{"id":911,"date":"2005-11-17T05:44:55","date_gmt":"2005-11-17T05:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:27","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:27","slug":"nyt_iraq_is_vie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=911","title":{"rendered":"NYT: Iraq is Vietnam; Richard Nixon Says So. Can We Have the Pulitzer Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been working on what I hoped was a balanced and thoughtful response to my buddy Brian Linse’s unfair effort to tar everyone on the pro-war side as jingoists (yes, my accusation is overbroad, but so is his).<\/p>\n

Then I read this in today’s New York Times and decided to chuck thoughtfulness and fairness right out he window.<\/p>\n

Vietnam Archive Offers Parallel to War in Iraq<\/a><\/p>\n

White House advisers convene secret sessions on the political dangers of revelations that American troops committed atrocities in the war zone, and whether the president can delicately intervene in the investigation. In the face of an increasingly unpopular war, they wonder at the impact on support at home. The best way out of the war, they agree, is propping up a new government that can attract feuding elements across a fractured foreign land.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and my initial response was “Well, f**k, let’s just give up, then.”<\/p>\n

Because if Iraq is Vietnam, then three things are true:
\n# We’re on the wrong side of a brutal and senseless war.<\/p>\n

\n# We can’t possibly win it.<\/p>\n

\n# And a bunch of people who got stiffies when they saw “All The President’s Men” will become truly insufferable as they live out their adolescent fantasies of Speaking Truth To Power and Bringing Down The Man while driving BMW’s and Audis and dining at Cafe Milano.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, we can make some reasonable arguments that suggest that the first two don’t hold a lot of water.<\/p>\n

Vietnam was a textbook war of National Liberation; Vietnam had been a colony of the Chinese and then the French for a really long time, and they wanted their own country.<\/p>\n

Ho Chi Minh approached Harry Truman at the end of WW II and asked to become a U.S. protectorate, like the Philippines, as a way of getting out from under the French. We turned him down, and he went to war to kick out the French, and sought and received Russian and Chinese assistance to do so. The path to freedom, the Vietnamese people believed (somewhat mistakenly) led through the occupying U.S. armies.<\/p>\n

Iraq – unless like certain professors I know of, you believe that everything is best understood through the lens of Western imperialism – is very different. The path to freedom and independence doesn’t lie in casting off foreign domination – it lies in casting off domestic tyranny.<\/p>\n

There are arguments made that we could have won the Vietnam War, had we persisted. I’m not sure I buy them, but having read Chang’s book on Mao<\/a> and the Chinese guerilla wars, I’m more convinced that guerilla wars without a conventional army are less effective than we have mythologized them to be.<\/p>\n

There are facts on the ground that paint a picture far different than that painted in the New York Times; it’s certainly impossible for me to say – and may be impossible for anyone to say – which is true.<\/p>\n

That’s what history looks like while it’s being made.<\/p>\n

KING HENRY V<\/p>\n

I tell thee truly, herald,
\nI know not if the day be ours or no;
\nFor yet a many of your horsemen peer
\nAnd gallop o’er the field.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been working on what I hoped was a balanced and thoughtful response to my buddy Brian Linse’s unfair effort to tar everyone on the pro-war side as jingoists (yes, my accusation is overbroad, but so is his). Then I read this in today’s New York Times and decided to chuck thoughtfulness and fairness right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}