Michael Korda has a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times that accuses President Bush of “a total lack of interest in the past.” The problem, as Korda sees it, is that there is an obvious parallel between the “unwinnable” Korean War and the current “unwinnable” war in Iraq. If only President Bush would look to Eisenhower’s example for guidance, he would acknowledge as much:
There’s another Republican president who was once scorned for his lack of knowledge or curiosity about the past: Ronald Reagan. Of course, Reagan is now viewed as a paragon of wisdom and restraint. But all statesmen seem like pygmies when they’re mere politicians; time has a wonderful emollient effect. But even on the merits, Truman was right that Ike’s “I shall go to Korea” declaration was purely a campaign political device to suggest that he, the wise old general, need only take a closer look at the situation to wrap up the problem. When he did go, it’s doubtful he learned anything he didn’t already know–especially since the commanding general, Ridgway, was a disciple of his (and later his choice for CJCS). Eisenhower’s view was not that the war was not “winnable”–no one seriously proposed re-conquering North Korea since that had been tried by MacArthur and brought in the Chinese–but that he, not Truman, had the political standing to accept the modus vivendi our troops had reached at the 38th parallel. There is no comparison at all between North Korea–which in 1953 was no threat to anybody outside of South Korea–and the war against al Qaeda, which is global in scope and threatens much more than Iraq and U.S. interests in the Middle East. Comparing Eisenhower’s view of Korea 55 years ago with today would have been the equivalent of Eisenhower looking to McKinley’s conduct of the Spanish American war (54 years earlier) for guidance. False historic parallels used exclusively for political effect are a cheap way to seem profound–and nobody ever confused Michael Korda with profundity. HT Mr. T
