Bush's bad historical analogies

Thom Shanker of the New York Times commits an act of real journalism by bothering to ask some questions about the historical analogies Bush is using to defend indefinitely American combat in the Iraq War: Historians Question Bush’s Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq 08/23/07.

He doesn't address the the Vietnam War stab-in-the-back claim. But he does look at some of the related claims:

American air power was used to help sustain South Vietnam’s struggling government, but by the time of the famous photograph of Americans being lifted off a roof in Saigon in 1975, few American combat forces were left in Vietnam. "It was not a precipitous withdrawal, it was a very deliberate disengagement," said Andrew J. Bacevich, a platoon leader in Vietnam who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University.

Vietnam today is a unified and stable nation whose Communist government poses little threat to its neighbors and is developing healthy ties with the United States. Mr. Bush visited Vietnam last November; a return visit to the White House this summer by Nguyen Minh Triet was the first visit by a Vietnamese head of state since the war.

"The Vietnam comparison should invite us to think harder about how to minimize the consequences of our military failure," Mr. Bacevich added. "If one is really concerned about the Iraqi people, and the fate that may be awaiting them as this war winds down, then we ought to get serious about opening our doors, and to welcoming to the United States those Iraqis who have supported us and have put themselves and their families in danger." (my emphasis)

The article also discusses briefly Bush's Second World War analogy:

The comparison of Iraq to Germany and Japan “is fanciful,” said Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He noted that the American and allied militaries had eliminated the governments of Japan and Germany, and any lingering opposition, and assembled occupation forces that were, proportionally, more than three times as large as the current American presence of more than 160,000 troops in Iraq.

“That’s the kind of troop level you need to control the situation,” Mr. Simon said. "The occupation of Germany and Japan lasted for years — and not a single American solider was killed by insurgents." (my emphasis)

At one point in the polemics around the Iraq occupation, war fans were scaping to find instances of guerrilla resistance in Germany or Japan. So far as I've seen, Simon is correct: there were no American deaths from any resistance fighters, if any could be said to exist. (Secret networks to smuggle war criminals out of Germany are another matter.)

Tags: bush, iraq war, vietnam war