SocraticGadfly: Iraq: Another analogy besides Vietnam

December 17, 2005

Iraq: Another analogy besides Vietnam

How about Mexico, circa 1846? Or the Spanish-American War?

That’s the thesis of Harold Bloom in a thought-provoking interview in The Guardian.
One rightly expects Whitman to explain our Evening Land to us, because his imagination is America's. A Free-Soiler, he opposed the Mexican war, as Emerson did. Do not our two Iraq invasions increasingly resemble the Mexican and Spanish-American conflicts?

Read the rest of this interview for a fascinating insight from American and British literature, primarily poetic, by Bloom into a declining empire, or, as he calls it, a “parody” of Rome.

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