Wonderful New Yorker Editorial on the likely consequences of the Bush regime’s overweening arrogance

David Remnick has written a deeply perceptive editorial about the need for humility and its total absence in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld camp. He opens with a quote from Dwight Eisenhower’s speech on receiving the Freedom of the City of London:

“Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.

Conceivably a commander may have been professionally superior. He may have given everything of his heart and mind to meet the spiritual and physical needs of his comrades. He may have written a chapter that will glow forever in the pages of military history. Still, even such a man — if he existed — would sadly face the fact that his honors cannot hide in his memories the crosses marking the resting places of the dead. They cannot soothe the anguish of the widow or the orphan whose husband or father will not return….”.

I never realised that Ike could rise to such eloquence. But he was a thoughtful and wise man who had seen — and been responsible for — many of the horrors of warfare. Compare that speech with the strutting, sod-you, sod-the-world hubris of the Bush junta. And tremble for the future. The truth is, I suspect, that the Bush ‘conquest’ of Iraq will turn out to be just like the Israeli ‘conquest’ of the Lebanon — especially when it becomes clear, as an experienced ex-soldier, John Robb, points out, that there is no way to take Baghdad without killing thousands of Iraqi civilians.