The Big Push - To Take America Down A Peg Or Two

"The Survivor" by George Grosz 1944, Private Collection

 

Even award winning historians sometimes can't resist the allure of contortionist acrobatics. I am of course speaking metaphorically as I am referring to Adam Hochschild's extraordinary efforts to connect National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley's "the big push" quote to 600,000 killed soldiers with the disastrous "The Big Push" campaign during the 1916 Battle of Somme.

Rarely have we been treated to such spurious foundation, which in a nutshell depend solely on the vivid description of trenched warfare in "muddy, shell-pocketed wasteland" during WW-I and an isolated quip by retired US Army Lieutenant-General William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, saying: "It's like finding yourself in a hole and then digging deeper."

That's it. That's all that connects the horrors of World War I with tackling the murdering Islamofascists in Iraq; an analogy in itself, conjuring up the image of trenched warfare and, voilà, we have the headline: "Why the 'big push' sounds horribly familiar".

If we needed more evidence that those surrounding US President George W Bush have a tin ear for the lessons of history, it came this month when National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley referred to increasing the number of US troops in Iraq as "the big push" that would bring victory closer.

"The Big Push" is a phrase that came into the language with another troop surge that was supposed to bring another war to victory. For months beforehand, the Big Push was how British cabinet ministers, propagandists, generals, and foot soldiers talked about the 1916 Battle of the Somme.

I am no longer surprised by the bold-faced audacity, with which the left attempts to discredit all and every efforts to defeat acknowledged evil in the form of proxy terrorists from Iran and Syria, hell-bent to bring death and destruction to our way of life; irrespective whether Democrat or Republican, to them we are all Infidel scum.

But this contortion to fabricate a connection between Hadley's "the big push" and WW-I, just to be able to deliver the opening broadside of having a 'tin ear for lessons of history', is simply pathetic.

None of that alters the fact, that the Administration is facing growing opposition against the 'surge' even from within Republican ranks -- and I hesitate a guess, the President's SOTU address in a few hours time isn't going to change that -- but, at least the arguments are perfectly transparent in so far as they are politically motivated or, as Dean Barnett @ Hugh Hewitt explains, motivated by taking the U.S. down a peg or two.

Comments

[rich]

Christopher Hitchens Sunday Times review of Nick Cohen's book:

"A Man with a Score to Settle"

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-2550492,00.html

[rich]

The Left's support of Islamic Fascism is immoral.

Excerpts from Nick Cohen's new Book "What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way."

About 14 pages typewritten.

Part I

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1995096,00.html

Part II

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1995122,00.html

The concluding paragraphs:

"When a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein came, the liberals had two choices. The first was to oppose the war, remain hypercritical of aspects of the Bush administration's policy, but support Iraqis as they struggled to establish a democracy.

The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. I did have an eminent liberal specialist on foreign policy tell me that 'we're just going to have to forget about Saddam's victims', but I thought he was shooting his mouth off in the heat of the moment. From the point of view of the liberals, the only grounds they would have had to concede if they had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qaeda and all the rest of it. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis, who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence on privatisation of industries, for instance. All they would have had to accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one to which they could and should make a positive commitment.

A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.

The second choice for the liberals was to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. To look at the Iraqi civilians and the British and American troops who were dying in a war whose central premise had proved to be false, and to go berserk; to allow justifiable anger to propel them into 'binges of posturing and ultra-radicalism' as the Sixties liberals had done when they went off the rails. As one critic characterised the position, they would have to pretend that 'the United States was the problem and Iraq was its problem'. They would have to maintain that the war was not an attempt to break the power of tyranny in a benighted region, but the bloody result of a 'financially driven mania to control Middle Eastern oil, and the faith-driven crusade to batter the crescent with the cross'.

They chose to go berserk."

[Crusader.NoRegrets.]

Actually the Somme Campaign has now been credited with having been vital to the eventual Allied successes at Vimy Ridge, later Paschendaele, and the ability to counterattck successfully in October 1918 and win the war.

The "Big Push" analogy didn't portray so much a spurious intent, as a complete lack of appreciation for contemporary studies of the Somme Campaign.

By the way, several German Armies were bled white at the Somme, and do not forget that many Commonwealth battalions actually reached their objectives that day, but were then left high and dry due primarily to the lack of efficient communications - a technological reality of WWI. Bradley remembered this state of affairs and thus allowed the US 1st division to finish its job at Omaha instead of calling off the whole operation mid-fight.

The "Big Push" was designed in much the same way that Dieppe was, except with a lot more guns, and ultimately it was far more successful than most of the British operations against Rommel in 1941.

By the way General Haig has been criticised for the SOmme mercilessly. Certainly there weren't a lot of naysayers at the time. A Barrage such as was delivered at the Somme had never before been possible, and it was certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that it would succeed. Hence the order for the infantry to walk forward with rifles at the high port. Read German accounts of the engagement, and you'll see they weren't so sure the British would fail on the first day...

In fact a large amount of the blame can be placed at the German infantry's extraordinary composure and performance after enduring the most ferocious artillery barrage in history to that point. They were quite terrified seeing this wave of determined, stoic infantry marching forward, taking very few prisoners, and in no mood to sing "Silent Night" with the Hun. They fought desparately for their very lives, and the machinegunners were just damned good.