Best of the Web Today - August 24, 2007
By JAMES TARANTO
Vietnam, Iraq and Iraq
Earlier this week, President Bush gave a speech in which he drew an analogy between Vietnam and Iraq. As Max Boot argues in today's Wall Street Journal, this was unusual. Normally it is opponents of American power--those who believe, or hope, that America cannot win--who cite Vietnam. "Supporters of [American] interventions have adamantly resisted any Vietnam comparisons."
"In a skillful bit of political jujitsu," Boot writes, Bush "cited Vietnam not as evidence that the Iraq War is unwinnable, but to argue that the costs of giving up the fight would be catastrophic--just as they were in Southeast Asia." Here is what the president said:
The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I'm going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.
The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, "The Quiet American." It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism--and dangerous naiveté. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?" A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: "Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life."
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
There's a reason for the apparent reversal Boot describes. Usually, the Vietnam analogy comes up before the U.S. intervenes overseas. Opponents of intervention liken it to Vietnam because they think America was wrong to intervene there, and they want to avoid "another Vietnam"--that is, another U.S. military intervention.
Now, however, it is the Iraq opponents who are seeking another Vietnam, i.e., another defeat for America, and President Bush who wants to avoid that outcome. And so the erstwhile opponents of the Vietnam War have to argue that the outcome in Vietnam wasn't really so bad.
This means, among other things, averting one's eyes from the humanitarian costs of American retreat. Newsweek's Michael Hirsh shows how it's done, describing a visit he made to Hanoi in December 1991, when the Soviet Union had less than a month to exist:
Throughout the country, but especially in the North, the Vietnamese had come to despise the large resident Russian population for its cheap spending habits and arrogance. Visiting Americans, by contrast, were welcomed with smiles ("Russians with dollars," we were called.)
On the day I visited the old U.S. Embassy in Saigon--the where [sic] some of those iconic photos symbolizing American defeat were taken--I discovered government workmen removing a plaque that once commemorated the North's victory over the "U.S. imperialists." In the waning days of that epochal year, 1991, the propaganda against American involvement in Southeast Asia was suddenly no longer politically correct. Hanoi's new message: Yankee Come Back (and bring your investment dollars).
Today Vietnam remains nominally communist, but Hanoi knows it is an ideological relic surrounded by Asian capitalist tigers, all of them U.S. allies or dependents (one reason Vietnam was so eager to have Bush visit last November: it wants to be part of that club). The cold war dominoes did fall--but the opposite way.
This was the "harsh" aftermath that George W. Bush attempted to describe this week when he warned against pulling out of Iraq as we did in Vietnam.
Could that last sentence be any more disingenuous? To Hirsh, the "aftermath" of America's withdrawal from Vietnam didn't begin until 1991, more than 16 years after Saigon fell. About events between 1975 and 1991, he has only this to say:
Yes, a lot of Vietnamese boat people died on the high seas; but many others have returned to visit in the ensuing years.
Never mind Vietnam's and Laos's "re-education" camps; never mind Cambodia's killing fields. It is as if one visited West Germany in 1960, found a prosperous democracy, and reached positive conclusions about the "aftermath" of Nazi rule. It misses the point by a light-year.
Of course Iraq is not Vietnam, and any historical analogy entails differences as well as similarities. But let's look at one more historical analogy to Iraq: Iraq. That is, the last time America abandoned Iraqis, in 1991. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Shiites in southern Iraq staged an uprising. Today's New York Times reports on some of what happened:
A former top aide to Saddam Hussein had two men tied to concrete blocks and thrown from a helicopter into deep water in 1991, according to testimony on the third day of the trial of Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali, and 14 co-defendants on charges of crimes against humanity. . . .
Another witness, testifying anonymously, said today that he was tortured in prisons in Basra and Baghdad. In the Basra prison, he said, he was ordered to stand on a chair with a rope around his neck while officers asked him to confess. They kicked out the chair from under him and let him hang by the neck until he passed out, then they took him to another room where he regained consciousness.
The witness said he saw a girl who had been serving tea to officers at the prison forced by one of the officers into an adjoining room, and then he heard her screaming. He realized that she had been raped when another officer congratulated the officer who had taken her into the next room, telling him "you have married twice now, good for you."
