Don't Quit as we did in Vietnam Part Two
Does Iraq bring back memories of Vietnam? The president's critics say yes, and they are right. Vietnam came to mind when we saw Saddamites torturing their captives on camera. Do President Bush's opponents grasp that those are (or were) real people getting beaten to a pulp, mutilated, tortured, murdered? (If they did, wouldn't they be overjoyed now that the smug murderers have been thrown out, and radiantly proud of America?) Our moral obligations as the world's most powerful nation come strongly to mind when we hear about rape rooms and children's prisons; when we read about captives fed into industrial shredders, and swaggering princelings dragging women off the street to the torture houses.
Voltaire once felt obliged to rouse all Europe over the judicial torture of one man. Europe today reacts with the same charming befuddlement it felt back then: What's all the fuss? Surely, it's none of our business.
The president's critics say that he has made mistakes; right again. He was too optimistic about the difficulties of hunting down a man or a biological weapon in a large country. He might well have been too optimistic about the difficulties of managing postwar Iraq. He was certainly too optimistic about the rest of the world's joining us; too many people were making too much money from Hussein's Iraq for the case by Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair against Hussein ever to be popular, for the world at large to care much about Kurdish infants choking to death on poison gas or about a political dissenter with his tongue cut out. But suppose we sweep up all the administration's mistakes and dump them in one pan of the moral balance. We'll put just one fact on the other side: Hussein is overthrown. What do all the president's mistakes amount to? How much do they count when we step back and take in the big picture? They count zero.
People ask: Are you proposing to overthrow every sadist tyrant on Earth? No, only proposing to be proud that we overthrew one.
Some Bush critics tell us that "Iraqification" is bound to be a failure and a "losing strategy," like "Vietnamization." They are wrong on the facts. Vietnamization was a winning strategy. Several years ago, political commentator Fred Barnes reviewed, in an article for the Weekly Standard, the findings of two books on Vietnam that challenged the conventional wisdom on the war. Barnes wrote, in summary: "What really worked was Vietnamization, the reliance on Saigon's forces as American troops were gradually brought home." He quoted Lewis Sorley, one of the authors: "There came a time when the war was won. The fighting wasn't over, but the war was won. This achievement can probably best be dated in late 1970, after the Cambodia incursion."
But then we got fed up and pulled the plug. We left the bill on the table and walked out, and our allies paid in blood. Yes, we are haunted by Vietnam, and God forbid we should ever again betray our friends to tyrant murderers. Or ever again walk out on a nation whose people are struggling merely to live and be let alone. Or ever again inform the natives prissily over our shoulders on our way out: Look, it's your choice; if you choose to be governed by blood-sucking murderers, it's none of our business.
Yes, America is haunted by Vietnam. It always will be.
latimes.com |
