With the president’s upcoming report to Congress on “progress” in Iraq just a few weeks away, the White House is, once again, preparing a new public-relations offensive to bolster support for Bush’s war policy. It starts today with a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ annual convention, followed by another address next week to the American Legion, which will reportedly offer a “broader context” to discouraging news out of Iraq.
Apparently, this context includes an odd comparison between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam.
As he awaits a crucial progress report on Iraq, President Bush will try to put a twist on comparisons of the war to Vietnam by invoking the historical lessons of that conflict to argue against pulling out.
On Wednesday in Kansas City, Missouri, Bush will tell members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that “then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” according to speech excerpts released Tuesday by the White House.
But this is an obvious misread of history. Supporters of the war in Vietnam said a withdrawal would lead to Communists dominating Southeast Asia., just as supporters of the war in Iraq argue that a withdrawal now would lead to some kind of al Qaeda caliphate.
That, of course, is probably one of the least persuasive arguments the White House could offer. Predictions predicated on an Asian “domino theory” turned out to be wrong. As Josh Marshall explained, “Going 40 years on, it is not too much to say that virtually none of the predicted negative repercussions of our departure from Vietnam ever came to pass. Asia didn’t go Communist. Our Asian allies didn’t abandon us. Rather, the Vietnamese began to fall out with her Communist allies…. If anything, the clearest lesson of Vietnam would seem to be that there can be a vast hue and cry about the catastrophic effects of disengagement from a failed policy and it can turn out that none of them are true.”
But as it turns out, that’s not even the dumbest part of the president’s new argument.
This is.
The president will also make the argument that withdrawing from Vietnam emboldened today’s terrorists by compromising U.S. credibility, citing a quote from al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden that the American people would rise against the Iraq war the same way they rose against the war in Vietnam, according to the excerpts.
“Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility, but the terrorists see things differently,” Bush will say.
Now, this is just silly. Several U.S. administrations pursued a failed strategy in Vietnam, we withdrew U.S. troops, and Osama bin Laden, several decades later, said, “A ha! Now we can attack with impunity”? I don’t think so. It’s an argument that reeks of desperation. This nonsense doesn’t bolster the White House line; it undermines the president’s credibility (even more so).
For good measure, the president will also reportedly argue that proponents of withdrawal from Vietnam are indirectly responsible for tragic massacres in Southeast Asia: “Whatever your position in that debate, 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,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’ ”
Marshall tackles this one, too.
The story of the ‘boat people’ is unquestionably tragic. And there’s little doubt that there are many Iraqis who will pay either with their lives or nationality for aiding us in various ways during our occupation of the country. But to govern our policy on this basis is simply to buy into a classic sunk cost fallacy. A far better — and really quite necessary — policy would be to give asylum to a lot of these people rather than continuing to get more of them into the same position in advance of our inevitable departure.
More concretely though, didn’t the killing fields happen in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge rather than Vietnam? So doesn’t that complicate the analogy a bit? And didn’t that genocide actually come to an end when the Communist Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and overthrow the Khmer Rouge regime? The Vietnamese Communists may have been no great shakes. But can we get through one of these boneheaded historical analogies while keeping at least some of the facts intact?
Why let facts get in the way of a perfectly ridiculous meme?