Remembrance of Wars Past
The past three weekends have been a time for remembrance of wars past—and what they can tell us about war present.
First there was the annual day of remembrance, Veterans’ Day, commemorating the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, when World War I ended. A week later, President Bush was concluding his first visit to Vietnam, inevitably bringing to the fore questions about parallels between the American war there and the war in Iraq.
A week ago Sunday, it was the huge war that occurred between those two conflicts that was remembered as the length of the current war surpassed the time that the United States was involved in World War II. That same weekend, any argument that Iraq has not descended into full civil war lost whatever shred of credibility it still had.
“History,” Mark Twain famously said, “doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
President Bush and his party attempted during the recent campaign to persuade the American people that his war rhymes with World War II, but the actual echoes from that conflict ended three-and-a-half years ago when Bush stood in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Aside from the length of the wars, the only striking rhyme of the current war with that which ended six decades ago is that we have adopted some of the standards we had condemned in our enemies. In World War II we were rightly horrified when the Nazis targeted civilian populations. Our response went by such names as Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Iraq War rhymes of letting our wicked enemies set the standards are Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, “no habeas corpus,” and water-boarding.
The historical rhymes between Vietnam and Iraq are more numerous. “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” “Ties to al Qaeda,” and “mushroom cloud” don’t rhyme acoustically with “Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” but they all rhyme historically. Lie, obviously, rhymes with itself.
Likewise, quagmire, disaster, foolhardy, senseless, and a host of other words apply equally to both wars.
McNamara does not sound much like Rumsfeld, but the historical rhyme between these arrogant and misguided Defense secretaries is plain to the eye, if not the ear.
The sound of the intellectual architects of the wars—the “Best and the Brightest” advisers Lyndon Johnson inherited from John F. Kennedy and the neo-conservatives who assured George W. Bush that Iraq would be a “cakewalk”—jumping ship and leaving a Texan president alone at the helm of his sinking warship is almost identical: Plop! Flop!
The president faced several queries in Hanoi about the Vietnam and Iraq wars, but the most pertinent one remained unasked. The increasingly Americanized culture and capitalistic economy evident in Hanoi begs the question: How would Vietnam be different or worse today if the United States had never fought its war there, or had departed in 1966, when Republican Sen. George Aiken of Vermont suggested that we should “declare victory and get out”? If the answer is, it seems to be, “Not significantly,” then for what did nearly 60,000 Americans die?
Unfortunately, there are also important aspects of the current war that do not rhyme historically with Vietnam. Foremost among them is that leaving the hornet’s nest that Bush foolishly poked in Iraq will have much worse consequences than did the very belated departure from the situation created by a similar imprudent action by Johnson. In both cases, the United States was in fact fighting against one of its stated objectives: to prevent the spread of a dangerous enemy. Both Ho Chi Minh and Saddam Hussein were brutal dictators, but each was the best means of maintaining a unified nation to check the expansion of a more dangerous neighbor: China and Iran. Leaving Vietnam meant that Ho would unify the country, but the early American success in the conventional war in Iraq removed Saddam and now what will be left behind is a dismembered non-nation that assures Iranian domination of the region.
But will the result be any different if we stay longer? If not, clearly we must leave quickly, before more of our troops are killed and maimed unnecessarily.
What must be understood is that this disastrous outcome is the result of the terrible mistake of entering an unnecessary and counterproductive war, not of leaving it when it has become clear that it cannot be won.
As of mid-March, the United States will have been fighting in Iraq’s civil war longer than our ancestors fought in our own Civil War. But we would have to stay there for five more years to be in Iraq’s civil war as long as we were in Vietnam’s. That unhappy milestone would not be reached until December 2011. The eleventh year of this century will be long after the eleventh hour of Mr. Bush’s War, which is striking midnight right now.
First there was the annual day of remembrance, Veterans’ Day, commemorating the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, when World War I ended. A week later, President Bush was concluding his first visit to Vietnam, inevitably bringing to the fore questions about parallels between the American war there and the war in Iraq.
A week ago Sunday, it was the huge war that occurred between those two conflicts that was remembered as the length of the current war surpassed the time that the United States was involved in World War II. That same weekend, any argument that Iraq has not descended into full civil war lost whatever shred of credibility it still had.
“History,” Mark Twain famously said, “doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
President Bush and his party attempted during the recent campaign to persuade the American people that his war rhymes with World War II, but the actual echoes from that conflict ended three-and-a-half years ago when Bush stood in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Aside from the length of the wars, the only striking rhyme of the current war with that which ended six decades ago is that we have adopted some of the standards we had condemned in our enemies. In World War II we were rightly horrified when the Nazis targeted civilian populations. Our response went by such names as Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Iraq War rhymes of letting our wicked enemies set the standards are Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, “no habeas corpus,” and water-boarding.
The historical rhymes between Vietnam and Iraq are more numerous. “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” “Ties to al Qaeda,” and “mushroom cloud” don’t rhyme acoustically with “Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” but they all rhyme historically. Lie, obviously, rhymes with itself.
Likewise, quagmire, disaster, foolhardy, senseless, and a host of other words apply equally to both wars.
McNamara does not sound much like Rumsfeld, but the historical rhyme between these arrogant and misguided Defense secretaries is plain to the eye, if not the ear.
The sound of the intellectual architects of the wars—the “Best and the Brightest” advisers Lyndon Johnson inherited from John F. Kennedy and the neo-conservatives who assured George W. Bush that Iraq would be a “cakewalk”—jumping ship and leaving a Texan president alone at the helm of his sinking warship is almost identical: Plop! Flop!
The president faced several queries in Hanoi about the Vietnam and Iraq wars, but the most pertinent one remained unasked. The increasingly Americanized culture and capitalistic economy evident in Hanoi begs the question: How would Vietnam be different or worse today if the United States had never fought its war there, or had departed in 1966, when Republican Sen. George Aiken of Vermont suggested that we should “declare victory and get out”? If the answer is, it seems to be, “Not significantly,” then for what did nearly 60,000 Americans die?
Unfortunately, there are also important aspects of the current war that do not rhyme historically with Vietnam. Foremost among them is that leaving the hornet’s nest that Bush foolishly poked in Iraq will have much worse consequences than did the very belated departure from the situation created by a similar imprudent action by Johnson. In both cases, the United States was in fact fighting against one of its stated objectives: to prevent the spread of a dangerous enemy. Both Ho Chi Minh and Saddam Hussein were brutal dictators, but each was the best means of maintaining a unified nation to check the expansion of a more dangerous neighbor: China and Iran. Leaving Vietnam meant that Ho would unify the country, but the early American success in the conventional war in Iraq removed Saddam and now what will be left behind is a dismembered non-nation that assures Iranian domination of the region.
But will the result be any different if we stay longer? If not, clearly we must leave quickly, before more of our troops are killed and maimed unnecessarily.
What must be understood is that this disastrous outcome is the result of the terrible mistake of entering an unnecessary and counterproductive war, not of leaving it when it has become clear that it cannot be won.
As of mid-March, the United States will have been fighting in Iraq’s civil war longer than our ancestors fought in our own Civil War. But we would have to stay there for five more years to be in Iraq’s civil war as long as we were in Vietnam’s. That unhappy milestone would not be reached until December 2011. The eleventh year of this century will be long after the eleventh hour of Mr. Bush’s War, which is striking midnight right now.