The Quiet AmericanI just finished reading The Quiet American by Graham Greene. It was mentioned in the last Vietnam book I read, Dispatches. This book is brilliant. Highly recommended, and a quick read. Written in 1955, it's a short novel that describes the French's failures in Vietnam and also foreshadows America's fiascos there over the next twenty years.
Oddly, while reading on the net about the book, I found out that the President actually quoted the book last summer in defense of his failed Iraq war (i.e. the new Vietnam War.) I guarantee you that Bush has not read this book, and probably nobody on his speechwriting team has either. Thinking about this Bush-quotes-Greene thing is totally tripping me out, and it's not just the rye and gingers I'm enjoying tonight kicking in. In The Quiet American, Alden Pyle - the earnest "let's bring democracy to the childlike Vietnamese" CIA agent idolizes an author named York Harding, who advocated a way of bringing democracy to Indochina that was questionable on paper and would fail miserably in the field. York Harding, fictional father of the neocons. Alden Pyle, forerunner of George Bush. That's not just me saying that last one, it's also on the pages of The American Conservative:
Back in 1987, Greene was one of the most vocal critics of the Israeli government following the abduction of Mordechai Vanunu from Italy by Israeli agents. Vanunu’s “crime,” in the eyes of the Israelis, was to have exposed the fact that Israel possessed nuclear weapons that, by any stretch of the imagination, can be described as “weapons of mass destruction.” Why is it, one wonders, that some countries in the Middle East can possess weapons of mass destruction, with Bush’s blessing, while others cannot? Why did previous American governments arm the Taliban and Saddam Hussein in the name of “Freedom” and “Democracy”? Why did Bush’s own government declare war on the only secular government in the Middle East capable of resisting Iran? These are questions that only George W. Bush or Alden Pyle could answer. The rest of us remain baffled.
Bush quoted a character in The Quiet American who said of Pyle that he had never known a man “who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” Like Pyle, Bush is well-intentioned. Like Pyle, he is dangerously naïve. Like Pyle, his noble motives have caused a lot of trouble. And, like Pyle, he needs reminding of the old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.