CSotD: 10 Years After
Skip to comments
It seems like a good time to note the 10 year anniversary of our invasion of Iraq. These cartoons are from my presentation to high schools, back in those days, and so were often printed directly onto transparencies for overheads, making them quite lo-res.
They also were often copied without dates, since they were being used as contemporaneous commentary at the time and only filed away because I'm a packrat.
The messages still come through, however. I've tried to put them in rough chronological, or, failing that, some contextual, order.
In retrospect, Stephff's cartoon from the Bangkok Post becomes less enigmatic and more chillingly prophetic. Did Bush arrive in the Oval Office with some unresolved business to tackle?
What has changed, in my interpretation at least, is the idea that Bush didn't know he was going to have to deal with Saddam. Not to mention the idea that "necessity" was going to even tangentially figure into what happened.
But, whatever Stephff's intent, whatever Bush's intent, this cartoon was still weirdly prescient.
On 9/11, while the bulk of American cartoonists were drawing weeping Statues of Liberty, Peter Schrank used a familiar image to comment on world reaction, and it's worth noting that this was the initial reaction, despite some outbursts of celebration in isolated neighborhoods of the Middle East.
But never let a good tragedy go unexploited …
LuoJie of the China Daily didn't hesitate to make this call. Not that you'd expect a paper in Beijing to favor the Bush/Cheney strategy, mind you. Incidentally, here's LuoJie's blog. I found it a little obscure, but that's no reason not to give you the link, right?
Norwegian cartoonist Herb (Herbjørn Skogstad) noted that Bush only attracted one major ally for his attack on the fearsome giant, and he reaches beyond Cervantes to depict Sancho Panza with a tail.
This cartoon seems like more of a slap at Blair than at Bush, but cartoonists everywhere had a field day with Bush's cowboy personna, even those who had probably never heard the expression "all hat and no cattle" or knew that, out west, the biggest cowboy hats seem always to be worn by the folks who were born in New England.
However, while the world responded with distrust, the idea that everyone back home, by contrast, fell into lockstep isn't true. For example, Bob Englehart sounded a warning, much, of course, like whispering into a hurricane.
And Tom Toles commented on the lack of preparedness with which we approached the war, sending in enough troops to knock down the tattered remains of Hussein's army but not enough to then counter the furious response.
But we weren't scared, our commander-in-chief declared from his foxhole on the banks of the war-torn Potomac River, as Patrick Bagley observed.
When this somewhat haphazard approach of going to war with the army you have instead of the one you should have had was beginning to show its human cost, Toles kicked up a hornets' nest with his take on Donald Rumsfeld's cavalier "shit happens" response to the casualties.
There was a time when siding with the troops was good politics, but in these days of crocodile tears and conservative political correctness, Rumsfeld and the Chiefs of Staff lept to the public-relations attack, weeping loudly over the cartoon, claiming Toles was … yeah … disrespecting the brave troops they had sent out with inadequate arms and protection.
Jeff Danziger was not about to leave Toles dangling in the wind on this one, and countered with an LBJ reference.
Meanwhile, a Jordanian cartoonist whose name, unfortunately, got cut off by the printer pointed out the folly of beheading Saddam, which you may recall was a side-effect of his having been hanged with an ill-adjusted noose.
In the end, there was nothing much to retrieve from the adventure and, as Clay Bennett noted, no real plan for disentangling ourselves beyond "declare victory and bug out."
Which, Jim Morin points out, we did, with great success.
Well, not quite as soon as the declaration was made, but soon after. Just a couple of years after. And with great success.
I would say unparalleled success.
Great, unparalleled, fabulous success.
Please don't audit my tax returns.
POSTSCRIPT: The Washington Post has put up a slideshow of Ann Telnaes' brilliant Iraq cartoons. I've found the link a little wonky, but, if it doesn't come up right, it's worth playing with: Her work is brilliant.
Comments 9
Comments are closed.