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Journalism of Courage
The Vietnam war is still such a divisive episode in US history that comparisons to Iraq are sure to be clouded by emotion. But President Bush tossed analogies around capriciously this week before the Veterans of Foreign Wars and added a few more from World War II and Korea. Since he broached the subject, it8217;s reasonable to take the comparisons to places he might not want to go.
Here8217;s one: It would have been better to surrender South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese communists in the early 1960s than to engage them in a struggle that cost 58,000 American and millions of Vietnamese lives before it ended in 1975 with the same result: victory for Hanoi and the suppression of non-communist opposition in the south. Would Bush agree that, similarly, it would have been preferable to allow Saddam Hussein, notwithstanding his evil regime, to remain in power than to engage in a more than four-year war that has torn Iraq apart 8230;?
The Iraq war is now nearly 4 1/2 years old. Bush didn8217;t mention the war-weariness that afflicted Americans as the Korean war dragged on for three years and as World War II passed the 3 1/2-year mark. After 4 1/2 years of intense American involvement in Vietnam, Nixon began pulling out the troops. 8220;In Iraq, our moral obligations and our strategic interests are one,8221; Bush said. The United States is not winning this war, and there is no strategy in place analogous to Nixon8217;s to get the US troops out and devise a diplomatic solution involving neighboring nations. A weary people demand more of the president than war without end.
Excerpted from an editorial in the 8216;Boston Globe8217;, August 24
