nam-iraqThere are a number of reasons why, if I were a (very camp) adviser to President Bush, I would have told him with regards to yesterday’s unfortunate choice of using the Vietnam War as a metaphor for Iraq, “Don’t go there, girl.”

Mainly because he didn’t go there, girl.

Even if the White House wins the argument about exactly what happened in Texas and Alabama in 1972 and 1973, it is not clear that the furore will evaporate. Some interpretations of the documents suggest that Bush realised the gravity of his situation and hurried to make up his minimum service requirements, ending his time in the military with his duties fulfilled. But that might not be sufficient, says Joshua Marshall, a Washington journalist who edits the influential weblog www.talkingpointsmemo.com and writes for the Washington Monthly. “The backdrop is that even the White House’s story is not a good one,” he says. It is widely agreed, he points out, “that the president was a son of a congressman who used his connections to get a cushy deal … So the Democrats wouldn’t take much of a hit even if the whole White House story was true. It’s still a story of using your connections to get out of Vietnam.”

That Guardian story is from 2004, but the questions about how our Toddler in Chief spent the Vietnam years is still very much an unsettled question, given that all the records have mysteriously vanished in the intervening years. Although the place where they were stored smells faintly of bacon grease, Rogaine shampoo, and hate. (Karl? Is that you?)

But there are dozens of other reasons why invoking Vietnam yesterday was about as specious and wrong-headed as Preznint Slappy could get, not the least of which being that he completely mangled his historical facts and referenced a book he’s obviously never read, but also because of the copious amounts of ink that were spilled back in the run-up to the war and in its first phases, when we were told again and again and again that Iraq would not be like Vietnam.

Ah, yes, I remember those heady days of 2003. War critics like myself said, “I don’t think this is such a good idea. Anybody remember Vietnam?”

And the Very Serious People who were cheerleading the invasion of Iraq said, “You have no idea what you’re talking about, you liberal traitor. This situation is totally different from Vietnam. Iraq is all desert, and Vietnam was a jungle, and, uh…the people in Vietnam were Vietnamese and not Iraqi, and, um…cos we say so.”

Uh-huh. The NeoCocksuckers have kept it up, too.

Here’s gin-soaked waste of space Chris Hitchens from 2005:

Why Iraq and Vietnam have nothing whatsoever in common.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Jan. 31, 2005, at 4:16 PM ET

There it was again, across half a page of the New York Times last Saturday, just as Iraqis and Kurds were nerving themselves to vote. “Flashback to the 60’s: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam.” The basis for the story, which featured a number of experts as lugubrious as they were imprecise, was the suggestion that South Vietnam had held an election in September 1967, and that this propaganda event had not staved off ultimate disaster.

(*cough, cough*)

But perhaps now is the moment to state the critical reasons why there is no reasonable parallel of any sort between Iraq and Vietnam.

Seriously, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. His closing paragraph?

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.

Even better, I thrust an arm all the way up to the shoulder into the Pool of Spent Propaganda (I’ll never get the smell out of that shirt) and found some vintage Fred Kagan from a December 2005 edition of the Hoover Institution Policy Review:

When American ground forces paused briefly during the march to Baghdad in 2003, critics of the war were quick to warn of a “quagmire,” an oblique reference to the Vietnam War. Virtually as soon as it became clear that the conflict in Iraq had become an insurgency, analogies to Vietnam began to proliferate. This development is not surprising. Critics have equated every significant American military undertaking since 1975 to Vietnam, and the fear of being trapped in a Vietnam-like war has led to the frequent demand that U.S. leaders develop not plans to win wars, but “exit strategies,” plans to get out of messes.

Uh, well, yes. Those “exit strategy” thingies of which we speak are often very good to have when launching poorly thought out wars of choice in highly unstable and dangerous parts of the world, even for God’s Favorite Li’l Country, the Almighty, Undefeatable USA.

The situation in Iraq is completely different from Vietnam. The beginning of the conflict, the nature of the enemy, the enemy’s military capabilities, the nature of the current Iraqi government, and the legitimacy of that government are all so widely removed from the circumstances of Vietnam as to make meaningful comparisons almost impossible.

(…)

The real reason that the Vietnam example remains so prominently in many people’s minds, of course, is that the U.S. lost that war.

Ah, no, Mr. Kagan. Right now the reason is because of your boy Dubya’s all over the TeeVee saying that Iraq is just like Vietnam, and that if we stay for another twenty years, this time we’ll “win”, by golly.

Perhaps by trying to box the spiraling, burning clusterf*%k that is Iraq up into a neat little Vietnam analogy is a measure of how desperate the War Spinners of the Right Wing Noise Machine have become. They know the war is winding down, not because violence is decreasing, because it certainly isn’t, but because our forces are exhausted, our treasury is busted, and the violence continues to spin out of control, regardless of what the stuffed suits from America’s burgeoning Think Tank industry have to say.

The Iraq War is, has been, and always will be a colossal failure. Too many things went too horribly wrong at the outset. It’s time for us to pack this one in. Of course, no one who can actually do anything about it seems to understand that, which means that whatever happens in Iraq, it will take much, much longer than it should, and thousands (if not millions) of people will suffer and die needlessly before it’s over.

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