Monday, April 17, 2006

Iraq III: Beware of False Analogies

David Brooks was way off his game last week in "The Past Meets the Future," an op-ed column (mercifully hiding behind the New York Times' subscription firewall) that argued the war in Iraq should be compared to such stirring human endeavors as Moses' journey to the Promised Land and the American civil rights movement because it will lead, as did those earlier discords, to an ultimately noble end.

This silliness prompted John Duffy of Notre Dame, Indiana, to respond in a letter to the editor that:

The problem with those analogies should be obvious. Neither Moses nor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began their campaigns by lying about the reasons for the journey. Nor did they suppress information, bully dissenters or surround themselves with yes men who were never held accountable for mistakes, no matter how disastrous.

Maybe this explains why Moses and Dr. King approached their Promised Lands, and why our current leadership has gone so far astray.

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