Cole's Shoals

Juan Cole, the "scholarship-lite," questionably Arabic-fluent professor passed over for a position by a school that even accepts the Taliban, bitterly attacked White House spokesman Tony Snow for rather innocuous response to question asked by CNN's Wolf Blitzer Sunday:

BLITZER: "Let's talk a little bit about troop withdrawal potentials for the U.S. military, about 130,000 U.S. forces in Iraq right now.

In our most recent CNN poll that came out this week, should the U.S. set a timetable to eventually withdraw troops from Iraq, 53 percent said yes; 41 percent said no.

Senator Dianne Feinstein wrote a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today. She's going to be on this show, coming up.

She wrote this: "We have now been in Iraq for more than three years. And we believe that the time has come for that phased redeployment to begin. It is also time for the Bush administration to provide a schedule and timetable for the structured downsizing and redeployment of U.S. forces in Iraq."

"Does that make sense?"

SNOW: "The president understands people's impatience — not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation. He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?

But you cannot conduct a war based on polls. And you can't conduct this kind of activity. What you have to do — and the president's been clear about this — is take a look at the conditions on the ground. Let's think for a moment of the alternative.

Snow makes a self-evident point that no reporter thought to question: a major counteroffensive mounted by an enemy that you thought was on the verge of being beaten is—at the very least—a sobering experience, one that requires recalibration and reevaluation before the offensive continues.

Cole, for some reason infuriated with Snow's response, went off on a odd rant that predictably enough, blamed Bush:

The president of the United States is in some ways the nation's leading public historian. More people hear about American history from him than from virtually any other source, with the possible exception of Hollywood.

It has therefore been dispiriting to witness the falsehoods about American history consistently purveyed by the Bush administration. Bush and his officials have repeatedly made allegations that simply are not true, but they sin most grievously against the muse of Clio with their flat-footed and implausible analogies.

On Sunday, the most prominent among Bush's spokesmen from the ranks of Fox Cable News anchors, Tony Snow, did it again. He compared our current situation in Iraq to the Battle of the Bulge. This battle began in mid-December, 1944, a little over 3 years after the US entered the war. Snow also suggested that the American public was ready to throw in the towel at that point in the war!

Is the only way this tawdry administration can make itself feel good to defame the Greatest Generation? My late uncle used to tell us stories of how he fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Is Tony Snow saying he was a coward? That the Americans back at the homefront were?

Let' examine this outburst for a moment.

While I am certainly limited by having just a normal human circle of friends and acquaintances, I think I can honestly state that not one of them confuses the White House with the Smithsonian, nor do they think of the President as being "Curator in Chief."

Or, perhaps I merely was too young to have heard and appreciated FDR's fireside chats about the Punic Wars, where he boldly proclaimed:

"The only think we have to fear is: HUGE. FREAKING. ELEPHANTS."

"Any jackass can stomp on some greenware, but it takes a good Moche to use a press mold."

At no point would it appear to a rational person that Snow's hypothetical question of "what are we doing here?" could be stretched into a charge of defaming an entire generation. Nor does it seem likely one could reasonably conflate this question into calling for surrender, nor could an intelligent person misunderstand that question to be a statement labeling Cole's uncle (or anyone else) as a coward.

I'm sure Juan Cole has a point.

I'm just not sure that it's worth wading through the barren shoals of his mind to determine just what that point may be.