Iraq is like Vietnam: Bush reverses course and compares the wars
A Register-Guard Editorial
Published: Monday, August 27, 2007
After years of rejecting comparisons between U.S. military operations in Iraq and the nation's tragic involvement in Vietnam - particularly when it came to the term "quagmire" - President Bush surprised almost everyone on Wednesday by invoking the divisive Indochina war as a blueprint for what would happen if the United States withdraws prematurely from Iraq.
He should be more careful, both with his history and his foreign policy. His amnesia about the Vietnam War immediately brought to mind the admonition from George Santayana: "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." With respect to this president, truer words have never been spoken.
Addressing a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Mo., Bush decided to reverse course and link Iraq and Vietnam. Perhaps he was betting that the incomprehensible chaos in Iraq would mask any miscues in his comparison. Instead, it magnifies them.
"One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam," Bush said, "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,' `re-education camps,' and `killing fields.'?"
The president seemed oblivious to the fact that his images already had powerful contemporary counterparts in Iraq. Before a single soldier has permanently left Iraq in anything other than a body bag or a hospital flight, tens of thousands - reputable sources say hundreds of thousands - of Iraqi civilians have been killed. Or, in Bush's words, have "paid the price of America's" decision. These civilians weren't abandoned by Americans, they were "liberated" by them. U.S. forces aren't packing up, they're surging in. It's just like Vietnam, only the American soldiers are still coming, not going.
As the American forces surge and occupy Iraq in record numbers, millions of Iraqis have fled, just like the boat people of Vietnam, from a country made uninhabitable by the chaos unleashed by American soldiers. It's just like Vietnam, only the Americans are still coming, not going.
Iraq's killing fields are anywhere a suicide bomber can drive a car or truck - markets and gathering places, offices and apartment buildings. You don't have to be a counterrevolutionary intellectual to be killed in Iraq; you just have to belong to the wrong religious sect. It's just like Vietnam, only the American soldiers are still coming, not going.
There may still be a handful of deluded neoconservatives who believe that the United States could have won the Vietnam War, that more of the nation's young men should have been cut down in the jungles and rice paddies, that 58,000 wasn't enough. But it's a misguided and minuscule group, and they couldn't be more wrong.
The president's portrayal of the conflict "is not revisionist history. It is fantasy history," said Allan Lichtman, a historian at American University. Far more Vietnamese died during the U.S. military presence in their country than did after American troops left in 1975.
And lest the president become too enamored of the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq, he might want to find a credible source who doesn't list the Vietnam War as a military, political and foreign policy debacle for the United States - a defeat with consequences that continue to reverberate.
Using Vietnam as an example of the worst-case scenario for pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq ignores the fact that the horror stories about the consequences of American withdrawal from Vietnam never came to pass. No more dominoes fell to communism. In fact, Vietnam stabilized and developed into an economically thriving country that is now a friend of the United States.
There is a tragic irony in the timing of Bush's choice to compare Iraq and Vietnam. The worst similarities between the two wars have beengrowingsteadily. Except for the fact that American soldiers are still coming, not going. |
