For the last several days, those who take reality seriously have been mystified by the president’s incoherent comparison between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. Bush, who was not exactly well grounded before this week, has managed to humiliate himself to a jaw-dropping degree.
But I’ve been curious ever since the president made the bewildering remarks how, exactly, the Bush gang ended up embracing this ridiculous comparison. After all, for several years now, any time a White House critic would note the similarities between the two quagmires, the president and his team would aggressively push back, insisting the two had nothing whatsoever in common.
So, what happened? The LAT offered a peek behind the curtain.
Aides said the president felt it was necessary to revamp his message in the weeks before Army Gen. David H. Petraeus delivers a progress report that Congress mandated.
White House counselor Ed Gillespie and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove worked with the president on the speech. There was a sense in the White House that the president’s rhetoric on Iraq, though consistent, was also becoming somewhat repetitive. […]
What’s different, [a former official who left the White House recently] said, is that the president is taking a perceived weakness — historical comparisons to Vietnam — and turning it into a strength.
“Vietnam has been wrung around the administration’s neck on Iraq for a long time,” he said. “There are many analogies or comparisons or connections that could cut against the administration’s position, but this is a connection that supports the administration’s position. . . . They want to say, the last time you took a drastic option like abandoning our allies it didn’t work well. Let’s take a more measured one. They’re setting that up.”
This really doesn’t make any sense. I say that a lot when it comes to the White House’s thinking on, well, pretty much everything, but this is practically pathological. The Bush strategy effectively boiled down to: war critics have said Iraq and Vietnam are similar, so our strategy will be to say they are similar, but in a good way.
The New York Daily News added:
A Republican source said White House strategists, believing anti-war Democrats will liken Iraq to the Vietnam War “quagmire,” launched a preemptive strike “to inoculate Bush.”
Got that? The White House is effectively telling the reality-based community, “You can’t talk about Vietnam anymore; we’ve claimed it as our own.”
I can appreciate the strategy of trying to turn a negative into a positive. I can even appreciate the notion of inoculating the president against an expected criticism. But the key part of both strategies is using an argument that isn’t moronic. That’s where this strategy comes up short.
Washington’s failure to face these unpleasant realities opens the door to strange and dangerous fantasies, like Mr. Bush’s surreal take on the Vietnam war.
The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.
The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.
If Mr. Bush, whose decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre, took the time to study the real lessons of Vietnam, he would not be so eager to lead America still deeper into the 21st century quagmire he has created in Iraq. Following his path will not rectify the mistakes of Vietnam, it will simply repeat them.
And just when I thought this White House could no longer scare me.