Jonathan Alter: Phony Analogies (Re: Iraq & Vietnam)
Both the Vietnam and Iraq wars were started and perpetuated by heedless, arrogant leaders unwilling to change course when the facts on the ground changed. But the similarities mostly end there.
President Bush thinks the Vietnam analogy for Iraq is wrong. Aside from the predictability of this (it’s understandable that he doesn’t like his policy called a “quagmire”), the president’s reasoning is historically ignorant. Bush said last week that the difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that the enemy in Vietnam didn’t want to follow us home. Of course during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson repeatedly made precisely that argument, comparing communists to burglars who must be stopped when they are in the neighborhood (in that case, Southeast Asia) before they came up on the porch and into the kitchen.
This argument was phony 40 years ago—the “domino theory” of noncommunist countries toppling over proved false—and it’s phony now. The idea that we’re fighting “them” (whoever “they” might be) there so we don’t have to fight them here is lousy logic, now echoed by several GOP candidates for president. Consider the true enemy—Al Qaeda in Iraq, which we have good reason to want to smash in Anbar province even as we disengage from the Sunni-Shiite civil war in Baghdad. Bush’s reasoning blithely assumes that Al Qaeda cannot walk and chew gum at the same time—cannot fight in Anbar and plot attacks in the United States simultaneously. It also implies that the main explanation for why we have not been hit in the five and a half years since 9/11 isn’t better homeland security, but the war in Iraq! Come on.
The Vietnam War and the Iraq War do have some things in common. They were both started and perpetuated by heedless, arrogant leaders unwilling to change course, as Ronald Reagan did in Lebanon, when the facts on the ground changed. They both reflected poor understanding in Washington of local culture and regional politics. They both featured the unconscionable policy of throwing good young solders after good young soldiers—signing the death warrants of our finest in the name of foolish consistency or mindless fortitude. But like most disparate historical events, they differ in more profound ways than they resemble each other. The Vietnam War was at root a struggle over nationalism. The Vietnamese include some ancient tribes, but they are one people, determined for centuries to rid their nation of foreign powers. By contrast, the Iraq War is at bottom tribal. Our problem there is the inverse of what it was in Vietnam—that the people have no fundamental sense of nationhood. They are three peoples (Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish) who have made it clear at the ballot box and in the streets that they can’t live together. Iraq is not in danger of breaking up; it has already broken up. That’s an entirely different challenge than we faced in Vietnam....
[Alter goes on to note that the decision to maintain bases in Iraq for years to come, announced by the White House this week, undermines the US claim to be establishing democracy in Iraq. ]
But what does that aim have to do with permanent bases? The only two reasons to station troops in the Middle East for half a century are protecting oil supplies (reflecting a pessimistic view of energy independence) outside the normal channels of trade and diplomacy, and projecting raw military power. These are the imperial aims of an empire. During the cold war, charges of U.S. imperialism in Korea and Vietnam were false. Those wars were about superpower struggles. This time, the “I word" is not a left-wing epithet but a straightforward description of policy aims—yet another difference from those two older wars in Asia.
Read entire article at Newsweek
President Bush thinks the Vietnam analogy for Iraq is wrong. Aside from the predictability of this (it’s understandable that he doesn’t like his policy called a “quagmire”), the president’s reasoning is historically ignorant. Bush said last week that the difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that the enemy in Vietnam didn’t want to follow us home. Of course during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson repeatedly made precisely that argument, comparing communists to burglars who must be stopped when they are in the neighborhood (in that case, Southeast Asia) before they came up on the porch and into the kitchen.
This argument was phony 40 years ago—the “domino theory” of noncommunist countries toppling over proved false—and it’s phony now. The idea that we’re fighting “them” (whoever “they” might be) there so we don’t have to fight them here is lousy logic, now echoed by several GOP candidates for president. Consider the true enemy—Al Qaeda in Iraq, which we have good reason to want to smash in Anbar province even as we disengage from the Sunni-Shiite civil war in Baghdad. Bush’s reasoning blithely assumes that Al Qaeda cannot walk and chew gum at the same time—cannot fight in Anbar and plot attacks in the United States simultaneously. It also implies that the main explanation for why we have not been hit in the five and a half years since 9/11 isn’t better homeland security, but the war in Iraq! Come on.
The Vietnam War and the Iraq War do have some things in common. They were both started and perpetuated by heedless, arrogant leaders unwilling to change course, as Ronald Reagan did in Lebanon, when the facts on the ground changed. They both reflected poor understanding in Washington of local culture and regional politics. They both featured the unconscionable policy of throwing good young solders after good young soldiers—signing the death warrants of our finest in the name of foolish consistency or mindless fortitude. But like most disparate historical events, they differ in more profound ways than they resemble each other. The Vietnam War was at root a struggle over nationalism. The Vietnamese include some ancient tribes, but they are one people, determined for centuries to rid their nation of foreign powers. By contrast, the Iraq War is at bottom tribal. Our problem there is the inverse of what it was in Vietnam—that the people have no fundamental sense of nationhood. They are three peoples (Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish) who have made it clear at the ballot box and in the streets that they can’t live together. Iraq is not in danger of breaking up; it has already broken up. That’s an entirely different challenge than we faced in Vietnam....
[Alter goes on to note that the decision to maintain bases in Iraq for years to come, announced by the White House this week, undermines the US claim to be establishing democracy in Iraq. ]
But what does that aim have to do with permanent bases? The only two reasons to station troops in the Middle East for half a century are protecting oil supplies (reflecting a pessimistic view of energy independence) outside the normal channels of trade and diplomacy, and projecting raw military power. These are the imperial aims of an empire. During the cold war, charges of U.S. imperialism in Korea and Vietnam were false. Those wars were about superpower struggles. This time, the “I word" is not a left-wing epithet but a straightforward description of policy aims—yet another difference from those two older wars in Asia.