Eric Alterman, George Zornick: Iraq Isn’t Vietnam, but America Is Still America
[Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His blog, “Altercation,” appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation. His seventh book, Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will be published in March. George Zornick is a New York-based writer.]
... Remember Iraq?
While everyone is obsessing about New Hampshire and Iowa, let’s take a few steps back and take a look at two other locations that, like those two states, have come to signal so much more than geography: Iraq and Vietnam. Comparisons between these two disastrous U.S. military interventions are hardly uncommon. Everyone from George W. Bush, to Harry Reid, Henry Kissinger, and even Osama bin Laden, has made the analogy. With so many people insisting that the metaphors imply conflicting conclusions, one is tempted merely to let the matter drop.
That would be a shame, however, because the analogy has a great deal to teach us about our own country, if not about the nations of Iraq or Vietnam. Thankfully, a group of historians of U.S. foreign policy have attempted to tie together what some of these lessons might be in a recently published collection, Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young. The book reveals many telling similarities between the two occupations, along with several key differences.
Iraq may not be “Farsi for Vietnam,” but one truth emerges in this collection of essays: America is still America, and we make the same mistakes over and over. When we heard the drums of war in 2002-03, the alarm bells were sounding. Alas, most of our media and political establishment could not be bothered to stop and think about them, and our soldiers and the Iraqis are paying the price for that today.
When a democracy decides to launch an offensive war, the public must be convinced in advance. And so it’s appropriate that the collection begins with an overview by Gareth Porter of the process of threat exaggeration, if not invention, in both wars.
In the first weeks of the Kennedy administration, a National Intelligence Estimate was produced that concluded that the fall of Vietnam and Laos to Communists would produce no “falling dominoes”—no states that would subsequently ally with Communist China. The report acknowledged there would be less willingness among Southeast Asian nations to go along with policies of hostility towards China as there was in the past, but as Porter writes, this assessment did not make the case that war hawks in Kennedy’s cabinet needed to make.
Nevertheless, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—fully aware of the NIE’s analysis to the contrary—wrote in a memo to Kennedy that “the fall of South Vietnam to Communism would lead to the fairly rapid extension of Communist Control, or complete accommodation to Communism, in the rest of mainland Southeast Asia and in Indonesia.”
A sensibly skeptical John Kennedy rejected this incorrect analysis, but following his assassination, McNamara and his followers made the false “domino theory” case again to Lyndon Johnson—even though yet another NIE was issued stating that while the fall of Vietnam might force a series of “livable settlements with the Communists” among Southeast Asian nations, no dominoes would fall. However, as John Prados writes in his essay “Wise Guys, Rough Business, and Iraq,” Johnson’s hawkish advisors consistently presented the opposite opinion to Johnson until he eventually acquiesced.
The historical record was certainly clear by March 2003 that in the run-up to Vietnam, hawkish elements inside the government had fabricated a threat contrary to all the intelligence in order to justify a war of choice. Had the media learned the lesson of Vietnam, they may have actually questioned the predictions of mushroom clouds and WMDs much more aggressively. Liberal hawks and politicians who now claim they were simply fooled by Bush would have been a little less susceptible had they, too, engaged in a moment of historical memory....
Read entire article at American Progress
... Remember Iraq?
While everyone is obsessing about New Hampshire and Iowa, let’s take a few steps back and take a look at two other locations that, like those two states, have come to signal so much more than geography: Iraq and Vietnam. Comparisons between these two disastrous U.S. military interventions are hardly uncommon. Everyone from George W. Bush, to Harry Reid, Henry Kissinger, and even Osama bin Laden, has made the analogy. With so many people insisting that the metaphors imply conflicting conclusions, one is tempted merely to let the matter drop.
That would be a shame, however, because the analogy has a great deal to teach us about our own country, if not about the nations of Iraq or Vietnam. Thankfully, a group of historians of U.S. foreign policy have attempted to tie together what some of these lessons might be in a recently published collection, Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young. The book reveals many telling similarities between the two occupations, along with several key differences.
Iraq may not be “Farsi for Vietnam,” but one truth emerges in this collection of essays: America is still America, and we make the same mistakes over and over. When we heard the drums of war in 2002-03, the alarm bells were sounding. Alas, most of our media and political establishment could not be bothered to stop and think about them, and our soldiers and the Iraqis are paying the price for that today.
When a democracy decides to launch an offensive war, the public must be convinced in advance. And so it’s appropriate that the collection begins with an overview by Gareth Porter of the process of threat exaggeration, if not invention, in both wars.
In the first weeks of the Kennedy administration, a National Intelligence Estimate was produced that concluded that the fall of Vietnam and Laos to Communists would produce no “falling dominoes”—no states that would subsequently ally with Communist China. The report acknowledged there would be less willingness among Southeast Asian nations to go along with policies of hostility towards China as there was in the past, but as Porter writes, this assessment did not make the case that war hawks in Kennedy’s cabinet needed to make.
Nevertheless, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara—fully aware of the NIE’s analysis to the contrary—wrote in a memo to Kennedy that “the fall of South Vietnam to Communism would lead to the fairly rapid extension of Communist Control, or complete accommodation to Communism, in the rest of mainland Southeast Asia and in Indonesia.”
A sensibly skeptical John Kennedy rejected this incorrect analysis, but following his assassination, McNamara and his followers made the false “domino theory” case again to Lyndon Johnson—even though yet another NIE was issued stating that while the fall of Vietnam might force a series of “livable settlements with the Communists” among Southeast Asian nations, no dominoes would fall. However, as John Prados writes in his essay “Wise Guys, Rough Business, and Iraq,” Johnson’s hawkish advisors consistently presented the opposite opinion to Johnson until he eventually acquiesced.
The historical record was certainly clear by March 2003 that in the run-up to Vietnam, hawkish elements inside the government had fabricated a threat contrary to all the intelligence in order to justify a war of choice. Had the media learned the lesson of Vietnam, they may have actually questioned the predictions of mushroom clouds and WMDs much more aggressively. Liberal hawks and politicians who now claim they were simply fooled by Bush would have been a little less susceptible had they, too, engaged in a moment of historical memory....