Failure To Communicate
Charles Peters, writing at Newsweek, decries the apparent inability of his fellow liberals to even acknowledge that there is progress in Iraq. It is an interesting take on things. I don't necessarily agree with everything he writes but he does point out a couple of things that it would be a good idea to keep in mind.
Conservative and liberal rigidity joined to create a tragic end to the war in Vietnam. Liberals became so antiwar that they could not admit that every South Vietnamese was not a closet Viet Cong; in fact, a significant number of them did not want to live under the communist North. The Nixon administration could not admit that South Vietnamese leaders were too inept to prevail. This meant that neither the administration nor its liberal critics planned for our exit. In our chaotic departure, we abandoned hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who could only escape across the South China Sea in boats so rickety that many did not survive. Many of those who could not flee languished for years in North Vietnamese prisons and "reeducation camps."
This sad story should inspire us to face similar facts in Iraq. General Petraeus has proved that many Iraqis will respond to the kind of empathetic approach with which he has replaced the previous strategy of banging down doors and shooting first. At the same time, we have seen Iraq's politicians remain unwilling to get their act together. I agree with other war critics who believe these politicians will be motivated to reconcile their differences only when they know we are going to leave on a date certain and they will no longer be able to dither endlessly under our protection in the Green Zone.
There is quite a lot more, but his essential point is that what happened in Vietnam must not be allowed to happen again. In that he is absolutely correct. I don't think trying to force compliance to a set of artificial benchmarks is the solution, however. As the situation in Iraq stabilizes and the violence level drops, a lot of the political issues will be able to be worked out. But trying to make the political issues into hard milestones is confusing means with ends.
By Mwalimu Daudi, Monday, 26 November , 2007 @ 7:08 pm
I don’t know, Gaius - Charles Peters seems to be trying to help the anti-war Left negotiate its way out of the quagmire it finds itself in. I also think that some of Peters statements (such as, “Conservative and liberal rigidity joined to create a tragic end to the war in Vietnam.”) are attempts to rewrite history and ignore what really happened - a Congress, driven to hysteria by anti-war fanatics, abandoned an ally and helped to bring about genocide in Southeast Asia. And our exit was not “unplanned” - the chaos was the deliberate result of the zany policies pushed by the anti-Vietnam War movement. Instead of trying to “democratize guilt” (by falsely implying that everyone was somehow equally guilty in the catastrophe), Peters would have done better instead to relate a more accurate account of what actually happened. But perhaps that was expecting too much from Newsweek.
Peters also went off on unrelated tangents about taxes and abortion (among other things). Exactly what relationship these issues had with the Iraq War was not made clear, although I did get the distinct impression that by bringing these up Peters was trying to filibuster. At any rate, it detracted from his already weak arguments.
By Gaius, Monday, 26 November , 2007 @ 7:27 pm
Yeah, like I said, I did not agree with a lot of his stuff. But the point that the Iraqis must not be abandoned to the same fate as the Vietnamese is the one part he got right.
By chuck, Monday, 26 November , 2007 @ 7:28 pm
I agree with Mwalimu, the faux history pretty much made the article a throw away from the start. Not that I expect anything better from Newsweek.
By martian, Tuesday, 27 November , 2007 @ 8:44 am
For most adult (read baby Boomer) liberal Democrats Viet Nam was the defining factor in their lives. They are unable to get past Viet Nam because it is what gave their lives meaning and focus (since they disdain other things that do so like patriotism). This is why you started to hear them referring to Iraq as the new Viet Nam within weeks of the original invasion. They NEED Iraq to be another Viet Nam. They need it to be a “quagmire”. They need the elected Iraqi government to be a bunch of evil incompetents they can rail against. They need the USA to be fighting a long, micro-managed (by Congress) war of attrition that causes massive American casualties. They need all of this to bring the meaning back into their lives - the meaning that has been missing since they succeeded in forcing the US to accept defeat and abandon an ally in Viet Nam.
For them what happened in Viet Nam must be FORCED to happen again - it’s the only thing that vindicates their world view. This is why they absolutely CANNOT accept that the troop surge might be working, that Iraq may be getting safer and more secure for her civilian population, that the Iraqi government might actually stabilize and work for the Iraqi people, that the US might actually WIN in Iraq. This would invalidate everything they believe about the US, our military forces, and our position in the world.