Bush makes the Vietnam War "stab-in-the-back" into his official state ideology

I've written a lot about the "stab-in-the-back" excuse for the loss of the Vietnam War, which has long since been embraced by the Republicans' "culture war" ideology. And we've been hearing a barely-altered ideological version of it already being used to blame the Democrats for the loss of the Iraq War.

In reality, the Republicans have fought this war just the way blowhard-white-guy Republicans have been saying wars should be fought. We blasted into Iraq and didn't worry about any limited goals. We destroyed the Iraqi government and dissolved the Iraqi army. We took over the place and decided ourselves what to do with it. We didn't worry overly much about the United Nations and certainly not about international law, or even the American laws banning torture.

Despite attempts, Congress has so far put no restraints on how Bush and his Party conduct the war. (There was an essentially symbolic bill banning acts of torture that were already illegal anyway.) And, according to both our Dear Leader Bush and and to his generals, our generals have gotten exactly what they have requested and have been allowed to conduct the war exactly the way they wanted.

The result is a disaster. The biggest strategic disaster in the history of the United States, as a matter of fact.

So the Republicans say it's all the Democrats' fault.

As part of this positioning, Bush himself rolled out his own version of the Vietnam War stab-in-the-back mythology to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Tuesday, citing as an authority Osama bin Laden, among others. From the White House Web site, with "Applause" notations omitted, President Bush Attends Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention, Discusses War on Terror 08/22/07:

Finally, there's Vietnam. This is a complex and painful subject for many Americans. The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I'm going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.

The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, "The Quiet American." It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism - and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people. [I wonder who he's talking about here; such a statement from a Vietnam War critic would be hard to find. - Bruce]

In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?" A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: "Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life."

The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.

Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There's no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. Whatever your position is on that debate, 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."

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle - those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that "the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today."

His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda's chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents."

Zawahiri later returned to this theme, declaring that the Americans "know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet." Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility - but the terrorists see it differently.

We must remember the words of the enemy. We must listen to what they say. Bin Laden has declared that "the war [in Iraq] is for you or us to win. If we win it, it means your disgrace and defeat forever." Iraq is one of several fronts in the war on terror - but it's the central front - it's the central front for the enemy that attacked us and wants to attack us again. And it's the central front for the United States and to withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating.

If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities. Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home. And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America.

Yes, there were consequences of the civil war in Vietnam after the United States withdrew and Saigon fell.

There were also strategic benefits for the United States from withdrawing. We stopped pouring lives and money into a war that was not vital to our national interests and that offered no reasonable prospect for "victory" at any acceptable price.

One of the main justifications for the war was that a North Vietnamese victory would mean an expansion of Chinese power. In fact, unified Vietnam resumed their country's traditional distant relationship with China and actually fought a serious border skirmish with the Chinese.

The testosterone argument over whether losing in Vietnam "emboldened" our enemies is pretty questionable. The fact that Osama bin Laden, hiding in his proverbial cave in the badlands of Pakistan or wherever, taunts the United States over the Vietnam War is no surprise. Nor does it tell us much of anything. This citing of Bin Laden's propaganda claims to justify your own position of the moment - Democrats do it too - is a bit weird. More importantly, it's becoming a ritual symbol with little actual content other than the emotional, just like Second World War symbolism has been used ever since 1945. Bush doesn't fail to cite some in his VFW speech, either.

Yes, the jihadis will taunt Bush's manhood when US troops eventually leave. Maybe Bush can reassure himself by dressing up in his "Mission Accomplished" flight suit and manly codpiece and admire himself in costume in the mirror.

The truth is, whatever "emboldening" of actual or potential enemies the Iraq War has produced has pretty much already occurred. The United States invaded a country that was no threat to us. And we've been now tied down there militarily for longer than we were involved in the Second World War that Bush was still citing today. With no end in sight. And the effectiveness of the Iraqi enemy's irregular warfare has been demonstrated many times over.

Will we really look tougher if we continue to pursue the illusion of total victory and unconditional surrender for the next 5, 10, 15 years? Is Bush willing to spend the remaining months of his failed Presidency rallying his Party and the nation to accept a military draft and the decade-or-longer continuing combat commitment that would be required for any hope of such an outcome to exist?

Democrats shouldn't let themselves be bullied by this kind of talk. No matter what happens, the Reps are already blaming the Democrats for the loss of the Iraq War. If there is another major terrorist attack in the United States, the Republicans will blame the Democrats, no matter what. And however the US eventually leaves Iraq under whatever President, the Republicans will blame the new foreign policy challenges on Weakness and lack of Will - by the Democrats.

Not that the Democrats should accept such accusations. On the contrary. But they also shouldn't be under any illusion that they can avoid them by buckling under to Bush's failed Iraq War policies.

And when it comes to reality-based analysis of the Iraq War itself, we should all remember that talking about the potential aftermath of withdrawal - which the war critics are aware of and often discuss (e.g., George McGovern and William Polk in Out of Iraq [2006]) - without talking at the same time of the ongoing costs and risks of continuing American participation in the war is to create a phony picture. Which, as usual, Bush was trying to do in his Tuesday VFW speech.

Tags: bush, iraq war