Isn't It Ironic

Today's Washington Post notes that Bush "read three books last year on George Washington, read about the Algerian war of independence and the exploitation of Congo, and lately has been digging into 'Troublesome Young Men,' Lynne Olson's account of Conservative backbenchers who thrust Winston Churchill to power." Remarkably, they don't say anything about yesterday's Washington Post op-ed by Olson:

I've spent a great deal of time thinking about Churchill while working on my book "Troublesome Young Men," a history of the small group of Conservative members of Parliament who defied British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler, forced Chamberlain to resign in May 1940 and helped make Churchill his successor. I thought my audience would be largely limited to World War II buffs, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the president has been reading my book. He hasn't let me know what he thinks about it, but it's a safe bet that he's identifying with the book's portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. But I think Bush's hero would be bemused, to say the least, by the president's wrapping himself in the Churchillian cloak. Indeed, the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out -- but they're between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.

Seems relevant. I dunno. It'd also be interesting to know what it is Bush thinks he's learned from reading about the Algerian war of independence. There was a weird moment way back in 2003 that it came out that the Pentagon was screening The Battle of Algiers as some kind of how-to manual. It's always nice to have a reminder that "the lessons of history" are rarely clear or even especially useful.

Comments

From my 2004 review of the re-release of Battle of Algiers in The American Conservative:

"Perhaps, though, our soldiers should have shown their civilian overlords “The Battle of Algiers” before the latter blithely decided to occupy an Arab country. For extra verisimilitude, the special-ops boys could have strapped Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans ideologue-warriors to their armchairs, pinned their eyelids open, attached electrodes, and applied little jolts of juice to help them remember the movie better."

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 2, 2007 4:34 PM

George Washington was criticized in his day and yet today people think he was great. It just goes to show.

Posted by Tyrone Slothrop | July 2, 2007 4:54 PM

It kind of bothers me that he has this kind of time.

Posted by aeroman | July 2, 2007 4:56 PM

Is anyone else outraged at the President tacitly comparing the war in Iraq with the Algerian War for Independence?

Bush demonstrates his complete ignorance of the middle east and all former colonies when he shows the world that he believes that it helps his cause when the occupation of Iraq is compared with the brutal and murderous domination of the Algerian people by the French.

Posted by Rickm | July 2, 2007 5:08 PM

Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

Those who read about history still repeat it, but at least it makes them feel smart.

Posted by lampwick | July 2, 2007 5:22 PM

I was really glad to see that comment from Lynne Olson because I had posted on the similarities between George Bush and Neville Chamberlain on April 17 on my own blog.

My argument boils down to this:

1. Bush made a "tragic misreading" of the Iraq situation in the same way that Neville Chamberlain misread Hitler's intentions.

2. Given his delusions about Iraq, Bush's rhetoric of a "free Iraq" has been just as empty as Chamberlain's slogan of "peace in our time."

3. Bush has been just as thoroughly repudiated by the American public as Chamberlain was by the British public.

Bush is much closer to Chamberlain than he is to either Roosevelt or Churchill. Who knows? Maybe George has a picture of old Neville on his desk.

Posted by Ric Caric | July 2, 2007 6:00 PM

Unlike Bush and Chamberlain, Churchill was never in favor of his country going it alone

Churchill allied with Stalin, he definitely would have been negotiating with Iran after 9/11 and probably now too.

Posted by mq | July 2, 2007 7:34 PM

It's always nice to have a reminder that "the lessons of history" are rarely clear or even especially useful.

Matthew, think about it: they watched a movie about how everything went wrong about Algeria in spite of best efforts, and rather than change policy or do something differently, they just kept doing the same shit, instead of leaving or whatnot.

This is not a problem with the lessons of history, this is the ne plus ultra of ignoring the very plain lessons of history.

m, 'intelligence reports are only useful to the intelligent'

Posted by max | July 2, 2007 8:07 PM

Sometimes you just wonder....

By May 1940 WW2 was a full eight months old. The policy of appeasement was long gone.

In April there was a major defeat in Norway. The U-Boats were winning. The attempts to bomb Germany had proved useless. And then came May...

Germany invaded several countries at once. France was the important one and it was collapsing.

Chamberlain was about 69 years old and physically weak. (Within a month he would be operated on for stomach cancer.) He insisted on staying - he had the odd notion that changing leadership in crisis was fatal.

But the Labor and Liberal parties now totally opposed him. He still had a majority of the Conservatives.

Finally the facts were faced. He continued as a Minister and was personally very popular. In six months he was dead.

His departure was due more exhaustion and to three years of utter disaster than to the tough Conservative thugs backing Churchill.

Posted by K | July 2, 2007 11:47 PM

From Irwin Stelzer's Weekly Standard Article on Bush's meeting with controversial historian Andrew Roberts:

"On to the lessons of history, as taught by Andrew Roberts. First: Do not set a deadline for withdrawal. That led to the slaughter of 700,000 to 1 million people in India, with the killing beginning one minute after the midnight deadline. Bush wondered if there are examples of occupying forces remaining for long periods of time, other than in Korea. Malaysia, said Roberts, where it took nine years to defeat the Communists, after which the occupying troops remained for several years. And Algeria, added Bush, citing Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace for the proposition that more Algerians were killed after the French withdrawal than during the French occupation."

Posted by Robert Geilfuss | July 3, 2007 5:55 PM