President Bush and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice have both been drawing hopeful analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. What Vietnam teaches us, they say, is that over time old enemies can reconcile and a war-torn nation can chart a happy future. This is both true and, in context, unbelievably bizarre.

To review: the US spent 15 years, more or less, in Vietnam. We took over a doomed colonial enterprise from the French and turned it into a doomed anti-communist one. By the time we lost the war and left, millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans were dead. After we left, many more Vietnamese died as the communist regime consolidated its power. Thirty years later the country still bears scars from the war, not least among which are the continuing environmental problems caused by our liberal use of the toxic defoliant Agent Orange.

If we extrapolate the analogy, Bush and Rice are saying that when we ultimately leave Iraq, after killing as many Iraqis as seems feasible given the amount of time we have left and doing whatever damage we can to the country’s infrastructure and environment, and after Iraq concludes its own civil war, assuming any one party is ultimately able to prevail, it’s possible that a few decades down the road a more or less liberalized Iraq will rejoin the community of nations and all will be forgiven on both sides (other than those Americans who will insist that we could have won the war had the politicians not buckled).

Continue reading Notes from beyond: Bush, Iraq, Vietnam