Blast-from-the-Past Bonus Question
11. Who said, "I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire"?
a. Bob Dylan, mumbled during a live performance in April 2002.
b. Dick Cheney in 1991 when he was George H.W. Bush's Secretary of Defense.
c. George Steinbrenner in an interview with the New York Daily News after the Yankees won the 1998 World Series.
Correct answer: b. If only Cheney had listened to himself when he became vice president. "Several years after occupied Iraq had become the quagmire he once warned about," writes historian John Dower in his striking new book Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq, "Cheney was asked how to reconcile what he argued in 1991 and disregarded later. "Well, I stand by what I said in '91,' he replied. "But look what's happened since then -- we had 9/11.'" Sigh.
And believe it or not, folks, that's it for the wild and wacky world of American war this month. If you answered at least 10 of the American Way of War Quiz questions correctly, consider yourself a four-star general. If you answered 5 to 9 correctly, you qualify as a gun totin' mercenary (with all the usual Lord of the Flies perks). If you did worse, you're a buck private in a U.S. Army woodwind ensemble that's just been dispatched to Camp Dwyer in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books), has just been published. You can catch him discussing war American-style and his book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview by clicking here or, to download it to your iPod, here.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan(Verso Books), has just been published. He discusses why withdrawal hasn't been on the American agenda in Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview, which can be accessed by clicking here or downloaded to your iPod here. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is NickTurse.com.
Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse
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