Medal Devaluation

December 15, 2004

Yesterday, Bush awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in this country, to Tommy Franks, Paul Bremer and George Tenet for their roles as architects of the Iraq war and reconstruction. There's a few things wrong with this, the least of which is, why is General Tommy Franks being given a civilian honor for fighting a war, especially for an award that is for distinguished civilian service in peacetime? For that matter, why are any of them getting it for service in a decidedly non-peacetime capacity?

More to the point, as a general policy, isn't it a little early to be honoring the people who crafted a war that's not even two years old yet, with an outcome still uncertain? This is the shortest time period between the awarding of this medal and the events cited for the awarding.

But most importantly, Iraq is hardly a success at this point, and certainly not anything that deserves the highest honor awarded to civilians.

Now Bush may just be deluded about reality, but this smacks to me of either an attempt to reinforce the administration's line on Iraq (it being just peachy that is), or it's another example of Bush loyalists getting rewarded, this time quite literally (and none of those three possibilites is very fantastic).

I guess the (circular) logic goes... if the architects of the Iraq policy are awarded the Medal of Freedom, the war must have been a success! So let's award them!

Here's the story.