From the Chicago Tribune...

Thanks go to Joe at "For What It's Worth" blog (link in favorites) for once again tipping readers off to this WTF? tidbit in a never-ending string of 'em coming from the head Orc in Mordor. The story was up on Joe's blog this a.m. and it caught my eye. What boggles my mind is that BushCo would actually let W quote from this book/film. Are they irony-challenged? Did they think that Alden Pyle was a true American hero? Here's the Trib article:

by Frank James

In his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City today, President Bush summoned up the Alden Pyle CIA agent character of Graham Greene's classic Vietnam novel "The Quiet American" which is essentially a contemplation on the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

I'm not sure he really wanted to go there or why his speechwriters would take him there.

As Bush said:

In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called "The Quiet American." It was set in Saigon and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
After America entered the Vietnam War, Graham Greene -- the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. Matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people. In 1972, one anti-war senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?"


Bush seemed to be seizing on Greene's idea of U.S. naivete on entering the war and trying to turn it around and apply it to those now calling for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

But Greene wrote his book about the way America bumbled into Vietnam, not how it left it.

By reminding people of Greene's book, Bush was inviting listeners to recall the mistakes his administration made in entering and prosecuting the Iraq War. Did he really want to do that?

Even more astonishing is that Bush's speechwriters included in the president's speech a mention of the very fictional character some of the president's critics have used for years to lambaste him for what they consider a major strategic blunder.

The thinking goes, Bush may have been well-intentioned like Pyle but, also like the Greene character, Bush's efforts are ultimately doomed.

Writing in Newsweek in November 2005, Christopher Dickey said:

For any of us who lived through the cold war, Bush’s attempts to equate the scattershot writings of Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the challenges posed by Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet empire are just mind-boggling. In his Veteran’s Day address to troops at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania (Murtha’s home state), Bush started four paragraphs with the phrase “like the ideology of communism.” He longs transparently for the challenge of an Evil Empire, like the one his idol Ronald Reagan confronted, whether or not it exists.
This is nuts, but alas, not that unusual in the annals of American policy. Once again, President Bush’s lethally misguided good intentions are reminiscent of Alden Pyle in Graham Greene’s novel “The Quiet American,” about the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam: “He was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined—I learnt that very soon—to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. … When he saw a dead body he couldn’t even see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy.”


Then there's this pre-war, 2003 interview in Salon with Phillip Noyce, director of the remake of "The Quiet American" who also saw similarities between the very real Bush and the fictional Pyle.

NOYCE: What was the question? I forget. [Laughter] Greene defines, through the caricature that he wrote of Alden Pyle, he defines some aspects of American foreign policy that resulted from all of those factors coalescing. And, in doing so, he answered a lot of questions about the war against the Vietnamese that hadn't yet been asked. And in many ways, Alden Pyle is alive and well today. And that's either a mark of Greene's brilliance, or the fact that some things just never change. I think his thesis has become very important to us, given the current administration. In theory, you've got a White House full of Alden Pyles. [Laughter] And that's scary.
INTERVIEWER: Let's draw that analogy out a little further.
NOYCE: Well, George Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle! He's hardly been out of the country, he's steeped in good intentions, believes he has the answer, is very naive, ultimately not that bright, and extremely dangerous. One only hopes that his advisors like Colin Powell are listened to carefully.


Earlier in the interview, Noyce responded to a question about whether "The Quiet Amerrican" was anti-American by calling Pyle a "dunderhead."

NOYCE: So no, I don't think it's anti-American, although at the time the book was written, Greene was accused of being anti-American, really for two reasons: one, Alden Pyle is a bit of a dunderhead. He's just a complete big bumbling idiot who's really not aware of any of the implications of what he's doing. I don't think that would have been true of a CIA operative at that time. And secondly, we have to remember the context that the book was written in, when Stalinism was still a valid and onerous enemy of America and of freedom everywhere. And a treatise like this might have been considered even by reasonable people to have been anti-American within the context of 1955.
Given all this negative Pyle baggage, why a White House speechwriter would include a reference to Greene and "The Quiet American" is dumbfounding.

Greene doesn’t really help the White House's argument. Indeed, most people would read Greene's novel as a refutation of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And why draw attention to a fictional character who has been used to outline Bush's alleged flaws?


Posted by Frank James on August 22, 2007 1:40 PM | Permalink