Unfair Historical Analogies
The DNC blog (entitled "Kicking Ass", I recommend it for all of you), via Atrios (of course), has linked to this column by former Democrat Senator Max Cleland which compares our current conflict in Iraq to Vietnam.
Now, I don't know if Iraq will devolve into a Vietnam-style quagmire, but given the relatively low casualty rate, I don't think the parallel will be any stronger than it's a bad, misguided, poorly managed war when Vietnam is still on our minds.
Besides which, I don't think that Cleland is being very fair to Lyndon Johnson.
A meme picking up on the left (it's even portrayed in this Ted Rall cartoon, and I usually love Ted Rall) is that what Johnson did in the buildup to Vietnam is essentially what Bush did with Iraq. But this ignores some basic facts.
Frankly, every postwar president, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, bear some responsibility for what happened in Vietnam. Truman for allowing the French to recolonize Indochina after the war, which was contrary to the wishes of Roosevelt, and Eisenhower and Kennedy, for essentially doing exactly what they needed to keep the ensuing guerrilla war from being lost.
There were some reasons for this. Truman didn't want to piss off the French with regards to Southeast Asia, because he was already pissing them off in Europe by rebuilding Germany's Army and Infrastucture. (Remember, France had fought four major wars against Germany or German states in the previous 150 years). Then Eisenhower and Kennedy did what every major president does about seemingly minor issues in foreign policy, they stayed the course.
Then you get to Johnson, and things get interesting. Johnson had some bold initiatives with his Great Society plan, things for which he would need bipartisan support in order to pass. But Vietnam was quickly devolving into a situation where we would need to mobilize in order to prevent it from "falling to the Communists". (I put that in quotes to point to the fact that one of the major intelligence failures in Vietnam was our inability to recognize the North Vietnamese to be at least as much nationalist as they were Communist. Ho Chi Minh may have been an ideological Communist, but he was no puppet to Moscow nor Beijing)
Johnson also had a good memory. He remembered that Truman received no mercy for not intervening when Mao led a Communist uprising in China. He didn't want the same thing to happen to him, leaving his Great Society initiative out to dry. So he started sending in troops. He didn't mobilize the National Guard, because he didn't want to send a panic. He clearly wanted a war that would be quiet, quick and forgotten.
This, obviously, is not what he got.
Now, compare that to Bush.
Cleland, in his article, implicitly states that Bush gave no sign that he would use the US military during his campaign. I disagree. I remember him talking about the Military needing a new Commander in Chief during the second debate, and I instantly got the impression he was planning to use the military in a self-serving, Napoleonic way.
I take grim satisfaction in knowing I was right.
True, Bush inherited a situation in Iraq, but it was a situation where Iraq had lost badly in a war against America in 1991, and since then sanctions and patrols had left Iraq's military and infrastructure in complete shambles, leaving it fully unable to repeat what it did in Kuwait for the foreseeable future. This wasn't a situation so much as it was an oppurtunity for our boy emperor. Our Caesar wannabe. Our poor-man's Napoleon.
I have little doubt that Rummy, Wolfowitz and Perle were planning a war with Iraq from the day Bush was "elected". Why? Because they were planning it while Clinton was in office, since at least 1998, when they and others formed the Project for a New American Century.
This is not Vietnam. In a sense, this is worse, because it implies a frightening shift in US foreign policy. Whereas Vietnam was an example of the failed policy of containment, Iraq is an almost naked grab for empire. I don't want to see our troops die in Iraq, but moreso, I don't want to see our troops head to Syria, Iran, or wherever the Bushies decide is ripe for conquest.
[Updated for clarity]
The DNC blog (entitled "Kicking Ass", I recommend it for all of you), via Atrios (of course), has linked to this column by former Democrat Senator Max Cleland which compares our current conflict in Iraq to Vietnam.
Now, I don't know if Iraq will devolve into a Vietnam-style quagmire, but given the relatively low casualty rate, I don't think the parallel will be any stronger than it's a bad, misguided, poorly managed war when Vietnam is still on our minds.
Besides which, I don't think that Cleland is being very fair to Lyndon Johnson.
A meme picking up on the left (it's even portrayed in this Ted Rall cartoon, and I usually love Ted Rall) is that what Johnson did in the buildup to Vietnam is essentially what Bush did with Iraq. But this ignores some basic facts.
Frankly, every postwar president, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, bear some responsibility for what happened in Vietnam. Truman for allowing the French to recolonize Indochina after the war, which was contrary to the wishes of Roosevelt, and Eisenhower and Kennedy, for essentially doing exactly what they needed to keep the ensuing guerrilla war from being lost.
There were some reasons for this. Truman didn't want to piss off the French with regards to Southeast Asia, because he was already pissing them off in Europe by rebuilding Germany's Army and Infrastucture. (Remember, France had fought four major wars against Germany or German states in the previous 150 years). Then Eisenhower and Kennedy did what every major president does about seemingly minor issues in foreign policy, they stayed the course.
Then you get to Johnson, and things get interesting. Johnson had some bold initiatives with his Great Society plan, things for which he would need bipartisan support in order to pass. But Vietnam was quickly devolving into a situation where we would need to mobilize in order to prevent it from "falling to the Communists". (I put that in quotes to point to the fact that one of the major intelligence failures in Vietnam was our inability to recognize the North Vietnamese to be at least as much nationalist as they were Communist. Ho Chi Minh may have been an ideological Communist, but he was no puppet to Moscow nor Beijing)
Johnson also had a good memory. He remembered that Truman received no mercy for not intervening when Mao led a Communist uprising in China. He didn't want the same thing to happen to him, leaving his Great Society initiative out to dry. So he started sending in troops. He didn't mobilize the National Guard, because he didn't want to send a panic. He clearly wanted a war that would be quiet, quick and forgotten.
This, obviously, is not what he got.
Now, compare that to Bush.
Cleland, in his article, implicitly states that Bush gave no sign that he would use the US military during his campaign. I disagree. I remember him talking about the Military needing a new Commander in Chief during the second debate, and I instantly got the impression he was planning to use the military in a self-serving, Napoleonic way.
I take grim satisfaction in knowing I was right.
True, Bush inherited a situation in Iraq, but it was a situation where Iraq had lost badly in a war against America in 1991, and since then sanctions and patrols had left Iraq's military and infrastructure in complete shambles, leaving it fully unable to repeat what it did in Kuwait for the foreseeable future. This wasn't a situation so much as it was an oppurtunity for our boy emperor. Our Caesar wannabe. Our poor-man's Napoleon.
I have little doubt that Rummy, Wolfowitz and Perle were planning a war with Iraq from the day Bush was "elected". Why? Because they were planning it while Clinton was in office, since at least 1998, when they and others formed the Project for a New American Century.
This is not Vietnam. In a sense, this is worse, because it implies a frightening shift in US foreign policy. Whereas Vietnam was an example of the failed policy of containment, Iraq is an almost naked grab for empire. I don't want to see our troops die in Iraq, but moreso, I don't want to see our troops head to Syria, Iran, or wherever the Bushies decide is ripe for conquest.
[Updated for clarity]
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