Analogies

As someone who's much better-informed about the war in Iraq than I am about the Vietnam War, it's been interesting to chart the shifting valences of the war of analogies. Initially, many war opponents were inclined to analogize Iraq to Vietnam, and conservative hawks were prepared to concede the point about Vietnam (at least ad arguendo) and dedicate their energies to the proposition that "Iraq's not another Vietnam." At some point, however, it switched and the right started making the Vietnam analogies; this time, though, using the revisionist account of Vietnam in which we were winning the war but cowardly liberals pulled the plug. Thus you started to get things like Bill Kristol waxing enthusiastic that "Bush has the good fortune of having finally found his Ulysses S. Grant, or his Creighton Abrams, in Gen. David H. Petraeus."

All of which is by way of introducing an excellent new essay on the subject by Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson in Democracy where they argue that, no, Vietnam wasn't winnable after all and that the impulse to keep hanging on only made the eventual outcome of the war worse than it needed to be. There's also a good brief discussion of Northern Ireland analogies up near the top.

Comments

Hafta logon to read, boo! bugmenot.com stopped working a while back too.

Seriously, I'm curious as to what the N. Ireland analogies are. Perhaps we should "analogize" this with not just N. Ireland but Ireland as a whole. How did stopping the insurgency work in the rest of Ireland?

Posted by freddiemac | December 19, 2007 1:02 PM

The Iraq war never went as well as the Vietnam war. During the Vietnam war americans could walk around the country go to bars, shops whatever. In Iraq a soldier walking alone would immediately be killed.

Posted by cheflovesbeer | December 19, 2007 1:07 PM

On the Nixon tapes - Nixon and Kissinger repeatedly acknowledge the unwinnability of the Vietnam war - Kissinger even acknowledged that fact to Mao and it's in his briefing books

Sure - it was winnable if you bombed the damms in the North or dropped some nukes and were will to risk world war. But then you would have had to kill everyone in the South too because you would have lost what remained of popular support.

Kristol's argument ins clever - You have to love they way he alludes to Craighton Abrams as if that was some sort of consensus view that his readers all know about

Posted by Comment | December 19, 2007 1:08 PM

"As someone who's much better-informed about the war in Iraq than I am about the Vietnam War..."

Dunno if you've ever read Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, Matthew, but if not, you really ought to curl up with at some point. It's a great read, and the parallels it'll show you between Vietnam and Iraq are pretty fascinating.

Posted by Petey | December 19, 2007 1:08 PM

cheflovesbeer:

Yes, indeed!

A historically-minded friend of mine pointed out that Heydrich was assassinated in Occupied Czechoslovakia because he was always riding around everywhere in an open touring car with just a single driver.

When American officials now visit Liberated Iraq they tend to wear helmets and heavy body-armor while inside our fortified Green Zone.

I'm not actually sure whether there's ever in modern times been a foreign army of occupation so overwhelmingly hated and strongly resisted as our own "liberators of Iraq." I'm pretty sure that the Russian "liberators" of Afghanistan didn't face a fraction of this opposition.

Bush and his neocons really are good at setting new world records.

Posted by RKU | December 19, 2007 1:33 PM

I'd abandon that final point about Afghanistan, RKU. The US is but the latest global power wandering around there. Its more of the same, and look where it leads.

Posted by rickhavoc | December 19, 2007 2:02 PM

Who is this someone who's not I?

Posted by bjk | December 19, 2007 2:03 PM

writing tip.

to make your opening sentence work better grammatically, I'd suggest:

As someone who's much better-informed about the war in Iraq than he is about the Vietnam War, it's been interesting for me to chart the shifting valences of the war of analogies.

Posted by Ben | December 19, 2007 5:11 PM

oh, also, drop the hyphen in 'better-informed'.

Posted by B | December 19, 2007 5:13 PM

For the last time, the closest comparison to the US involment in Iraq is almost certainly Napoleon's Spanish Adventure. Only the proximity of Spain to France is in true contrast.

Posted by shah8 | December 19, 2007 8:56 PM

.

Posted by Maybe analogies don't work | December 20, 2007 12:12 AM

If Matt is better informed about Iraq than about Vietnam, he must know absolutely nothing about the latter. His posts on the former indicate a total lack of awareness of anything that occurred there before about 2002.

Analogies almost never really work, but trying to make them between an aggressive oil-rich desert totalitarianism that has been one of the most advanced societies in its region, and a remote land of mountains and jungle most of whose population was living barely above neolithic standards, is hopeless. There are many differences, but the most important is that we killed about four million people in Vietnam, including nearly 60,000 GI's, without any US interests in sight beyond those we damaged by losing. We did this in direct opposition to the UN plan for a plebescite followed by unification, while in Iraq we invaded to enforce sixteen Chapter VII Resolutions in a place of vital interest not only to the US but the entire industrialized world.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 20, 2007 1:36 AM

You really need to spell out your 16 chapter VII resolutions.

I tried my hardest to figure out what the hell you are trying to say and even when just conceding a few of them that you are probably incapable of recognizing as complete bullshit that couldn't be complied to 16 either has to include things Iraq was in compliance with and the U.S. wasn't or you've pushed back into the Iran/Iraq war and completely ceased being coherent.

Posted by Ed Marshall | December 20, 2007 2:06 AM

Come on, Ed, this isn't difficult. Just Google "UN Resolutions on Iraq" and you'll get the whole list. Some of them dated from the Iran/Iraq war in terms of Iraq's use of nerve gas, but most of them, including the ceasefire agreement, were developed around the invasion and liberation of Kuwait. Particular emphasis on 678, 687, and 1441, which specifically authorized the use of force. It's also useful to read the reasoning of Lord Goldsmith requested by Parliament and published on the front page of The Guardian in March 17 2003 (Google Lord Goldsmith "A Case for War").

Posted by Robert Powell | December 20, 2007 6:56 AM