Is Iraq Another Vietnam?
Secrecy and Honesty for Democratic Governments at War
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Is Iraq George W. Bush's Vietnam? Senator Edward Kennedy says so - and conservatives have decried the comparison, saying that Kennedy doesn't want America to win in Iraq. Is that criticism justified? I don't think so - I think that Kennedy was making a very different comparison about honesty and secrecy.
For the sake of context and background information, let's take a look at some relevant portions of Senator Kennedy's speech:
The most important principle in any representative democracy is for the people to trust their government. If our leaders violate that trust, then all our words of hope and opportunity and progress and justice ring false in the ears of our people and the wider world, and our goals will never be achieved.
Sadly, this Administration has failed to live up to basic standards of open and candid debate. On issue after issue, they tell the American people one thing and do another. They repeatedly invent "facts" to support their preconceived agenda - facts which Administration officials knew or should have known were not true. This pattern has prevailed since President Bush's earliest days in office. As a result, this President has now created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon. He has broken the basic bond of trust with the American people.
In recent months, it has become increasingly clear that the Bush Administration misled the American people about the threat to the nation posed by the Iraqi regime. A year after the war began, Americans are questioning why the Administration went to war in Iraq, when Iraq was not an imminent threat, when it had no nuclear weapons, no persuasive links to Al Qaeda, no connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.
Tragically, in making the decision to go to war, the Bush Administration allowed its own stubborn ideology to trump the cold hard evidence that Iraq posed no immediate threat. They misled Congress and the American people because the Administration knew that it could not obtain the consent of Congress for the war if all the facts were known.
By going to war in Iraq on false pretenses and neglecting the real war on terrorism, President Bush gave al-Qaeda two years -- two whole years -- to regroup and recover in the border regions of Afghanistan. As the terrorist bombings in Madrid and other reports now indicate, al-Qaeda has used that time to plant terrorist cells in countries throughout the word, and establish ties with terrorist groups in many different lands.
By going to war in Iraq, we have strained our ties with long-standing allies around the world -- allies whose help we clearly and urgently need on intelligence, on law enforcement, and militarily. We have made America more hated in the world, and made the war on terrorism harder to in.
The result is a massive and very dangerous crisis in our foreign policy. We have lost the respect of other nations in the world. Where do we go to get our respect back? How do we re-establish the working relationships we need with other countries to win the war on terrorism and advance the ideals we share? How can we possibly expect President Bush to do that. He's the problem, not the solution. Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam, and this country needs a new President. [emphasis added]
Kennedy later continued:
This is the pattern and record of the Bush Administration. Iraq. Jobs. Medicare. Schools. Issue after issue. Mislead. Deceive. Make up the needed facts. Smear the character of any critic.
Again and again and again, we see this cynical and despicable strategy playing out. It's undermining our national security, undermining our economy, undermining our health care, undermining our schools, undermining public trust in government, undermining our very democracy. We need a change. November can't come too soon.
Curiously, the Bush administration's response has only served to validated Kennedy's claims because they have resorted to misrepresenting his comments and attacking Kennedy personally. Other conservatives have gotten in on the act as well - for example, Glenn Reynolds has dishonestly described the above as "Kennedy's opportunistic hope that Iraq would turn into "'Bush's Vietnam'" and "if Iraq were George Bush's Vietnam, it would be America's Vietnam, too. Just like the last one. That would be bad. Kennedy doesn't seem to care: What happens to America is second to the all-important task of beating George Bush."
Yes, I do mean to describe the above as dishonest - I think that it's the most appropriate adjective. Reynolds either didn't read the whole thing or he did and is deliberately trying to deceive readers. I believe it's the latter, which means that I believe he is a liar. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I won't hold my breath.
Kennedy's comparison between Iraq and Vietnam is a based upon questions of honesty and secrecy. It wasn't simply the images of casualties broadcast into people's homes every night that drove the opposition to Vietnam. Anti-war efforts were part of a larger movement against government deception and secrecy which conflicted with basic principles of open democracy. That's why the comment by Reynolds as well as government officials are so ironic - in dishonestly smearing critics, they are participating in exactly the sort of behavior that is the real focus of criticism.
Mark Kleiman comments that "By misrepresenting Kennedy's remarks and charging him for disloyalty in saying something he never said, the Bush Team and its allies have, of course, proven that what he actually said was entirely correct: despairing of winning honestly, they are prepared to win at any cost." It's a lot easier to smear one's opponents as traitors than it is to actually and substantively deal with the ideas and arguments they offer.
It is instructive to compare Kennedy's comments above with the following comments written by George E. Reedy in the Grolier 1973 Encyclopedia Yearbook (thus coming right at the end of the war and providing an informative context to Kennedy's quotes:
The unrest spread - a sit-down in the White House, sit-downs at the draft boards, raids on draft board records and finally huge demonstrations in Washington. At first only the college students were involved, and the initial reaction from the rest of the country was that they were spoiled brats. Thereafter their parents took up the cudgels, and the polls began to reflect a change in American attitudes. More and more citizens registered the opinion that the war was useless and that the only sensible course was to find an honorable way out. The Tet offensive in the spring of 1968, which American military leaders considered a Vietcong defeat but which toppled an American government [i.e., Johnson's refusal to seek reelection], was the last straw. After that, there was no question of the United States' winning, only a question of how to get out.
...The war has conclusively demonstrated that a democratic society and secrecy in government are incompatible and that Americans must rethink some of their attitudes toward government secrets. ...In the past, secrecy in government has been regarded as a necessary evil - a requirement for maintaining the nation's security ion a hostile world. This attitude was fostered by the Cold War, with its clandestine intelligence operations and its races to be the first to the hydrogen bomb, first to put a man in space and first to put a man on the moon. Thoughtful Americans recognized that secrecy involved a risk because if some things can be legally and properly classified there is no way of knowing whether other things are being illegally and improperly classified. The country did not, however, recognize the greater risk: that all such practices can inhibit national debate over vital issues and leave the people drained of confidence in their nation.
With this background, I think that Kennedy's comments will make a lot more sense to those who didn't experience the Vietnam era first-hand. It seems clear to me that Kennedy wasn't saying anything dramatically new; instead, he was continuing one side of a debate that was raging in America thirty years ago and which still has not been decided. As Kevin Drum points out, "Iraq may or may not turn out well, but in a democracy you can't maintain popular support for a war unless you're honest about why you went to war, honest about the goals of the war, and honest about how well the war is going. George Bush hasn't been, and that's why Iraq may very well be his Vietnam."
Reedy also had these interesting words to say:
Whether the lesson will strike home is questionable. There is a tendency on the part of government leaders to regard the people's business as too important and too difficult to be confided to them. ... Perhaps some day the thought will penetrate that planning free of domestic political pressure is also free of any assurance of the people's backing.
Update: Phil Carter, who really understands military issues, offers up an observation about the recent violence in Iraq that creates yet another parallel to be drawn between Iraq and Vietnam:
At this point, I'm not even sure how we define victory or success in Iraq, and how we conceive of an exit that will allow us to achieve that victory without seeing it vanish 6 months later in a bloody civil war. This is an issue that absolutely must become part of the 2004 presidential election debate -- how do we win in Iraq, and how do we get out?
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