He also testified that: he saw hanged men in tents in the prison in Basra; soldiers in the prison raped a young boy who used to work as barber in Basra, and prisoners were tortured by being put into a barrel that was heated by a fire underneath it.
In a 2003 Washington Post op-ed, Peter Galbraith described America's culpability:
On Feb. 15, 1991, President George H.W. Bush called on the Iraqi military and people to overthrow Saddam Hussein. On March 3, an Iraqi tank commander returning from Kuwait fired a shell through one of the portraits of Hussein in Basra's main square, igniting the southern uprising. A week later, Kurdish rebels ended Hussein's control over much of the north.
But although Bush had called for the rebellion, his administration was caught unprepared when it happened. The administration knew little about those in the Iraqi opposition because, as a matter of policy, it refused to talk to them. Policymakers tended to see Iraq's main ethnic groups in caricature: The Shiites were feared as pro-Iranian and the Kurds as anti-Turkish. Indeed, the U.S. administration seemed to prefer the continuation of the Baath regime (albeit without Hussein) to the success of the rebellion. As one National Security Council official told me at the time: "Our policy is to get rid of Saddam, not his regime."
The practical expression of this policy came in the decisions made by the military on the ground. U.S. commanders spurned the rebels' plea for help. The United States allowed Iraq to send Republican Guard units into southern cities and to fly helicopter gunships. (This in spite of a ban on flights, articulated by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf with considerable swagger: "You fly, you die.") The consequences were devastating. Hussein's forces leveled the historical centers of the Shiite towns, bombarded sacred Shiite shrines and executed thousands on the spot. By some estimates, 100,000 people died in reprisal killings between March and September. Many of these atrocities were committed in proximity to American troops, who were under orders not to intervene.
This history is no doubt uncomfortable for the current President Bush, since it was his own father who committed what Galbraith rightly calls "a mistake of historic proportions." Those who seek to abandon Iraq today would risk repeating the catastrophic mistakes not only of Vietnam but also of Iraq after the Gulf War.
We Don't Report, We Decide
"The FBI says it has received more than 200 leads and tips after the publication of a photograph of two men seen acting suspiciously on several Washington state ferries," the Seattle Times reports:
While the men have not been identified, Special Agent Larry Carr said Thursday that the bureau is hopeful "that we'll be able to have this matter resolved soon." Carr declined to say more.
The editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, however, remain determined not to help resolve the matter. Managing editor David McCumber is growing more petulant in his defense of the paper's decision not to publish the photos:
I understand that people have a hard time with the concept that we get to decide what is news and what isn't, and what is fair and what isn't.
Several people have basically told me I didn't have the right to withhold the photos of the individuals the FBI want to identify. One person even said, "You have a responsibility to obey all FBI directives."
That's not the way a free press works.
It is, of course, true that "the way a free press works" is that a newspaper gets to decide what to publish and is free to withhold news in the service of a political agenda. That doesn't mean that an editor's opinions about "what is news and what isn't, and what is fair and what isn't" are beyond dispute. Nor is there any contradiction between the reader's opinion that the P-I has a responsibility to publish the photos and "the way a free press works." The P-I has a right to behave irresponsibly; that doesn't mean it is right to do so.
McCumber continues:
This afternoon I got a call from a Washington State Ferries captain who thanked me sincerely for the decision not to run the photos. He said he feared we were moving to some sort of brown-shirt state where hysteria replaced reason.
He ended our short conversation by quoting Benjamin Franklin:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporaray [sic] safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I think there are very good arguments on both sides of this issue. The captain--and old Ben--expressed what I consider to be the controlling point here more eloquently than I was able to myself.
McCumber doesn't even try to explain how publishing the photos would cost "essential liberty." But it seems to us that those who fear that America is becoming "some sort of brown-shirt state" are the hysterical ones.
Mrs. Clinton vs. the Dems
"Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday raised the prospect of a terror attack before next year's election, warning that it could boost the GOP's efforts to hold on to the White House," the New York Post reports from Washington:
"It's a horrible prospect to ask yourself, 'What if? What if?' But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world," Clinton told supporters in Concord.
"So I think I'm the best of the Democrats to deal with that," she added.
We are inclined to agree that she is the best of the Democrats (or at least of the major presidential candidates) to deal with it. But isn't she conceding that the Republicans are better still?
