Bush learns wrong lesson from history

"All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." From George Orwell's novel 1984.

The other day President Bush invoked the Vietnam War to justify his bloody folly in Iraq. It was a troubling exercise in historical revisionism for the purpose of political manipulation. By portraying the disaster that was the Vietnam War as a lost opportunity for American greatness, Bush sounded either desperate or delusional. "Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush said in a speech last week. 

That debate has long been settled. Our leaders got us into the Vietnam War much as they did the Iraq war, through deception and miscalculation. Now Americans have reason to fear the debacle in Iraq will end as badly as the prior one.

"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,'" Bush said.

In fact, the impetus for chaos in Southeast Asia wasn't our military withdrawal but our reckless incursion in the first place. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in the war and 153,000 wounded. A quarter-million South Vietnamese soldiers and 4-million Vietnamese civilians also died. The reality of that conflict ripped the fabric of American society, and it wasn't mended quickly.

Yes, after America withdrew from South Vietnam, what followed was a refugee and humanitarian crisis that included brutal political indoctrination of the defeated by the victors. In Cambodia, the extermination of 2-million people by the Khmer Rouge was a nightmare of staggering proportions.

Where Bush got it wrong, however, was the role this nation played. It was America's gamble in Vietnam that so destabilized Southeast Asia, sparking a chain reaction that we could no longer control.

More thoughtful assessments of the Vietnam era take exception to the president's revisionist history. In fact, one of the critics was involved in making that history. "I don't think what happened in Cambodia after the war has anything to do with Iraq," said Melvin Laird, defense secretary under President Nixon.

David Gergen, who served four presidents including two embroiled in the Vietnam War, was more blunt. "By invoking Vietnam (Bush) raised the question, 'If you learned so much from history, how did you ever get us involved in another quagmire?'"

Already in Iraq more than 3,700 U.S. soldiers and as many as 600,000 Iraqis have died, while 2-million refugees have been driven into exile, mostly in the destabilized Middle East. Americans feel less secure. Our occupation of Iraq has created more terrorists and sparked Khmer Rouge-style acts of horror.

There are valid comparisons to be made between Vietnam and Iraq, and the Bush administration long fought to discredit those. Now the president has embraced one of his own making that clouds history and ignores reality.

[Last modified August 29, 2007, 08:23:03]