As Ronald Reagan might say, there he goes again.
President George W. Bush has once again shifted rhetorical course in Iraq, finally acknowledging this ugly war’s connections to a past American debacle, but doing so with a selective approach to history that reduces the United States’ 20-year history in Southeast Asia.
Our exit from Vietnam led to defeat and violence, he said, during a speech yesterday at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ”
This, of course, is an absurd reduction of the historical record, which included nearly a million American soldiers losing their lives in an unwinnable and unpopular civil war that fractured this nation and poisoned our politics for more than a generation.
Matthew Yglesias, blogging for The Atlantic magazine, offers this analysis:
He’d like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America’s collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.
Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds — emboldened — were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.
It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct.
But this is too nuanced an explanation of history (for a fuller explanation of what happened and what went wrong, I’d suggest reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest) and, besides, the president wasn’t interested in a history lesson anyway. The president (or at least his advisors and chief speech writers) was attempting to tap into this poisoned legacy of division with his speech, hoping to marginalize his opponents by reminding Americans of the nation’s loss in that war. That’s been a longstanding GOP tactic — to use U.S. failures in Vietnam to question the patriotism of war opponents and the competency of Democrats on national defense matters.
It’s a cheap shot from a man who has lost all credibility — and one that is likely to backfire, I think, because acknowledging the connections between the two wars can only underscore the futility of our remaining in Iraq. Staying will not lead to stability there, anymore than remaining in Vietnam until the mid-1970s led to stability in Southeast Asia.
More than anything, the speech underscores how deluded this president has become.
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Hank Kalet 