterranean, he proclaimed his intention of liberating the Egyptians from their Mamluk oppressors. And he brought an army of scholars and advisers with him to make the occupation of Egypt a model of European benevolence. “O people of Egypt, should they say to you that I have only come hither to defile your religion, this is but an utter lie that you must not believe. Say to my accusers that I have only come to rescue your rights from the hands of tyrants, and that I am a better servant of God - May He be praised and exalted - and that I revere His Prophet Muhammad and the grand Koran more than [the Mamluks] do.” Not surprisingly, the Egyptians and Syrians found Napoleon’s claims of liberation and esteem for Islam as nonsensical as Bush’s vision of saving the Iraqis from Saddam and destroying their country in the process. Guerrilla resistance grew. Cut off from their naval supply train, the French Army had no hope of imposing permanent rule over Egypt. >>> Here’s my suggestion for Bulliet. Go embed. I’m sure the Army will take you. Embedded historian. That would be something new. But it is a great opportunity to see real, actual history happening. See an actual army of occupation in the Middle east, just like Napoleon’s. Very messy. Hot. Bloody. Dangerous. Filthy. Irksome and annoying, too. Not, according to a growing number of people who have been there, so easily dismissed as a pointless failure, nor so easy to exit. Complicated and not readily put in a box. A matter of life and death, as it happens, maybe even one’s own. But a great opportunity to discuss theories with soldiers, with Iraqis, those who live and die by their practical application, and to get a sense of how ridiculous the abovementioned statements are. Statements that, really, should be an embarrassment for a serious historian, who presumeably has to be able to document every word he writes about what happened in the 18th century but would be hard-pressed to back up the absurd statements he makes here about the sitting president of the United States and the military and political situation in Iraq. julescrittenden.com