11 December 2006

Eye Off the Ball

Focus is not everything, but it certainly is close to it.

They say at the end of their long days at the birth of the Republic, John Adams lay on his deathbed in his estate in Quincy, Massachusetts. It was Independence Day, and the old Patriot and former President was ninety-one as he croaked the words "Thomas Jefferson--still survives..."

It was the eloquent Adams who had so persuasively defended Thomas Jefferson's DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE before the Continental Congress in 1776, ultimately leading to the birth of this new Nation. It also may have been the last time Adams and Jefferson agreed on anything.

Jefferson had actually passed away earlier that day, but the media being what it was, the word did not get to the Bay Colony for days.. They say that emissaries carrying the sad news passed on the road between Monticello and The Old House where Adams died. 

Adams had always proclaimed that, he would outlive Jefferson, even though he was seven years older. "I will outlive Jefferson" was the vow, though of course he was speaking in a metaphor, and of legacy.

He was wrong. Although he succeeded in outliving his Revolutionary rival, it is Jefferson whose stature stands in its own memorial on the National Mall.

That would not be the case today, of course, and Fidel Castro can now go to his rest in peace, knowing he has survived Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet left us still maintaining that he was as “blameless as an angel” for what he did after the murder of President Allende, and during his two decades as Dictator of Chile.

He had a golden parachute out of the dictatorship. He was named Commander of the Armed Forces Emeritus, and he only gave up his title of “Senator for Life” in 2002.

As late as August of this year, prosecutors were investigating means of bringing charges in the deaths of thousands at the Villa Grimaldi between 1974 and 1977.

Of interest, even former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is still wanted for questioning in the matter, and specifically the murder of Charles Horman in the town of Viña del Mar in 1974. Horman was a thirty-one year old American citizen, Harvard graduate and activist of the left.

Dr. Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize winner, avoids travel to Chile for that very reason even today.

Fidel can rest easy, since the revisionist view of his career lies in the distant future. When he expires, he can go serene that he will, for the moment, be remembered as the Father of his Nation.

Like Pinochet, he will never be tried for anything.

Henry Kissinger is in the same boat. But he is concerned with another great rescue mission, this one to salvage something from he ongoing adventure in Iraq. He has been advising the President on strategy of late, even before the Iraq Study Group delivered it's Chinese Menu of options.

One of them is to remove the major American ground combat units, and embed more American personnel in Iraqi units.

There is something utterly bizarre about that strategy, as if someone had put the film history of the Vietnam War in the projector backwards. I am absolutely certain that some members of the study group have seen the movie.

The Americans started in the Republic of Vietnam as Advisors, and you will recall how it ended, tanks rolling, even as the Iraq war began.

I happened to be talking to an official in the Afghan assistance office the other day. He was frustrated, and said his office did not talk to the Iraq specialists in the same office. It was as though there was a curtain between them, he said.

I mentioned the Government Accounting Office estimate that the war in Iraq had cost $400 billion, and it wasn't nearly over.

The Official's eyes grew a little misty. He said that for that kind of money, we could have made Afghanistan into a rose garden, where the birds sang and the high desert bloomed below the mountains.

Pity we took out eye off the ball, I said. Part of his could have worked out really well.

Where was Kissinger when we needed him?

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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