The news magazines are having trouble mustering much enthusiasm for the defeat of Zarqawi. U.S. News & World Report, which featured Zarqawi only at the top of the cover, carried an article from White House correspondent Kenneth Walsh titled "A Bit of A Bounce." Walsh didn't have any actual polling data, but noted at the article's beginning that Zarqawi and the election of Rep. Brian Bilbray were bright spots. Walsh ended, however, with liberal historian Robert Dallek (no label, of course), who wasn't budging from his stubborn take that Iraq is Vietnam:
Zarqawi's death may be a PR coup, but Dallek and other scholars argue that the U.S. occupation increasingly resembles U.S. involvement in Vietnam, an exhausting morass that haunted the country for a generation. Until there is real improvement in Iraq, they say, Bush's presidency will probably remain a troubled one.
This is one of those moments where you wonder why the media would insist that Bush needs to flow with the facts on the ground, change his take to fit the current public mood, and yet why not the same expectation for the Quagmire Corps?
I couldn't find a link to the story on the website -- ahem, a sure sign of a news magazine not in the same class as its mass-production liberal competitors. (If I missed it somehow, let me know.) I did, however, in the futile hunt for that, I found that Dallek was sounding the same depressing notes in 2004 in the liberals' joyous Abu Ghraib aftermath:
"This begins to have the smell of a national crisis," says presidential historian Robert Dallek. " . . . It's opening up a painful divide in the country, and behind it is the sense we may be in another quagmire." One of Dallek's fears is that the debate over Iraq will deteriorate into a bitter cycle of name-calling, similar to what happened during the Vietnam War, over which side is truly patriotic -- the supporters of the war or the critics.
It all comes back to Bush, who made the decision to go to war in Iraq. The continuing insurrection and the prisoner scandal leave critics--and many voters--wondering whether Bush relies too heavily on a hawkish inner circle led by Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. Of growing concern, according to some polls, is whether the Iraq conflict is alienating many in the Arab world while confounding some U.S. allies. "It's not that President Bush lies or deceives the public," says Dallek. "The sense I have is his judgment is poor. He digs in his heels and is very stubborn."
As if Dallek should talk...
