How the Bush gang settled on the Vietnam analogy
For the last several days, those who take reality seriously have been mystified by the president’s incoherent comparison between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam. Bush, who was not exactly well grounded before this week, has managed to humiliate himself to a jaw-dropping degree.
But I’ve been curious ever since the president made the bewildering remarks how, exactly, the Bush gang ended up embracing this ridiculous comparison. After all, for several years now, any time a White House critic would note the similarities between the two quagmires, the president and his team would aggressively push back, insisting the two had nothing whatsoever in common.
So, what happened? The LAT offered a peek behind the curtain.
Aides said the president felt it was necessary to revamp his message in the weeks before Army Gen. David H. Petraeus delivers a progress report that Congress mandated.
White House counselor Ed Gillespie and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove worked with the president on the speech. There was a sense in the White House that the president’s rhetoric on Iraq, though consistent, was also becoming somewhat repetitive. […]
What’s different, [a former official who left the White House recently] said, is that the president is taking a perceived weakness — historical comparisons to Vietnam — and turning it into a strength.
“Vietnam has been wrung around the administration’s neck on Iraq for a long time,” he said. “There are many analogies or comparisons or connections that could cut against the administration’s position, but this is a connection that supports the administration’s position. . . . They want to say, the last time you took a drastic option like abandoning our allies it didn’t work well. Let’s take a more measured one. They’re setting that up.”
This really doesn’t make any sense. I say that a lot when it comes to the White House’s thinking on, well, pretty much everything, but this is practically pathological. The Bush strategy effectively boiled down to: war critics have said Iraq and Vietnam are similar, so our strategy will be to say they are similar, but in a good way.
The New York Daily News added:
A Republican source said White House strategists, believing anti-war Democrats will liken Iraq to the Vietnam War “quagmire,” launched a preemptive strike “to inoculate Bush.”
Got that? The White House is effectively telling the reality-based community, “You can’t talk about Vietnam anymore; we’ve claimed it as our own.”
I can appreciate the strategy of trying to turn a negative into a positive. I can even appreciate the notion of inoculating the president against an expected criticism. But the key part of both strategies is using an argument that isn’t moronic. That’s where this strategy comes up short.
Washington’s failure to face these unpleasant realities opens the door to strange and dangerous fantasies, like Mr. Bush’s surreal take on the Vietnam war.
The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.
The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.
If Mr. Bush, whose decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre, took the time to study the real lessons of Vietnam, he would not be so eager to lead America still deeper into the 21st century quagmire he has created in Iraq. Following his path will not rectify the mistakes of Vietnam, it will simply repeat them.
And just when I thought this White House could no longer scare me.
…the president’s rhetoric on Iraq, though consistent, was also becoming somewhat repetitive.
Not to mention, superfluous and redundant.
What else that is repetitive is the U.S. Military Occupation of Iraq. It’s just a continuation of the undeclared war in Vietnam through other means. It’s no coincidence that some of the same imperialists are right there on the sidelines cheerleading, especially our Acting President.
Yes, the moment of true defiance has come to bare for this administration and its strategists. Mr. Bush is defying a tragic history caused by policy blunders. He is defying our collective sense of recent national history, and he is defying the dynamic he has set up in Iraq by creating a modern day Vietnam for all the same reasons the Neo-Liberals did in 1960 in southeast Asia.
Dante had a place for such defiance, and I think Bush, Rove, Rummy and The Dick are headed there as I type. -Kevo
The Bush “Vietnam” ploy is not as insane as it seems. Withdrawal from Vietnam was a defeat and national humiliation. Many in this country, Republicans for the most part, have never gotten over it. Bush is bypassing all the sane arguments for leaving Iraq by holding up the bogeyman of the Vietnam humiliation. (The gratuitous crap about innocent civilians killed after our Vietnam withdrawal is just a device to pretend Bush cares.) We won’t be humiliated until we leave, so let’s just stay indefinitely and cross our fingers for a miracle.
Fact is, we are not at war in Iraq. We’re “at occupation.” And we’re losing the occupation. We’re already being humiliated, but it will be worse. At some point we’re going to have to swallow the fact that Bush started the thing, prolonged it — and America let him do it.
Interesting point, Alibubba.
