What Dowd Doesn't See: Bushies Pig-Headed and Proud of It

"It's stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded," says Maureen Dowd in her NY Times column of today, Didn't See It Coming, Again. "The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react."

Dowd, I would suggest, is incorrect in her analysis here. Pig-headed and proud of it, the Bushies continue to ignore the facts on the ground in Iraq because they are fighting an ideological war that began a generation ago in America. As I said in my post of November 19, 2005, The Importance of Being Earnest or Why the Cabal Won't "Cut and Run":

The Bush administration will never pull U.S. troops out of Iraq. To do so would be to violate a sacred principle of the ideologues who run George W. Bush and the U.S.: America must never again retreat.

"Again" is the operative word here. Again because this principle rests upon the foundational belief of the neo-cons that the US must never show weakness again as it did in Vietnam. According their view Vietnam wasn't an unwinnable conflict against an enemy that could not be defeated in the conventional US manner. Nope. That view wouldn't serve their imperial agenda, or stimulate their appetite for conquest.

No. According to the neo-con rewrite, the U.S. was on the cusp of victory when American leadership knuckled under to student protestors (dupes of Communism), lily-livered peaceniks, dope-smoking journalists in the liberal media, limousine liberals in Congress, etc., etc.

Since Bush's last State of the Union speech, the conditions in Iraq by most measures have badly deteriorated: more Americans killed than in previous one year period, more Iraqi police killed, more bombings, more civilian deaths, and less electricity being delivered to Iraq citizens, etc.

In Iraq-nam the Bush team were and continue to be -- deliberately -- pig-headed and culturally illiterate because they were and are continuing to fight a domestic battle against "weak liberals" who lost the war in Vietnam because they (according the right-wing narrative), "didn't have the guts to win." Monstrous.