Weekend quote: While David Brooks blithers about how, even three years too late, an Iraq "surge" may be a good idea, Frank Rich sees more nightmare

In his Sunday column, "The Timely Death of Gerald Ford," Frank Rich says of what he refers to as "the [Saddam] Hussein snuff film":

"What really makes the video terrifying is its glimpse into the abyss of an irreversible and lethal breakdown in civic order. It sends the same message as those images of helicopters fleeing our embassy in April 1975: Iraq, like Vietnam before it, is in chaos, beyond the control of our government or the regime we’re desperately trying to prop up."

On the same day that that gruesome hack David Brooks is babbling about how a "surge" would have been a great idea if only we'd done it, and done it right (as if we've done anything in Iraq right), three years ago--and how, you know, it's still worth doing, to provide time to complete the partitioning of Iraq, Mr. Rich is taking an unflinchingly clear-eyed look at the wreckage we've wrought.

"For all the media acreage bestowed on the funeral" of former President Ford, he writes,

the day in Mr. Ford's presidency that most stalks [President] Bush was given surprisingly short shrift--perhaps because it was the most painful. That day was not Sept. 8, 1974, when Mr. Ford pardoned his predecessor, but April 30, 1975, when the last American helicopters hightailed it out of Saigon, ending our involvement in a catastrophic war. Mr. Ford had been a consistent Vietnam hawk, but upon inheriting the final throes of the fiasco, he recognized reality when he saw it.

Just how much so can be found in a prescient speech that Mr. Ford gave a week before our clamorous Saigon exit. (And a speech prescient on other fronts, too: he called making "America independent of foreign energy sources by 1985" an urgent priority.) Speaking at Tulane University, Mr. Ford said, "America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam" but not "by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned." He added: "We, of course, are saddened indeed by the events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world."

In case the connection isn't obvious, Mr. Rich returns to the "snuff film":

Perhaps the video's most chilling notes are the chants of "Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!" They are further confirmation, as if any were needed, that our principal achievement in Iraq over four years has been to empower a jihadist mini-Saddam in place of the secular original. . . .

The day after [Cindy Sheehan's son] Casey Sheehan's slaughter, Dan Senor, the spokesman for the American occupation, presided over a Green Zone news conference promising [radical cleric Moktada al-]Sadr's woefully belated arrest on a months-old warrant. . . . Today Mr. Sadr . . . is the puppetmaster who really controls Nuri al-Maliki--the Iraqi prime minister embraced by Mr. Bush . . . . (And, you might ask, whatever happened to Mr. Senor? He's a Fox News talking head calling for a "surge" of American troops to clean up the botch he and his cohort left behind.) Only Joseph Heller could find the gallows humor in a moral disaster of these proportions.

Now Mr. Rich is ready to close in:

It's against the backdrop of both the Hussein video and the Ford presidency that we must examine the prospect of that much-previewed "surge" in Iraq--a surge, by the way, that the press should start calling by its rightful name, escalation. As Mr. Ford had it, America cannot regain its pride by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned and, for that matter, as far as Iraq is concerned. By large margins, the citizens of both countries want us not to escalate but to start disengaging. So do America's top military commanders, who are now being cast aside just as Gen. Eric Shinseki was when he dared assert before the invasion that securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops.

It would still take that many troops, not the 20,000 we might scrape together now. Last month the Army and Marines issued an updated field manual on counterinsurgency supervised by none other than Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the next top American military commander in Iraq. It endorsed the formula that "20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents" is "the minimum troop density required." By that yardstick, it would take the addition of 100,000-plus troops to secure Baghdad alone.

The "surge," then, is a sham. It is not meant to achieve that undefined "victory" Mr. Bush keeps talking about but to serve his own political spin. His real mission is to float the "we're not winning, we're not losing" status quo until Jan. 20, 2009. After that, as Joseph Biden put it last week, a new president will "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof." This is nothing but a replay of the cynical Nixon-Kissinger "decent interval" exit strategy concocted to pass the political buck (to Mr. Ford, as it happened) on Vietnam.

As the White House tries to sell this flimflam, picture fresh American troops being tossed into Baghdad's caldron to work alongside the Maliki-Sadr Shiite lynch mob that presided over the Saddam hanging. Contemplate as well Gerald Ford's most famous words, spoken as he assumed the presidency after the Nixon resignation: "Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule."

This time the people do not rule. Two months after Americans spoke decisively on Election Day, the president is determined to overrule them. Our long national nightmare in Iraq, far from being over, is about to get a second wind.

[The complete text of the Rich column is posted in a comment.]