“We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”--Robert S. McNamara
The Democratic perspective on Iraq: Bush is an illegitimate president, in the White House even though he lost to Gore by 540,000 votes. 9/11 took America to war against al-Qaeda, and Bush exploited that war to win the 2002 mid-term elections.
Instead of confining war to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Bush in 2003 undertook to bring democracy to Iraq, vastly expanding our combat effort. Bush failed to find the weapons of mass destruction used to justify invading Iraq, and Rumsfeld’s too-few-troops strategy failed to pacify Iraq. Bush nevertheless jerked the patriotism-in-time-of-war chord enough to win re-election in 2004. Now two more years on with no victory in sight, America should be fed up enough with Iraq to defeat Bush’s party in 2006.
To Democrats who remember the ‘60s as a heady time of youthful idealism, getting out of Iraq is ending the Vietnam War all over again. An accidental president from Texas forces us to fight the wrong enemy in the wrong place, lies to us about why we are there, and proclaims success when evidence shows otherwise. A misconceived effort to bomb and kill where people only want peace and a better life comes at the expense of federal programs at home and abroad to reduce poverty while expanding equality. It’s all so familiar.
Wasn’t the big lesson of our lifetime to stay out of wars we have no business fighting? And if we do go where we shouldn’t, get out as fast as possible. The U.S. paid dearly to learn the Vietnam lesson. Given that price, we must now commit totally to making sure America has “no more Vietnams.”
One problem. Iraq isn’t Vietnam.
2 comments:
Democrats’ fixations on Bush and Vietnam to one side, there are some salutary similarities between Iraq and Vietnam. Both involve the American military in a conflict in very different cultural surroundings, in which American technological superiority is not necessarily decisive, it is difficult to distinguish friend from foe, the enemy is a guerrilla force that can blend in with the civilian population, and the result is a continuing toll of American casualties (and civilian casualties among the population we are seeking to help) in a seeming quagmire. The president can certainly make the case that terrorism is a vital threat to the United States and must be stopped, that this will be a lengthy battle, and that it will be costly in terms of the burden that must be borne by those who do the fighting and their families. However, this argument ultimately only holds if the military strategy can succeed and we can prevail. A war that drags on for a seemingly indefinite period with little evidence of progress much less prospect of a successful conclusion will eventually prove unacceptable to the American public. Were that to happen, it would become necessary to find another approach to fighting terrorism, just as Vietnam was succeeded by a different approach to the struggle with Soviet communism in the developing world. In that respect, Iraq could well end up like Vietnam, with similar collateral damage to America’s international standing and our ability to achieve other objectives and a similarly long recovery period to that earlier debacle. This is hardly an outcome to be wished, but surely it is a possibility that the policy makers would be well advised at least to contemplate.
Iraq is a tough slog. For my view on why it's worth the effort, please see:
http://capitalismdemocracypeace.blogspot.com/2006/09/problem-with-extremism.html
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