AG, Phone Home
Working Assets, the "socially responsible phone company," has started a "carbon neutral phone" program, the New York Times reports:
Under that program, the company will pay $55 to the Carbon Fund for a year's worth of carbon offsets when new subscribers sign up for a year of service. The company says the offsets pay for 10 tons of emissions per year (from such things as the consumer's air and car travel).
We wanted to figure out how many of these phones Al Gore would have to buy to offset the carbon usage at his Tennessee mansion, and the Web site for "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore's global-warmist movie, has a handy "carbon calculator" to do just that.
Just one problem: According to the Tennessee Policy Center, in 2006 Gore's average monthly electric bill "topped $1,359," and his average natural-gas bill was $1,080. The highest values the calculator will accept for either are "$400-$500."
Even so, according to the calculator, a two-person Tennessee household that spends $400 to $500 a month each on electricity and natural gas thereby produces 26.8 tons of carbon dioxide--and this assumes no driving, flying, or burning of heating oil or propane. So Al Gore may end up buying a whole lot of phones.
Homer Nods
We erred slightly in an item yesterday, in which we asserted that approving a constitutional amendment requires the assent of three-fourths of state legislatures. In fact, Article V of the Constitution provides for an alternative: Congress, when proposing a constitutional amendment, may call for state constitutional conventions, three-fourths of which also must vote to ratify.
The Constitution can also be amended without an act of Congress. Article V provides that two-thirds of state legislatures can call a convention for the purpose of proposing amendments to the Constitution, which would then be submitted to the states for ratification. No such convention has been held, however, since the original Philadelphia Convention in 1787.
Still, our broader point stands: Amending the constitution is a purely legislative function, since a constitutional convention is a legislative (lawmaking) body.
One reader suggested impeachment as another example of a purely legislative function. But the vice president, an executive branch official, doubles as president of the Senate and thus has the power to preside over impeachment trials--except when the president is impeached, in which case, pursuant to Article I, Section 8, the chief justice presides over the trial.
At Least They Come Only Once Every Four Years
"Vultures Prey on Joys of Summer in Iowa Town"--headline, Omaha World-Herald, Aug. 24
Metaphor Alert
"Police say the suspect hid inside a sweltering port-a-john on a hospital construction site until a police K-9 unit caught his scent and flushed him out."--WLTV-TV/WJXX-TV Web site (Jacksonville, Fla.), Aug. 22
In Lieu of Flowers
"Pigeon Dung Contributed to Minneapolis Bridge Collapse"--headline, FoxNews.com, Aug. 22
The Limits of Power of Positive Thinking
"Viking Soil Tests May Be More Positive Than Thought"--headline, News.com.au, Aug. 24
The Decepticons Strike Again
"Capitol Evacuated Today; Transformer Suspected"--headline, Des Moines Register, Aug. 23
It's a Jungle Out There
"Manatee Woman in Wheelchair Recovering From Dog Attack"--headline, Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, Aug. 23
You Can Get It for $2.95 on eBay
"Nokia Battery Case to Cost Matsushita Up to $172 Mln"--headline, Reuters, Aug. 24
Breaking News From 1692
"Witches Charged After Raccoon Entrails Left on Doorsteps"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 23
Breaking News From 1993
"Clinton Vows to Improve Health Care"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 23
News You Can Use
o "Step Aside and Look at Yourself"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 23
o "Beware of Ticks That Carry 'Fatal' Disease"--headline, Daily Telegraph (London), Aug. 24
o "Soybeans May Pack Secret Weapon"--headline, Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star, Aug. 21
Bottom Stories of the Day
o "Nicole Richie Serves 82 Minutes in Jail"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 24
o "No Fireworks for Diddy on Labor Day"--headline, Associated Press, Aug. 22
Unscientific Atheists
The Web site of CNN's "Larry King Live" is running an online survey asking "Which religion do you associate with?" Figuring that it'll soon be replaced by another poll, we took a screen shot of the current results.
As you can see, a large majority of respondents, 68%, say atheism, with Christianity a distant second at 17%. Note the disclaimer at the bottom: "This is not a scientific poll." Apparently someone styling himself "Friendly Atheist" is encouraging his readers to skew the poll.
A scientific poll would have had a lot fewer atheists.
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