Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Bad Press - Part 2
You'd have to have been living in a cave for the last year or so to have missed the preoccupation of many pundits that Iraq is our new Vietnam. Whenever this line is taken, the term "quagmire" is never far away. Yet as each attempt at analogy is shown by saner heads to be sorely lacking, if not egregious, new ones pop up.
The latest seems to have surfaced at the popular lefty blog, Daily Kos. On Monday Kos cited a New York Times article from 1967. The NYT piece reported the election in South Vietnam thusly:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 [1967] -- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.
Since the eventual outcome in South Vietnam was a disaster, this article is seen in the Kos universe to be sufficient to discredit Sunday's Iraqi election; it's all propaganda, you see. Kos even felt it was unnecessary to add his usual snarky commentary; merely reprinting (and linking) the NYT piece was enough for him and his readers to draw the proper conclusion: the Iraqi election is illegitimate and a fraud.
Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the quagmire. Christopher Hitchens, once a leading light of the left, who has since 9/11 been writing article after article debunking the threadbare neo-Marxist criticisms of US foreign policy, takes on the use of the Vietnam model in discussions of Iraq. In an article appearing Monday in the online magazine Slate, Hitchens refers to the very article to which Kos and his readers attach so much powerful symbolism. A more thorough debunking you will seldom see, as Hitchens shows how Iraq and Vietnam "have nothing whatsoever in common." Calling the experts the NYT featured in their 1967 piece "as lugubrious as they were imprecise", Hitchens proceeds to swat the whole Iraq-Vietnam model out of the park.
No car bomb or hijacking or suicide-bombing or comparable atrocity was ever committed by the Vietnamese, on American or any other foreign soil. Nor has any wanted international gangster or murderer ever been sheltered in Vietnam.
American generals and policymakers could never agree as to whether the guerrillas in Vietnam were self-supporting or were sustained from the outside (namely the northern half of their own country). However one may now view that debate, it was certainly true that Hanoi, and the southern rebels, were regularly resupplied not by minor regional potentates but by serious superpowers such as the Warsaw Pact and China, and were able to challenge American forces in battlefield order. The Iraqi "insurgents" are based among a minority of a minority, and are localized geographically, and have no steady source of external supply. Here the better comparison would be with the dogmatic Communists in Malaya in the 1940s, organized principally among the Chinese minority and eventually defeated even by an exhausted postwar British empire. But even the die-hard Malayan Stalinists had a concept of "people's war" and a brave record in fighting Japanese imperialism. The Iraqi "insurgents" are dismal riff-raff by comparison.
Where it is not augmented by depraved Bin Ladenist imports, the leadership and structure of the Iraqi "insurgency" is formed from the elements of an already fallen regime, extensively discredited and detested in its own country and universally condemned. This could not be said of Ho Chin Minh or of the leaders and cadres of the National Liberation Front.
Hitchens devotes many paragraphs to the contrasts between the two conflicts. In light of the evidence it wouldn't seem possible to continue to make this kind of mischief, as the left very assiduously does. But Kos and kids take a spanking that should at least leave their fannies bright red for a while.
I suppose it's obvious that I was not a supporter of the Vietnam War. Indeed, the principles of the antiwar movement of that epoch still mean a good deal to me. That's why I retch every time I hear these principles recycled, by narrow minds or in a shallow manner, in order to pass off third-rate excuses for Baathism or jihadism. But one must also be capable of being offended objectively. The Vietnam/Iraq babble is, from any point of view, a busted flush. It's no good. It's a stiff. It's passed on. It has ceased to be. It's joined the choir invisible. It's turned up its toes. It's gone. It's an ex-analogy.
The latest seems to have surfaced at the popular lefty blog, Daily Kos. On Monday Kos cited a New York Times article from 1967. The NYT piece reported the election in South Vietnam thusly:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 [1967] -- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.
Since the eventual outcome in South Vietnam was a disaster, this article is seen in the Kos universe to be sufficient to discredit Sunday's Iraqi election; it's all propaganda, you see. Kos even felt it was unnecessary to add his usual snarky commentary; merely reprinting (and linking) the NYT piece was enough for him and his readers to draw the proper conclusion: the Iraqi election is illegitimate and a fraud.
Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the quagmire. Christopher Hitchens, once a leading light of the left, who has since 9/11 been writing article after article debunking the threadbare neo-Marxist criticisms of US foreign policy, takes on the use of the Vietnam model in discussions of Iraq. In an article appearing Monday in the online magazine Slate, Hitchens refers to the very article to which Kos and his readers attach so much powerful symbolism. A more thorough debunking you will seldom see, as Hitchens shows how Iraq and Vietnam "have nothing whatsoever in common." Calling the experts the NYT featured in their 1967 piece "as lugubrious as they were imprecise", Hitchens proceeds to swat the whole Iraq-Vietnam model out of the park.
No car bomb or hijacking or suicide-bombing or comparable atrocity was ever committed by the Vietnamese, on American or any other foreign soil. Nor has any wanted international gangster or murderer ever been sheltered in Vietnam.
American generals and policymakers could never agree as to whether the guerrillas in Vietnam were self-supporting or were sustained from the outside (namely the northern half of their own country). However one may now view that debate, it was certainly true that Hanoi, and the southern rebels, were regularly resupplied not by minor regional potentates but by serious superpowers such as the Warsaw Pact and China, and were able to challenge American forces in battlefield order. The Iraqi "insurgents" are based among a minority of a minority, and are localized geographically, and have no steady source of external supply. Here the better comparison would be with the dogmatic Communists in Malaya in the 1940s, organized principally among the Chinese minority and eventually defeated even by an exhausted postwar British empire. But even the die-hard Malayan Stalinists had a concept of "people's war" and a brave record in fighting Japanese imperialism. The Iraqi "insurgents" are dismal riff-raff by comparison.
Where it is not augmented by depraved Bin Ladenist imports, the leadership and structure of the Iraqi "insurgency" is formed from the elements of an already fallen regime, extensively discredited and detested in its own country and universally condemned. This could not be said of Ho Chin Minh or of the leaders and cadres of the National Liberation Front.
Hitchens devotes many paragraphs to the contrasts between the two conflicts. In light of the evidence it wouldn't seem possible to continue to make this kind of mischief, as the left very assiduously does. But Kos and kids take a spanking that should at least leave their fannies bright red for a while.
I suppose it's obvious that I was not a supporter of the Vietnam War. Indeed, the principles of the antiwar movement of that epoch still mean a good deal to me. That's why I retch every time I hear these principles recycled, by narrow minds or in a shallow manner, in order to pass off third-rate excuses for Baathism or jihadism. But one must also be capable of being offended objectively. The Vietnam/Iraq babble is, from any point of view, a busted flush. It's no good. It's a stiff. It's passed on. It has ceased to be. It's joined the choir invisible. It's turned up its toes. It's gone. It's an ex-analogy.
# posted by mds : 9:12 PM
