ESCALATION.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq War and George W. Bush's public image)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 19-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Last week, in a speech at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, Edward Kennedy said, "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam." The last Kennedy brother--now an aging lion, in his eighth decade of life and his fifth decade in the Senate, a thunderer on a par with his Massachusetts predecessors Daniel Webster and Charles Sumner--then outlined a blistering case that President Bush and his colleagues in the Administration, in almost every area of public policy, have invented or distorted facts to support a radically conservative agenda and have undermined basic standards of candid debate. "As a result, this President has now created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon," Kennedy said. "He has broken the basic bond of trust with the American people."

Analogies with the era of Vietnam and Watergate might have been easy to wave away for those inclined to trust a Bush before a Kennedy. But the headlines that followed in the next few days were impossible to dismiss: "up to 12 marines die in raid on their base as fierce fighting spreads to 6 iraqi cities" (the Times); "under siege" (the News); "40 reported killed in fallujah mosque" (Associated Press). As...

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