Isn't history just, you know, so enlightening?

Rightwing columnist Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute provides a prime example of bad historical analogies hackery: Heartbreak aside, Iraq progresses 01/10/05.  They are really nothing much more than throwaway attempts to powder up the mess known as the Iraq War with a couple of feel-good historical references for those who believe that Fox News is, like, actual news.

Discussing the fact that democratization, which Hansen apparently thinks is actually occurring in Afghanistan and Iraq, was a byproduct of the wars, which were both supposedly part of the War on Terror, he says:

Such is the case in war where unintended consequences follow, both good and bad. Lincoln promised the Civil War was to save the Union, and then in early 1863 announced it was really to eliminate slavery.

This is such a bizarre mishmash of Lost Cause propaganda and stock patriotic platitudes that it's almost impressive how someone could squeeze so much nonsense into one sentence.  But when you actually make the mistake as I sometimes do of stopping to think about what a sentence like this says, you just want to cringe at how goofy it is.

Think about that one.  Supposedly he's trying to throw the nice patriotic aura of the Civil War in American memory over our current Mesopotamian crusade.  But what he actually tosses out is the Lost Cause claim that, oh, that sneaky Lincoln and those devious Black Republicans (as the pro-slavery Democrats called the party) really wanted to free the slaves all along, those tricky abolitionist dogs.  I mean, Lincoln promised the war was about saving the Union and then he finally came out of the closet and admitted it was about freeing the slaves!

Yes, you can easily give yourself a headache looking into things like this.  For people who actually pay some attention to American history, it's hard not to recall that the Civil War ended in 1865.  But the American form of democracy didn't actually take permanent hold in the Deep South until roughly the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  That would be a century later.

And this is supposed to be an encouraging analogy for the "catastrophic success" in Iraq?

Then there's this:

The Anglo-Americanalliance fought World War II to free Eastern Europe from Hitler -- only to ensure that it was enslaved by our "ally," Josef Stalin and his Red Army. An isolationist America without a military was attacked in late 1941 and ended up the century's global peacekeeper just four years later.

You know, someone does have to put in a bit of effort to crank ideological hash like this out of history.  I guess if you spent a couple of decades reading John Birch tracts and listening to Oxycontin radio, it starts to come naturally.

To deconstruct this briefly, Josef Stalin and "his Red Army" actually were our allies during the Second World War.  And there's lots of interesting and disturbing implications of that.  It was a big war.  Actually, of the Allied coalition, of which the US, Britain and the USSR were by far the most decisive partners, the Soviets lost far and away the most people in the war and also did most of the fighting against the Nazis.

That doesn't mean that Stalin's regime was all sweetness and light.  But Hanson, writing mostly for the rightwing faithful, dismisses that as a so-called "ally."  And his unintended consequence here - that the USSR wound up in control of most of eastern Europe - doesn't actually give me a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings about the potential consequences of Bush's blundering intervention in Iraq.  We may well wind up with Iran the most influential Muslim nation in the Middle East as a result of the Iraq War.

The part about the US being the "global peacekeeper" is also cute.  Rightwingers are still gnashing their teeth over some of our "peacekeeping" ventures, particularly the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Bad historical analogies.  They've been crawling all over the place since 9/11.  The road to the Iraq War hell was paved with them.  And they keep on coming ...