Kudos again to Eugene Robinson, this time for fighting the Republican re-write of history by people who weren’t even there. (Or were high at the time.) mjh
Eugene Robinson – Good Morning, Vietnam! – washingtonpost.com
But seeking support for the war in Iraq by reminding the nation about Vietnam? I’d feel better if I thought this was just some exquisitely subtle, deeply cynical gambit, yet I have the sinking feeling that Bush actually believes the nonsensical version of history he’s peddling. I fear the man is on a mission to rewrite the past. …
[Bush said:] “Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility — but the terrorists see it differently.”
Lest anyone think this was merely a random rhetorical spasm, outgoing White House political czar Karl Rove wrote an article in the conservative National Review last week that included this passage: “If the outcome [in Iraq] is like what happened in Vietnam after America abandoned our allies and the region descended into chaos, violence and danger, history’s judgment will be harsh. History will see President Bush as right, and the opponents of his policy as mistaken — as George McGovern was in his time.”
What?
For the record, the illegal U.S. bombing of Cambodia destabilized that country and boosted the Khmer Rouge, who eventually took power and exterminated those “millions” in the “killing fields.” The monstrous Khmer Rouge regime was finally ousted by . . . none other than the communists who took power in Vietnam after the American withdrawal. Oh, and it was Richard Nixon who negotiated and began the U.S. pullout. Gerald Ford presided over the fall of Saigon. Both of them were Republicans, as I recall.
And George McGovern, who never got to be president, was right.
Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney and the other principal architects of the Iraq war never served in Vietnam — in fact, they went to great lengths to put distance between themselves and the military adventure they now describe as both necessary and noble. At the moment, though, I’m less concerned about their hypocrisy than their distortion of history.
To say the United States should not have withdrawn its forces from Vietnam is to say that there was something those forces could have done — something beyond napalm, carpet-bombing, destroying villages in order to save them — that would have led to some kind of “victory.” Of course, Bush and the others don’t say what that special something might have been, because they don’t know. They’re seeing nothing but a historical mirage.
Bush seems to want to return to a golden age when America confidently threw its weight around wherever, whenever and however it pleased. The problem is that no such golden age existed. American power has always had its limits, and there have always been some wars that simply couldn’t be won.
Bush and his enablers seem to forget that it was Dwight D. Eisenhower — a man with a bit more experience in running a war than the tinhorn generalissimos now occupying the White House — who realized that the most we could achieve in Korea was a stalemate. [mjh: Curiously, the Journal left this one paragraph out without inserting an ellipsis. Was “tinhorn generalissimos” too galling?]
George W. Bush wants us to remember Vietnam? Fine, then let’s remember those iconic images — the Viet Cong prisoner being executed in cold blood with a pistol shot to the temple, the little girl running naked and screaming from a napalm attack. Let’s remember how little we really understood about Vietnamese society. Let’s remember how wrong the domino theory proved to be. Let’s remember how much damage prolonging an unpopular war did to our armed forces and our nation, and how long it took us to recover.
Thanks for the reminder, Mr. President. When you talk about “victory” in Iraq and the Petraeus report discerns a light at the end of the tunnel, we’ll think of Vietnam.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300802.html