I’ve been off dealing with new parental responsibilities. And I’m just now easing back into my TPM life. But a few comments on the president’s new obsession with the Vietnam War (sort of a sign of how bleak things have gotten in Iraq, on so many levels. Think about it: at this point, it’s the president who’s arguing that Iraq is another Vietnam).
The argument about the need to maintain ‘credibility’ when deciding whether to withdraw from an ill-fated engagement is not one that, I think, can be dismissed out of hand. But those who wield this argument ignore another argument that is at least as important. If everyone really is watching, what do our actions tell other countries about how rational our national decision-making is about the use of our own power?
To be more concrete, showing other countries that we’re willing to bleed ourselves dry because we don’t have the common sense to cut our losses doesn’t necessarily serve us well at all. Quite the contrary.
Also, and this is another point that I don’t think gets raised often enough, a great power has the luxury to make various course corrections without its international standing or ‘credibility’ collapsing in upon itself. In fact, those who don’t get this seem to be concealing a profound pessimism about the United States’ collective national strength. The Bush crowd (and of course Kissinger in his long-standing and twisted way) sees America’s position in the world as exquisitely brittle, liable to being destroyed entirely by what happens in Baghdad or what sort of ‘mettle’ we display in Iraq. (A similar mindset about the ‘demonstration effect’ of whacking Saddam is, in a sense, what got us into this mess in the first place. But let’s leave that to another post. )
To use a crass but I think not totally inapt analogy, say Rupert Murdoch invests a lot of money in a big business deal in South America. And it just doesn’t pan out. Which inspires more or less future confidence in Murdoch’s reputation as an international media mogul: a willingness to keep pouring money into the failed venture basically forever, or pulling up stakes once it’s clear the deal isn’t working and moving on to more profitable ventures? Again, a crass analogy given the cost in lives and treasure we’re talking about in Iraq. But I think the analogy and its implications are solid. Denial and moral and intellectual cowardice do nothing for ones ‘credibility’.
So, now back to Vietnam — both the metaphor and the country.
Isn’t this trip a really odd venue for the president to be arguing that staying the course basically forever is the only acceptable solution? Though it took a tragically long time, the US, for all the moonwalking, eventually decided to pull up stakes in Vietnam. And what was the result? One might make arguments that the Soviets and Soviet proxies were temporarily emboldened in Africa or Latin America, though I think that’s debatable. But what of the real effects? The Soviet Union was dismantling itself within little more than a decade of our pull-out. And now we have a Vietnam that is politically repressive at home but proto-capitalist in its economy and, by any measure, incredibly eager for good relations with the United States.
If geo-political standing and international repercussions are really the issue we’re discussing, it seems very hard to argue that our decision to pull out of Vietnam had any lasting or meaningful ill-effects. And there’s at least a decent argument to the contrary.
And yet here we have President Bush, stepping on to Vietnamese soil to further our rapprochement with Vietnam, and arguing, in so many words, that the lesson of Vietnam is that we should still be there blowing the place up thirty years later.
We’re really deep into the primitive brainstem phase of our long national nightmare of presidential denial and mendacity on Iraq. Poetically, politically and intellectually it’s appropriate that Henry Kissinger is now along for the ride.
