November 26, 2006
Iraq and Vietnam, Again Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 PM EST David Rieff has a piece in The New York Times Magazine today making one version of the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam: Iraq is like Vietnam in that we have lost a war, but nothing terribly bad is going to happen, because nothing terribly bad happened in Vietnam. Rieff opens very clearly: “As the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate and as policy makers debate how to extricate the United States honorably from what increasingly appears a war without end, it is worth remembering that all wars do end eventually, and that postwar relationships between the bitterest of enemies can turn out surprisingly well.” Did the Indochina wars turn out surprisingly well? The Cambodian genocide is rarely so described, but Mr. Rieff takes a longer view: President Bush just visited Vietnam, which Rieff concedes is “hardly a paragon of human rights” but points out is open to trade and investment. What did Tom Paine say—something about “strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated”—well, never mind. You do not have to sentimentalize eighteenth-century Americanism to find Rieff’s tones distasteful; I admit to nostalgia for a time, less than a decade ago, when liberals—I had thought Mr. Rieff was such a one—did not sound quite this much like apologists bravely speaking up for Pinochet’s Chile. A more immediate problem with this form of the Vietnam analogy is that Vietnamese Leninists are not obviously the same thing as the Islamists who seem likely to take power in Iraq. In fact, it is not too obvious that victory for any indigenous faction is going to come soon or produce an independent and unified Iraq with a government-enforced monopoly on violence, the way the Communist victory produced that kind of Vietnam. It is now fashionable to say that civil wars have to end, but we ought to remember that they do not have to end completely, or end well. The Russian civil war ended with the victory of the Bolsheviks, which became the victory of Stalin. I do not think the victory of Iraq’s Shiites, which seems a possible outcome, is going to be the equivalent of Stalin’s Soviet Union, but there are shades of bad that, although shy of that marker, are pretty bad indeed. Iraq’s Shiites do not have Leninist discipline; they are themselves factionalized. They may not win, or win any time soon. The Taliban won the Afghan civil war, at least for a while, but did not have the power to control all of their country. In Afghanistan, it was the almost completely victorious faction, not the unsubdued part of the country, that gave shelter to terrorists. In Iraq, if the Shiites control parts of the place and Sunnis other parts, it seems possible that different varieties of terrorists will be sheltered in different places: Al Qaeda in Sunnistan, Hezbollah-types in Shiastan, maybe bits of the PKK in hard-to-get-at bits of Kurdistan. But some people make David Rieff look like a paragon of intellectual honesty. Chuck Hagel, his eye on the Republican presidential nomination, has an op-ed in the Washington Post opining that “there will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis—not the Americans.” That last sentence sounds plausible, but the first one sounds startlingly dishonest. If Americans are driven from Iraq, and a swirling, murderous chaos takes deeper root there, or a vicious tyranny reimposes the sort of order Saddam maintained, will America not have suffered some kind of defeat? Will it not be seen to have suffered a defeat? Rieff, who insists we have already been irreversibly defeated, may minimize the probable consequences, but that is surely less contemptibly dishonest than Hagel’s insistence that no defeat is possible. Hagel goes on to insist “that regional powers will fill regional vacuums, and they will move to work in their own self-interest—without the United States. This is the most encouraging set of actions for the Middle East in years.” Is that code for Iraq becoming a sphere of Iranian influence? No, reading more closely, I think Hagel means a joint Iranian-Syrian sphere of influence. It seems staggering—either staggeringly dishonest, staggeringly stupid, or staggeringly pessimistic—to call that “the most encouraging set of actions for the Middle East in years.” Hagel may be right to think that any American military presence in Iraq is making a bad situation worse. But it cannot be right to utter Panglossian absurdities in the face of genuinely tragic events. My earnest hope is that Hagel is underestimating the electorate. If someone in your family died in Iraq, or suffered crippling wounds there, I think you are going to be very unlikely to call either protracted anarchy (a possibility Hagel tacitly acknowledges) or Iranian hegemony an outcome that justifies that sacrifice. And my guess is that even if you didn’t lose a son or daughter, those outcomes are going to look like an American defeat. Thinking it over, Hagel’s op-ed seems to me as great a piece of mendacity on the subject of war as has ever been uttered by an American politician. Reagan didn’t call the evacuation of American troops from Beirut an American victory. He did call the occupation of Grenada “our finest hour,” which may have puzzled any surviving Spitfire pilots who survived the summer of 1940, but that is merely pardonable exaggeration by the new Hagelian standard.
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