Losing Vietnam

Robert Tracinski, the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIA Daily, has a thought-provoking piece up over at Real Clear Politics. He argues, pretty convincingly, that the left is rapidly losing control of the Vietnam war. As odd as that sounds, it appears that their control over the narrative of Vietnam is slipping away from them. That is the real danger in President Bush suddenly seizing on the Vietnam war analogy last week. The left has been deftly flanked.

In a speech last week, President Bush surprised everyone by citing Vietnam as an analogy to Iraq. Just as we paid a "price in American credibility" for our abandonment of Vietnam, he argued, so we will suffer an even worse blow to the credibility of American threats and American friendship if we retreat from Iraq.

The New York Times, borrowing "military parlance," described this as Bush's attempt at "preparing the battlefield–in this case for the series of reports and hearings scheduled on Capitol Hill next month." The military terminology is appropriate, since this war will not be won or lost only on the battlefield in Iraq; it will be won or lost in the political battles that will be fought in Washington, DC. And Bush's invocation of Vietnam may turn out to be a brilliant rhetorical flanking maneuver. In one stroke, he has unexpectedly turned the political battle over withdrawal from Iraq into the last battle of the Vietnam War. The effect on the right has been electrifying. One conservative newspaper, the New York Sun, has even taken the step–inconceivable a year ago–of dedicating a page of its website to parallels between Iraq and Vietnam.

This certainly has caught the left by surprise, since the history of the Vietnam War is territory they thought they owned and controlled, which is why they have attempted to fit every conflict since 1975 into the Vietnam template. An editorial cartoon published early during the invasion of Iraq aptly depicted the Washington press corps as unruly children in the backseat of the family car, pestering the driver with the question, "Is it Vietnam yet? Is it Vietnam yet?" They assumed that if Iraq was Vietnam–if it fit into their Vietnam story line about dishonest leaders starting a war of imperialist aggression that was doomed by incompetent leadership and tainted by American "war crimes"–then it was guaranteed to be a humiliating defeat for their political adversaries.

Yet while the left complacently trotted out its same old Vietnam story line, a few historians have been busy revising and correcting the conventional history of the war. The leading work of this school is Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965, by Mark Moyar. What makes Moyar's argument interesting is that he had access to facts that the conventional history of Vietnam, written in the 1970s and 1980s, could not have taken into account: the archives in Hanoi and Moscow, which reveal what our enemies regarded as our victories, our weaknesses, and our worst mistakes.

The speech by Bush put the left in a bizarre position. After trying to pain Iraq as another Vietnam since before the invasion of Iraq even started, the left had to start arguing that Iraq was not like Vietnam. John Kerry, Mr. "Jenjis" Kahn himself, even denied the genocide in Cambodia. (That actually occurred before Bush's speech - but made the left look very bad indeed.) Tracinski points out that the corrections now coming out about the real story in Vietnam are undermining the entire narrative the left has foisted on the world for decades. The left kicked the props out from under South Vietnam and forced the defeat - and that is coming home to roost now.