[NYTr] Iraq as Vietnam: W's Dumb-Dumb version of "History Will Absolve Me"

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[George W Bush's dumb-dumb version of "history will absolve me?" -NYTr]

The Guardian - Aug 23, 2007
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/matthew_yglesias/2007/08/dont_know_much_about_history.html


Don't Know Much About History

Why is George Bush suddenly making parallels between Iraq and Vietnam? 
Because he's preparing to shift the blame for another disaster.

by Matthew Yglesias

Today, it seems, was "Asian Wars Analogy Day" in the Bush 
administration, as the president uncorked a whole series of odd 
historical analogies 
<http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aDBgKb.ScGSQ&refer=us>
in defense of his Iraq policy. "In the aftermath of Japan's surrender," 
he reminded an audience of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Missouri, 
"many thought it naive to help the Japanese transform themselves into a 
democracy. Then, as now, the argued that some people were not fit for 
freedom."

In fact, it seems rather doubtful that any substantial body of opinion 
actually did argue this about Japan.

Perhaps some people argued that it was more important to the United 
States that Japan be a reliable ally against the Soviet Union than that 
it be a democracy. Which, of course, is precisely what American policy 
was. As former Tokyo CIA station chief Horace Feldman is quoted in Tim 
Weiner's new book  "Legacy of Ashes"
<http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/5669> "We ran Japan during the 
occupation, and we ran it a different way in these years after the 
occupation," ensuring the Liberal Democratic Party a basic monopoly of 
political power in exchange for deference to American security policy
in Asia. Despite this meddling, Japan did emerge from the post-war 
occupation with the basic scheme of a liberal democracy in place, which 
was all to the good. Elsewhere in Asia, however, things didn't work out 
so well, and countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines 
were subjected to America-friendly military dictatorships that only 
became democratic decades later as a result of popular protest.

One points this out not to condemn America's Asia policy of the 1940s 
and 1950s, but merely to observe that democracy-promotion wasn't 
especially high on the agenda. This serves, in turn, as a reminder that 
the United States hardly invaded Japan (or Germany or Italy for that 
matter) in order to build democracies. Rather, Japan launched a sneak 
attack on American soil, Germany invaded Poland, both were hell-bent on 
world domination, and the allies prosecuted World War II as a 
fundamentally defensive measure. The contrast with Iraq could not be 
more stark.

Nor, indeed, could the contrast between homogenous, resource-poor Japan 
and heterogeneous, oil-rich Iraq be much greater. Indeed, though
leading war advocate Paul Wolfowitz demonstrated gross ignorance of
Iraq when he testified before congress 
<http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/consequences/2003/0228pentagoncontra.htm> 
that the country had no history of ethnic strife, he was showing a keen 
awareness of the fact that a history of ethnic strife would make the 
country an unpromising proving ground for gunpoint democratization.

All this, however, was but the appetizer for a shocking embrace of a 
historically illiterate account of the Vietnam war. "One unmistakable 
legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by 
millions of innocent citizens," Bush said "whose agonies would add to 
our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 
'killing fields.'" While it is of course true that people died in South 
Vietnam following American withdrawal, millions died 
<http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2007/08/22/7002> during the 
United States' years of military involvement as well, a great many 
killed by the American military at enormous expense and with no end in 
sight. The killing fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia, meanwhile, were if 
anything more a consequence of America's destabilization of the region 
than of America's departure.

Unenlightening as Bush's analogies may be, they do serve as an 
interesting sign of the times. For years, war-supporters derided any 
efforts to draw parallels between Iraq and Vietnam as unwarranted, now 
they're eager to draw them. The reason, most likely, is that while the 
hawks lost the war in Vietnam and eventually even lost the debate over 
the war, they believe themselves to have eventually won the larger 
political battle as Ronald Reagan embraced Bush-style revisionist 
accounts of the war in southeast Asia as part of his march to the White 
House in 1980.

For months now, many conservatives have been fundamentally positioning 
themselves for the post-war era, readying the arguments that will blame 
the failure of the venture in Iraq on its opponents rather than its 
architects. That Bush himself has chosen to join them is, perhaps, on 
some level the clearest reflection of the reality that the president 
knows perfectly well that the war is unwinnable, and blame-shifting now 
the best hope for saving his historical legacy.

[Matthew Yglesias <http://matthewyglesias.com/>is staff writer at the 
American Prospect and author of an eponymous blog. His writing has also 
appeared in Foreign Policy, Slate and the New York Times Magazine.]