Needlenose

Since the run-up to the attack on Iraq in ’03, numerous liberal wags have been depicting Shrubya as a lil’ Napoleon. But if you think about it, Napoleon was actually pretty successful, for a time. And wasn’t he really smart? Focused on improving the lot of his countrymen whilst building up his empire?

An historic figure more analogous to President Arbusto is King Philip II of Spain – you know, the guy who launched the massive Armada (30,000 men on 130 warships) against England in a sort of quasi holy war – and got his ass kicked ( about 1/2 the ships destroyed and 2/3rds of the men killed).

In The Voyage of the Armada, David Howarth paints a pretty unflattering description of Shrubya’s soul-mate. King Philip was extremely slow to learn, either from his own experience, or from the much more brilliant men in court. The mixture of mediocrity and power made him immovably self-righteous and obstinate.” Sound familiar?

Philip “loved his children” and “at least one of his wives” but “outside of this little circle he was seldom moved to pity.” Shrubya seems equally devoted to both his spawn and Laura, but if you recall his time as Governor of Texas, he was a man that could execute felons (guilty or otherwise) with impunity.

Even their conception of the Almighty seems similar:

The God that Philip served was all-powerful, all-knowing and unforgiving. He could and did take part by miracles in men’s affairs…He demanded worship absolutely exactly in the forms the Catholic Church proclaimed and not in any other. He also demanded the most cruel and terrible punishments men could devise for anyone who deviated in the least degree.

Shrubya also seems to follow Philip’s economic policies:

Also (the Empire) was bankrupt…Philip had mortgaged all the empire’s revenues for years ahead, mainly to foreign bankers…Trite though it might seem, the designs of God cost an awful lot of money.

Howarth could easy be talking about Shrubya when he sums up Philip’s character:

Reading Philip’s letters in the twentieth century and judging him by twentieth century standards…one has to say he was bigoted, dogmatic, self-righteous, illogical, ruthless and hopelessly confused; but also, he was appallingly sincere.

The causus belli for the Armada invasion seems as confused as that for the invasion of Iraq. It morphed variously from restoring the Catholic faith to an England ruled by Protestant heretics to guaranteeing the rights of Catholics to practice their faith freely, to putting Philip or one of his kids on the English throne.

One eery parallel to the run-up to both wars is the use of both misLeaders on wacky spy masters who used disreputable and biased expatriate sources (English Catholics who were exiled or had to flee from England after being suspected of treason) to build his case for the war and for the reception the Spaniards would receive on the part of the grateful English:

Perhaps no monarch about to launch a war was ever so mistaken about his enemies. Philip was led to believe the Protestants of England were a small minority of oppressors; that the majority were Catholics who would gladly rise in revolt when they sighted his armada; and finally, the most tragic misapprehension of all, that England would welcome him as king or his daughter as queen.

Kinda reminds you of Swopa’s old favorite Iraqi subject, Chalabi, huh?

Another odd parallel is the use of deceitful, no-bid contracts. Some time after setting off, the leader of the Armada discovered that “their huge supplies of food were going rotten” and that the water barrels were “green and slimy and undrinkable” – most likely due to either shoddy workmanship or out-right swindling on the part of the suppliers. Worse, in the decisive sea battle off Calais, the English cannon turned the Spanish ships into swiss cheese, but the English ships emerged virtuously unscathed. No, it wasn’t a miracle – a modern study of the cannonballs used by the Spanish reveals substandard craftsmanship resulting in a “very brittle” shot that “broke into small bits either at the shock of firing or the shock of impact on an enemy hull.” I wonder who was the Halliburton of 1588?

Perhaps the most amazing similarity about Philip and Shrubya is their shared inability to admit to failure, and unwillingness to change policies in defiance of reality. In Philip’s case, you might think that the loss of half his fleet and the deaths of 20,000 men, especially in the face of not a loss of a single English vessel and minimal English casualties might convince him that sending an Armada against England was a really bad idea. But you’d be wrong:

…he dispatched three more (armadas) before he died in 1598. The first of them, for an invasion of Ireland, sailed at his insistence and against the advice of his admirals at the worst possible time of year, November 1596. It was wrecked by a storm before it left Spanish waters. The next, in 1597, was to land Spanish troops at Falmouth and occupy Cornwall. It came nearest of all to success, but was beaten back by a northerly gale a few miles short of its landing.

Afghanistan…Iraq…Iran? Two peas in a pod…