George Bush vs. Vietnam

The ordinary person learns from experience. The wise person learns from the experience of others. But the fool never learns. I’ll leave it to the reader to guess which group George W. Bush belongs to. It is clear, however, that Bush exhibits about as much sagacity in military matters as Inspector Clouseau demonstrates in law enforcement. The draft-dodging Bush, never served in Vietnam, but he has no compunction about Swift Boating veterans like John Kerry and Max Cleland, casting them as weak-willed surrender monkeys.

John Kerry, of course, served and was wounded in a war he opposed. George Bush, on the other hand, was gung-ho about a war he took pains to avoid serving in. Which contradiction is more ironic? Kerry’s experience taught him that America’s involvement in Vietnam was misguided from the start, which led him to pose the following question intended to end the war:” How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” It is a tragedy of historic proportions that Bush, the man who failed to serve in Vietnam, and has thus failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, has gone on creates an even more tragic blunder in Iraq.

There are many eerie parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was as phony as Saddam’s phantom WMD, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was as flaky as Donald Rumsfeld. In both cases, it seems, the “reason” we kept fighting was to avoid defeat. America’s leaders during the Vietnam era acknowledged this privately, but Johnson’s determination not to be the first president to lose a war meant that tens of thousands of U.S. troops would die for a cause that was unwinnable.

Bush believes America lost Vietnam because our leaders lost their nerve, not because the war was strategically misguided and misconceived. By failing to understand the lessons of Vietnam – that America’s involvement was predicated on false premises (like the Domino Theory: if Vietnam fell all of South East Asia would become Communist) – Bush has “succeeded” in creating a quagmire potentially even more insidious as Vietnam.

The invasion of Iraq was predicated on similar false premises, most notably the Reverse Domino Theory: once we establish democracy in Iraq it will sprout up all across the Arab world, thus reducing the impetus for terrorism. But so far the invasion has had just the opposite effect; it has discredited democracy and fed the forces that spawn terrorism. Put simply, democracy does not thrive without certain cultural habits, institutions, and a vibrant middle class, none of which exist in Iraq. At best, implanting democracy takes a generation or more, but our botched occupation has set that dim prospect back considerably.

Bush is going to get Swift Boated by History. His “mission accomplished” antics, his intemperate rhetoric (“bring it on”), and his feeble historical revisionism will catch up with him. Bush was AWOL during Vietnam. And Bush will be doing his best evade responsibility for the consequences of Iraq too.

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