A Hawk on Vietnam, a Dove on Iraq
A refugee from the Nazi dictatorship, I came to the United States after I had just turned fourteen and soon became accustomed to American ways and manners. Thoroughly assimilated, I joined the army during World War II, was naturalized and swore allegiance to this country. Rising to the rank of captain, I stayed in the reserves until I retired as a lieutenant colonel of military intelligence. So attached was I to my new country, that in college I majored in American history, which I eventually taught as a professor of this subject at Brooklyn College.
As a good American, I had long felt that the Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union was a dire danger to the United States. In addition, I considered it very much like the Nazi regime from which I had escaped, and so I tended to be anti-Communist even during World War II, when Russia was our ally. Thus when the Cold War broke out, I felt it was a continuation of our struggle against totalitarianism, and that the United States was totally justified in opposing the Soviet Union by all means possible short of war.
My first vote was for Harry Truman, as I thought the man opposed by the Reds and the Racists--Henry Wallace, though no Communist himself, was then the candidate of a pro-Soviet Progressive party and Strom Thurmond then ran on a States Rights ticket in opposition to desegregation--was the man for me. So thinking, I naturally approved of the Korean War, which I saw as a clear case of Communist aggression, and when a new war broke out in Vietnam, I felt it was very similar. Thus I become a hawk during that conflict, which I considered to be part of the Cold War, the struggle against international Communism, necessary for the defense of the United States.
Based on the Soviet Union, international Communism sought to undermine American interests everywhere, and weaken the United States itself wherever it could. It relied on supporters in many countries, the so-called fellow-travelers, had been quite successful in spreading to countries like China, Laos, and Vietnam, and had achieved considerable successes even in Western countries like France and Italy. With its emphasis on group action rather than individualism, its totalitarian anti-Democratic regime, and its suppression of civil liberties it challenged not only the power of the United States, but American ideas as well. Consequently, like myself, any patriotic American could easily approve of the war in Vietnam, thinking that a victory of the Communists there would cause the rest of Southeast Asia to go Communist also.
It is true that the war was unwinnable from the very beginning--guerillas cannot be defeated unless their sources of supply are cut off, and since the Viet Cong received aid from Russia and China, this was impossible--but the effort to stop the spread of Communism to South Vietnam seemed worth while just the same. This may have been a mistake, but at that time the situation seemed comparable with that following the Munich Conference and Hitler's later aggressions, so that widespread support for the war was evident, at least at the beginning. It is true that in spite of the victory of the Vietnamese Communists, the domino theory--the idea that once South Vietnam fell, any number of other countries in the vicinity would also become Communist--was proven to be false. As matter of fact, the aftermath of the war left the victors dirt poor while the losers emerged as the most powerful country in the world, but this could not be foreseen.
The situation in Iraq was entirely different. When the United States embarked on an unprecedented pre-emptive war without the sanction of the United Nations and with a loss of our oldest allies, particularly France and Germany, I believed that it started a conflict that was wholly unnecessary. Moreover, it was badly planned, well organized for initial victory, but totally unprepared for the aftermath.
I thought it was unnecessary first and foremost because the Cold War was over; and the United States was no longer facing a global enemy like the now defunct Soviet Union. Instead, it was and is still involved in a war against terrorists without a specific country with whom it is impossible to negotiate and who engage in suicide bombing tactics, methods almost unknown previously except for the Kamikaze of Japan at the end of World War II. I was appalled at the Bush administration's preemptive attack on Iraq, which I felt was not only wholly unnecessary, but actually counterproductive in the war against the terrorists, who were not in that country. Indeed, in the struggle against terror, Iraq did not figure at all; Saddam Hussein, its dictator, was an evil tyrant, but he did not constitute a direct threat to the United States. Moreover, he had no direct links with the Al Qaeda organization sponsoring the terrorist attacks on the American polity.
The George W. Bush administration, for reason not quite clear, seems to have planned the invasion of Iraq from the beginning, long before the United States suffered the outrageous attack of September 11,2001. Apparently the right wing faction represented by Dick Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, was anxious to display America's great might. To its thinking, the great deficit that the war and its tax cut policy would endanger did not matter. On the contrary, it was desirable because it would have the effect of shrinking social services, which the believers in limited government disliked. Thus the nation was led into war under the false pretenses of the existence of weapons of mass distraction in Iraq. Based on faulty intelligence convenient for the administration, this excuse was not very believable from the beginning, and it turned out to be entirely false. And instead of helping the fight against terrorists, it only gave them a new theater from which to operate.
Considering these facts, as a good American I could easily oppose the war and the administration that started it as a preventive measure. It differed greatly from the previous experience in Vietnam, was improperly planned, and still causes the United States to suffer daily losses in its effort to pacify the invaded country.
Iraq is not Vietnam, and so I can easily be a dove now even though I was a hawk some twenty-five years ago.