I think another interesting thing here is the mention of Rove and his trademark tactic of taking an apparent weakness and trying to hammer the other side with it. I think the tactic depends mostly on having enough people to carry your message (e.g. in the media and the right wing noise machine, although he’s not above just spreading rumors), and that may be a problem for them here.
Look at it from Cheney’s perspective: Pushing this “Iraq equals Vietnam” insanity leads to: “And oh yeah, this means that Iran equals Cambodia”.
Think of all the fun they’re going to have with all the “lessons” us rubes should have learned from Dear Leader’s VFW speech — if only we’d really invaded Cambodia and Laos instead of just that anemic “incursion” in 1970 and really taken the VC, NVA and Khmer Rouge out, Vietnam would be Free today.
Well our steely – eyed leaders won’t be making that mistake again. Next stop, Iran.
The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. [Blah,Blah,Blah…]”
The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq (and everything else) is WE SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE!
I remember the Vietnam quagmire very well. I even remember spending a year there. Bush infuriated me the other day with his stupid assertions that the “lessons of Vietnam” tell us that we have to stay in Iraq.
The REAL lessons of Vietnam are these:
When the President of the United States lies to Congress and to the American people in order to get authorization to send troops overseas,
for an adventure in support of a regime that is not supported by its own citizens,
because it is essentially only one player in a larger civil war,
then that adventure soon becomes clearly and obviously unwinnable.
But since politicians hate to admit mistakes, they refuse to accept reality. They believe their own lies. They talk about “progress,” “light at the end of the tunnel,” and “Friedman Units,”
sending additional Americans into the conflict to die… for nothing.
Finally, only hard-core supporters of the war, the 29%, the dead-enders, still believe the lies. Finally, the lies, and the war, become unsustainable.
When American troops are eventually withdrawn, some of the dire consequences predicted by the war’s supporters eventually come to pass,
not that further American involvement could have prevented them anyway.
And the war’s architects never admit to themselves that those dire consequences were preordained from the moment that they first lied to in order to begin America’s misadventure.
Long afterwards, most of the liars continue to lie, claiming that America’s “defeat” was because of the weakness and cowardice of those who were the first to see through their lies.
And so it goes, for two generations, until another another collection of fools repeats the history from which they failed to learn.
And brave soldiers die again. For nothing.
Those are the lessons of Vietnam, Mr. Bush. Mr. Cheney. Mr. Rumsfeld. You should have listened to Colin Powell. He was there. None of you were.
I can’t believe I can still be discouraged by Dubya but it bothers me that Bush is now at the tail end of the mighy Right Wing Wurlitzer. The wingnut blogs have been making the Viet Nam comparison for almost a year now. It is sad that the WH’s best thinking is no better than some wingnut at Redstate.
Alibubba (#3) pretty much nails it. Lies got us into Iraq and significantly upped our participation in Vietnam. A kind of lie, silence-with-coverup, extended our Vietnam involvement to Laos and Cambodia. But the analogy pretty much ends there.
In the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles chose the South. Iraq was, and is, a multi-faceted religious-tribal conflict in an artificial British-created entity, fatally weakened by our previous invasion. We were deceived into trying to occupy this “pushover”– which has turned out to be a quagmire — for the not-so-hidden purpose of expanding our petro-empire and/or to prop up the usurped and utterly failed presidency of George W. Bush, aka the Shrub.
The fact that there is no comparison will no doubt be lost on the American people and their “watchdogs of the press” since stating “no comparison” doesn’t make good TeeVee.
No criticism of John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, or Jim Webb’s many analogies between Iraq and Vietnam?
This is a classic marketing/PR ploy. The problem is, it’ll work on some people. The folks they’re trying to sway are the Republicans who are on the ship’s railing, ready to jump. The Iraq = Vietnam argument is not intended for you or me. We see right though it, as we always have.
What needs to be happening is more noisy rebuttal from the Democrats. And not the smart “let’s take a closer look at the historical significance of each” kind, or the ironic “look at how the president’s flip-flopping” kind. Democrats need three simple punch points that expose how incredibly stupid the president’s analogy is. 1..2..3! Wrong! Wrong! WRONG! And the Democrats need to say these three things over and over again.
