If I were Bush’s media advisor, or his framing expert, or whatever, I would advise Bush not to invoke the example of Vietnam while trying to buck up America’s resolve to stay in Iraq.
There is a tiny slice of Americans, mostly Republicans, who think we would have won the war in Vietnam is we had just kept at it. These people can be pretty noisy, but they constitute a vanishingly small percentage of the electorate.
The aftermath of our pullout from Vietnam was indeed ugly. The war spilled over into Cambodia and a genocide wiped out some ungodly percentage of the population there. Ordinary Americans, for the most part, were just relieved to be out of Indochina.
USA Today reports that Bush is going to try to use the specter of Vietnam to justify more war.
President Bush plans to argue today that a hasty “retreat” from Iraq would lead to the kinds of bloodbaths that followed U.S. withdrawals from Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s…
“Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they are gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq?” Bush says in prepared remarks released by the White House late Tuesday.
We all know all about how Bush and Cheney avoided serving in Vietnam. Now they join the fringe group of dead-enders that believe the war should have continued deep into the 1970’s.
Regardless of how one feels about U.S. involvement in that war, Bush says, the U.S. withdrawal in the mid-1970s did not end the killing in Vietnam or in neighboring Cambodia.
“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,’ ” Bush’s speech says.
The Vietnam War was not my generation’s war, but it is deeply ironic that Bush would invoke the carnage caused by our disastrous decision to fight there. The genocide in Cambodia, for example, has been seen by progressives as a kind of case in point about the unintended consequences of needless foreign adventurism. And then there is that old saw about putting down the shovel when you find yourself in a hole.
There were many ideological arguments made against invading Iraq. Those were, at least, debatable. But there was a practical argument that shouldn’t have been debatable. The practical argument was that Iraq would fly apart and become ungovernable. Dick Cheney made that argument in 1994. George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft made that argument in their 1990’s book. It was common wisdom until neo-conservatives took over and Dick Cheney went insane.
As for rebutting the administration’s new argument, I’ll leave it to one of the premiere historians of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow said Bush is reaching for historical analogies that don’t track. He said, “Vietnam was not a bunch of sectarian groups fighting each other,” as in Iraq. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge toppled a U.S.-backed government.
“Does he think we should have stayed in Vietnam?” Karnow asked.
When you talk to your friends, family, and co-workers, ask them the same question.
