Blow the Trumpets! The Vietnam/Iraq Post Is Here!

Much anticipated, and very long, the Vietnam vs. Iraq throwdown you've been waiting for. There are no links or italics or underlinings or photos because the new version of Blogger is evidently broken. Let us pray they fix it soon, so I can spice up my lengthy ramblings.

And now, let us begin:

It's odd that Bush went to Vietnam the other week. Wouldn't you have thought he'd want to avoid that of all locations? Especially given that he managed to go in the midst of a dizzying flurry of "Is Iraq another Vietnam?" reporting. The Times, the Post, the News Hour -- it was everywhere. And so what does Bush do? Goes to Vietnam. Sometimes I think that if I were writing the story of the last five years as a novel, any reputable agent would tell me the narrative was unpublishably predictable. Especially given that, when asked to compare Iraq and Vietnam, while IN Vietnam, Bush helpfully explained that in both cases we could win unless we quit. Not exactly a tactful thing to say to a Vietnamese government that traces its origins to the outcomes of our quitting, and also not very helpful to call Americans historically weak-willed.

By the way, how are you liking the new, bipartisan Bush? Isn’t he just so different now?

All of this brings me to a question: what the hell are the lessons of Vietnam, anyway? Because listening to the ad infinitum reporting over the last few weeks, I really couldn't tell. If you get any two foreign policy experts together, and ask them to talk about the lessons of Vietnam, or the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq, they promptly bog down in detail bickering. You know -- "Well, Steve, I must remind you that in 1965 when we were involved with talks ..." -- that kind of thing. Which is singularly unhelpful, because, of course, Iraq is not LITERALLY Vietnam. If we're looking for differences, we can for sure find plenty of them. But it seems to me the issue is the fact that there's disagreement at all. How is it possible that 30 years later we have absolutely no sense of the meaning, or lessons if you will, of a war that cost us a decade and 58,000 lives? Especially given that we were all apparently unaware for those 30 years of the very fact of our own unawareness.

For the record, I had always thought that the lessons of Vietnam were (and these were gleaned from a vast array of cultural and educational sources):
1.) Avoid a land war in Asia (cf The Princess Bride)
2.) Don't blame the troops (a concept the right certainly picked up on, to judge by their fanatical use of it as a cudgel against liberals)
3.) Don't go to war for stupidly ideological purposes (the Domino Theory? Seriously??); corellary: get over the idea that systems of government are contagious
4.) Don't lie about Gulfs of Tonkin or bombings of Cambodia (or equivalent)
5.) Don't treat other people's countries as your chattel (see "Don't go to war for
stupidly ideological purposes,” above)

It turns out that the Neocons you hear so much about learned a rather different set of lessons. To them, who were once Democrats and became Republicans under Reagan, the lessons of Vietnam boiled down rather simply to the failure to show sufficient commitment. This was the fault of the public, the liberals, the hippies and, perhaps more than anyone else, the press. It was this line that Bush was repeating. It’s this line you can still hear in the Weekly Standard and National Review. It was buried in Kissinger’s nastily calculating comment that Iraq is unwinnable “in the time period that the political processes of democracies will support”.

All of which means that the question -- "Is Iraq another Vietnam?" -- is a false one, not only for the reasons of detail I mentioned above, but because the answer doesn't matter in any case. Iraq doesn't need to be Vietnam for the lessons of Vietnam -- whatever you take them to be -- to apply to Iraq, simply because it was the people disgruntled over Vietnam who got us into Iraq, to soothe their hurt and to demonstrate, most importantly, that you don’t need long-term public support when you’ve got a new army and a spruced up, post-9/11 ideology. I would go so far as to say that these people were waiting around for 9/11, and Christopher Hitchens, who has a great deal in common with the Neocons, has as much as admitted that 9/11 was for him an ideological godsend.

Now these people are in an interesting pickle. Whatever else it was about, and however much detail bickering you’d like to engage in, the fact is that Vietnam tested the idea of voluntary warfare, and demonstrated the outer limit of our democracy’s willingness to pursue purely elective military goals. Given that Neocons attribute the loss of that war to insufficient public will (after 10 years, 58,000 dead and, at the end, over a half million troops in-country), it seems rather moronic of them to have based an entire political theory on the idea that that same public will would be so different this time around. It appears, if I may say so, naïve.

But Neocon naivete should not be credited on its face. Some of it hides a secret cunning. For instance, Neocons could only make the argument they made about Vietnam because of the draft. The draft meant effectively unlimited manpower resources, until the drawdown (“Vietnamization”). This allowed total blame for the press, the public, and the Democratically controlled Congress. Now, in Iraq, with a tiny military, these people find themselves begging for 20,000 troops (see this week’s Weekly Standard for proof), not because that would help (it certainly wouldn’t), but so that they can then say, when they don’t get those troops, that it was the public/press/Congress’s fault that we lost the war. They’ve replaced the actual possibilities offered by the Vietnam-era giant army with a bit of casuistry. And it’s not very pretty behavior.

Of course, the only honorable thing to do in their position – given that they think this war MUST be won or the sky will fall and the devil will reign for seven years and a giant hell mouth will open and swallow us all – well, given that they feel that way, shouldn’t they demand a draft as a matter of patriotic duty? And, by not doing so, don’t they sell out their principles to court precisely the public favor that they disdain? Don’t they, in effect, sell out American honor – judging by their standards, understand, not mine – for immediate political comfort? Doesn’t that make them, at the very least, no better than the rest of us, and probably worse? Oh yes, let me assure you, it DOES.

I have to say, I’ve had enough of these idiots – the Bill Kristols, the Podhoretzes (pere and fils), the Richard Perles, and their various sidekicks at the Weekly Standard, the National Review, the American Enterprise Institute, and so on. No doubt you don’t read them, and God spare you should, because they are truly horrifying – if you want, I’ll pull out a few gems for you sometime and put them on display – but I do read them, in the interests of research, and they make my skin crawl. Their greatest crime wasn’t the founding of an ideological movement grounded on a misinterpretation of the lessons of Vietnam; their crime – and it is a grievous one -- is the constant shifting of blame for a war they created in the service of that ideology onto those who are ultimately going to pay the bill – financial, physical, spiritual – of that war. By whom I mean, us.

And it is in this way that Iraq is another Vietnam. Those who failed to learn from Vietnam lied, cheated, and manipulated us into Iraq, and now they are busy making sure that Iraq confirms their theory of Vietnam: that these two wars were not lost due to flawed ideology, but thanks to a disloyal public.

To which I say, yeah, well fuck you too.