Carrying on the tradition

In next month’s Vanity Fair, Robert Dallek has written a piece on President Richard Nixon’s “epic power struggle with Henry Kissinger,” which is drawn from his upcoming book Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. It seems the tradition of blaming the other party for one’s failures in managing unnecessary wars has been lovingly passed on to the Bush Administration.

On Vietnam, Dallek writes that Kissinger and Nixon privately concluded that the war was unwinnable. “In Saigon the tendency is to fight the war to victory,” Dallek quotes Nixon in a 1969 phone call to Kissinger. “But you and I know it won’t happen — it is impossible.” Yet Kissinger and Nixon sought to label Democrats criticizing the progress of the war as being from “the party of surrender,” writes Dallek.

The question is, do Bush and Cheney realise that the Iraq war is also unwinnable?

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