Likewise, there’s been a lot of backpedaling on the part of some Democrats regarding the upcoming surge effectiveness report. I suspect it’s some self-inoculation for when the WH/Petreus report looks so swell. Well, this is wrong too. Were the tables turned the Republicans would never back down. I don’t think we should either. When that report comes out I think Obama and Edwards and Clinton should yell “Bullshit!” in unison. Every Democrat should. It’s a play right out of the right’s book. We shouldn’t even listen to the report. We should beat it to death before it sees the light of day. We should mock the Republicans, call them names and make them cry.
Just saying.
“No criticism of John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, or Jim Webb’s many analogies between Iraq and Vietnam?”
no, because their criticisms were valid and correct. Bush’s are not.
As Alibubba says, the Right Wing has never gotten over Vietnam. They have never seen the lesson of Vietnam that the rest of the world has seen — that it was an unwinnable fiasco that we never should have been in. The Right Wing still contend that if only the Liberals in America had let them stay in Vietnam, we would have won. This is the base Bush is playing to. Additionally, I think Bush was sending another message here as follows.
I was struck by one bit of phrasing in Bush’s speech the other day that I haven’t seen anyone comment on. When he talked about all the horrors (boat people, killing fields, etc.) after we left Vietnam, he referred to innocent “citizens” when it seems to me the appropriate word in this context is “civilians”. Has anyone seen a copy of the prepared text of the speech? I suppose it is possible the original had “civilians” and Bush bumbled as he frequently does, but I don’t think so. I think this was a carefully chosen word by the speechwriters (Rove and crowd). “Civilians” is the correct word in this context, referring to non-military peolple. “Citizen” however, has a different meaning; it refers to a person who belongs to a specific national entity or state. The people Bush was referring to were not citizens of one country (Vietnam), but several different countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.). Why, then use the term “citizen”? I suspect it is because the base Bush was mainly addressing here (all those Fox News viewers), when they here the word “citizen” it is automatically translated in their heads to “U. S. citizen”. In other words, this was just another one of Bush’s scare-mongering tactics. Bush and company figure there are a lot of people out there who hear his statement in their heads as “If we leave Iraq you are going to become boat people or be sent to the killing fields.”
And just when I thought this White House could no longer scare me.
I’d say when they start bombing neighboring countries, that will scare you more.
The Vietnam analogy continues, and we’re going all the way down the hole.
Again.
Alibubba writes: “Many in this country, Republicans for the most part, have never gotten over it.”
Strange how they could cling to this since the vast majority of them never went. Perhaps they look at from the perspective of sports fans who can’t get over a catastrophic collapse.
Some wanker writes: “No criticism of John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, or Jim Webb’s many analogies between Iraq and Vietnam?”
As for John and Jim, they were there. Where was W?
Wow – just when I thought Orwell couldn’t be more prescient. Here’s the definition of “blackwhite” from the Newspeak dictionary:
“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that white is black, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past…”
Homer
Alibubba (#3): I agree mostly. However, we’re not losing at occupation from a military perspective. We’re not about to be pushed out of the country. If we wanted more control, we could exert it (but at a very high price).
But we’re losing on all other fronts, especially the political front. And we can never “win” until we have regional plan involving neighboring countries. And we’ll never be able to end the religious war between the Sunni, Shia and Kurds. Never.
It is interesting that the Republicans are the ones who seem to be suffering from the pullout from Viet Nam when it was clearly the Democrats (esp. LBJ) who made all the classic Bushian mistakes. But since they held power at the end (and since denial seems to persist) it is understandable.
Melvin Laird’s authorized biography is coming out later on this year (U of WI Press) and my understanding is that it will clarify a lot of what went on during the time of the pullout. Apparently NIxon and Kissinger wanted to stay on “until victory” but eventually had to acknowledge the futility of that stance. A very similar situation to what is going on now but without the guidance of a SecDef who kept bringing reality into the arguments. (Maybe Gates will prevail, however.)
Nixon eventually declared a great victory and pulled out mostly because there was no other choice given all the mistakes made by the previous administration. That others suffered was an inevitable byproduct that would have occurred no matter what.
It will be interesting to compare the accounts of an insider in 1973 with what is going on today.
“And just when I thought this White House could no longer scare me.”
Well keep your eye on Iran… what the White House does there does, and has since going into Iraq, scare me.
