behind the news

Iraq? Vietnam? Who cares!

Says Union Tribune columnist

September 4, 2007

The award for the most head-scratchingly dumb op-ed from this past weekend goes to The San Diego Union Tribune‘s Ruben Navarrette, who seemed to be punching above his weight in a Sunday piece that totally misunderstood the core or criticisms leveled at president Bush’s August 22 speech comparing Iraq to Vietnam. Then it builds on that shaky foundation to argue for an ahistorial approach to foreign policy. A twofer.

When the president claimed that the American withdrawal from Vietnam caused chaos in Southeast Asia and that, “the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms such as ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields,'” he was making the point that American withdrawal from Iraq would have similar consequences for Iraqis. Navarrette gets this much right. But when he tries to add a little “politics-as-usual” flair, the logic falls apart.

For some reason, Navarrette seems to think that the president’s critique of how the war in Vietnam ended is the same critique that Democrats have been heaving at the war, and thus he claims to fail to understand why Democrats aren’t “flattered that the president seems to have come around to their point of view.”

But the president’s perspective wasn’t anywhere close to that of the Democrats. The standard Democratic critique has been that the war in Iraq, like Vietnam, was founded on faulty intelligence and analysis, that it has been mismanaged, and that it has become an unending meat grinder that is taking American lives and eating up equipment for no discernible reason. Bush ignored all that recent history and focused on the end game, projecting a terrible outcome for withdrawal. Navarrette doesn’t seem to grasp this, and instead accuses the Democrats of hypocrisy in their denunciations of the president’s speech. He writes that instead of applauding the president, “their instinct was to flip their position and insist that Bush is wrong and that the two wars cannot be compared…All some Bush critics care about is seizing the opportunity to disagree with the president that they’re willing to swallow their own words to do it.”

Now, I probably haven’t read every word uttered by democratic critics of the president’s Vietnam speech, but I am pretty familiar with democratic comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam. For whatever else they are, even at their weakest–opportunistic, historically selective, naïve–there is one thing they’re not: the same as the president’s. Bush didn’t say so explicitly, but his point seemed to be that the United States should have stayed in Vietnam longer in order to keep the violence that followed to a minimum. And that’s not quite what the Democrats have been saying. It’s not even close, actually, and any suggestion that the president has turned a Democratic argument back on itself is plain wrong.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t just Democrats who assailed the president’s speech; plenty of historians also found the president’s analogy lacking, so to reduce criticism of the president to a simple partisan affair doesn’t do the argument justice.

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Navarrette ends the piece with a real beauty.

We should eliminate the “V-word” [Vietnam] from our political vocabulary. As a member of Generation X who was born eight months before the Tet Offensive in 1968, I’m tired of hearing about this conflict. I felt that way before the Sept. 11 attacks, but I have even less patience for the discussion now. Why should Americans waste time arguing over the lessons of a war that ended in the 1970s, when we’re at war with a new enemy right now?

Unbelievable. It’s like a story in The Onion, without the wit. I would be happy to forward Navarrette article after article concerning all the ways in which the American military is taking lessons learned during the counterinsurgent war it waged in Vietnam and is applying them to Iraq and Afghanistan. And believe me, there are plenty. For him to advocate ignoring Vietnam in favor of focusing on Iraq ignores much recent military scholarship. Not only is it not a waste of time to talk about Vietnam, it’s critical to understand how to wage a counterinsurgency.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.