The Timely Death of Gerald Ford - New York Times
The New York Times

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January 7, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Timely Death of Gerald Ford
By
FRANK RICH

THE very strange and very long
Gerald Ford
funeral marathon was about many things, but Gerald Ford wasn't always
paramount among them.

Forty percent of today's American population was not alive during the Ford
presidency. The remaining 60 percent probably spent less time recollecting
his
unelected 29-month term than they did James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New
Bag." Despite the lachrymose logorrhea of television anchors and the somber
musical fanfares, the country was less likely to be found in deep mourning
than in deep football. It's a safe bet that the Ford funeral attracted far
fewer
viewers than the most consequential death video of the New Year's weekend,
the lynching of Saddam Hussein. But those two deaths were inextricably
related:
it was in tandem that they created a funereal mood that left us mourning for
our own historical moment more than for Mr. Ford.

What the Ford obsequies were most about was the Beltway establishment's grim
verdict on George W. Bush and his war in Iraq. Every Ford attribute, big and
small, was trotted out by Washington eulogists with a wink, as an implicit
rebuke of the White House's current occupant. Mr. Ford was a healer, not a
partisan
divider. He was an all-American football star,
not a cheerleader
. He didn't fritter away time on pranks at his college fraternity, Delta
Kappa Epsilon, because he had to work his way through school as a
dishwasher. He
was in the top third of his class at Yale Law. He fought his way into
dangerous combat service during World War II rather than accept his cushy
original
posting. He was pals with reporters and Democrats. He encouraged dissent in
his inner circle. He had no enemies, no ego, no agenda, no ideology, no
concern
for his image. He described himself as "a Ford, not a Lincoln," rather than
likening himself to, say, Truman.

Under the guise of not speaking ill of a dead president, the bevy of
bloviators so relentlessly trashed the living incumbent that it bordered on
farce.
No wonder President Bush, who once hustled from Crawford to Washington
to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo's medical treatment
, remained at his ranch last weekend rather than join Betty Ford and Dick
Cheney for the
state ceremony in the Capitol rotunda.

Yet for all the media acreage bestowed on the funeral, the day in Mr. Ford's
presidency that most stalks Mr. 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."

All of this proved correct, and though Mr. Ford made a
doomed last-ditch effort
to secure more financial aid for Saigon, he could and did do nothing to
stop the inevitable. He knew it was way too late to make the symbolic
gesture of
trying to toss fresh American troops on the pyre. "We can and we should help
others to help themselves," he said in New Orleans. "But the fate of
responsible
men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands,
not in ours."

Though Mr. Ford was hardly the unalloyed saint of last week's pageantry, his
words and actions in 1975 should weigh heavily upon us even as our current
president remains oblivious. As Mr. Ford's presidential history is hard to
separate from the Bush inversion of it, so it is difficult to separate that
indelible melee in Saigon from the
Hussein video
. Both are terrifying, and for the same reason.

The awful power of the Hussein snuff film derives not just from its
illustration of the barbarity of capital punishment, even in a case where
the condemned
is a mass murderer undeserving of pity. 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. The security
apparatus
of Iraq's "unity government" was powerless to prevent the video, let alone
the chaos, and can't even get its story straight about what happened and
why.

Actually, it's even worse than that. 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 radical cleric
Moktada al-Sadr
, an ally of Hezbollah and Hamas, is a thug responsible for the deaths of
untold Iraqis and Americans alike. It was his forces, to take just one
representative
example, that killed Cindy Sheehan's son, among many others, in one of two
Shiite uprisings in 2004.

The
day after Casey Sheehan's slaughter
, Dan Senor, the spokesman for the American occupation, presided over a
Green Zone news conference
promising Mr. Sadr's woefully belated arrest on a months-old warrant for
his likely role in the earlier assassination of Abdel Majid al-Khoei, a
rival
Shiite who had fiercely opposed Saddam. Today Mr. Sadr and his forces
control 30 seats in the Iraqi Parliament,
four government ministries
, and death squads (a k a militias) more powerful than the nominal Iraqi
army. He is the puppetmaster who really controls Nuri al-Maliki - the Iraqi
prime
minister embraced by Mr. Bush - even to the point of inducing Mr. Maliki to
shut down a search for an American soldier kidnapped at gunpoint in Sadr
City
in the fall. (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.

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 (PDF)
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.

Copyright 2007
The New York Times Company

Posted by MIriam V.