I believe the goal of the speech was to change the rhetoric from “winning the war” in Iraq to “to not loosing” the war in Iraq. Most Americans understand that this occupation can’t be won, but probably find it mor difficult to accept that we might loose. This particularly applies to the Repbulican base who, as mentioned above, have never got over Vietnam. Shrubco never do something for nothing, so they are most assuredly setting us up somehow.
The ‘reality-based community’ does not control the great right-wing propaganda machine. Americans don’t know history, and even those us alive at the time have selective memories. Vietnam tore this country apart for a generation, the hardliners to this day insist we could have ‘won’ had we ‘stayed the course.’ Playing that card will work in many precincts I predict. The country is basically too dumbed down to know better.
Doesn’t matter that we are an occupying army in Iraq, under attack by essentially all the factions vying for power, and not at war with an organized enemy. Such nuances are lost on the average American who, like Bush, doesn’t know an insurgent from a Sunni or a Shia, or a ‘terrorist.’ They are all the same, the enemy, even though we created them by ‘liberating’ the country from a tyrant.
The worst of it all is that the Dim-Dems are going to buy into it once again in trembling fear of being labeled ‘defeatocrats.’
The reality-based community needs a vacation.
Bush seems to be counting on gathering support behind him by claiming he will win this modern day Viet Nam. Some may fall for that cry to action.
But the Dems need to make sure that America understands that it was George W. Bush himself that pulled a Viet Nam from the jaws of victory. Bush made Iraq the quagmire it is by insisting to “Stay the Course” until it became just like Viet Nam. The pathological underestimation, hubris and stubborness in the face of reason of Bush and his allies made this disaster. It would be foolish to believe he has somehow found the common sense to guide us out of it. Bush already has ignored one of the greatest lessons of Indochina: when you find yourself in a Viet Nam, quit escalating.
Okie at #7:
Well said.
Thank you.
And just when I thought this White House could no longer scare me.
You think the Viet Nam-Iraq shill was bad? Wait till the first JDAM detonates on its Iranian target.
Wow, when I first heard about this speech, this is the exact reason I thought they did it: To steal Vietnam for themselves and turn the tables on the argument. But then I thought what an entirely dumb plan that was, so much so that I thought my guess was wrong and didn’t say anything about it. I guess I should have gone with my first instinct. These people truly are delusional morons.
If Dubya strikes Iraq, the next bomb dropped will probably be Putin “accidently” unloading one over the White House…they’ve been practicing that maneuver in Georgia.
WOW! Before reading this article, I just post this in WaPo:
This is a very curious statement for Chimpy McFlightsuit to make, one he would not make without A LOT of forethought (by his handlers). Why would he make this statement NOW, just before the NIE report that reveals thier failure, and just before the Iraq report, which is very likely to indicate significant failure?
I think what’s going on, is that the Iraq occupation has become so patently WRONG in the minds of Americans, that even the division Vietnam wrought on the public look pretty good by comparison. Basically, there were more mixed emotions about Vietnam than there are about Iraq, and the Neocons would rather frame the debate in that context.
They would rather take the offensive in a rhetorical debate about Vietnam than play defense on thier own self-made disaster.
I’m sorry, it’s not just thier disaster- It also belongs to the 48% of people who got scared and went along with it. Now OWN IT! WE FREAKIN’ TOLD YOU SO!
***9/11 changed NOTHING! IMPEACH NOW!!!***
I have a guess why Bush would embrace Vietnam now. He is of and for the right wing, they are his bretheren. I don’t think he cares much anymore about the rest of the American public because he’s clearly lost them. If he can appeal to the right’s belief that we lost Vietnam because liberals wouldn’t let us stay the course, then apply that “lesson” to Iraq, he might just yet earn a place of honor at the right’s table. If only they’d have had the back bone to see the thing through then we’d have prevailed he could bemoan. He’d be off the hook for starting the whole disaster because he could argue they wouldn’t let him finish when victory was just around the corner. You couldn’t with absolute confidence prove him wrong (only just about absolute confidence) so he’d always have that fig leaf to hide behind. It’s fantasy of course, but the right still largely buys this nonsense about Vietnam, why not go to the well again and give it a try on Iraq? Maybe the right will swallow that too. And, like I said up top, I think the right’s opinion of him is all that matters to this president now.