Election Section

Once More into the Quagmire: Vietnam and Iraq: By PHIL McARDLE

COMMENTARY
Friday September 17, 2004

George Santayana, the great Spanish-American philosopher, told us that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. This profound observation has been invoked out of context ad nauseam. Nevertheless, its real meaning stays fresh because it was intended for events like the Holocaust and for situations like ours today in Iraq. Many Americans didn’t learn the lessons of Vietnam, and so here we are, trapped in that genuine rarity, a disaster in which history repeats itself. The parallels between the two wars are breathtaking. 

Like Iraq, Vietnam was, first and foremost, a presidentially initiated misadventure, an unnecessary intervention in a place where we could not prevail by force of arms. Neither war protected American security. Both were interminable. And hideously, in both the lives of our soldiers were thrown away to no purpose. 

A huge amount of speculation has gone into trying to figure out why presidents Bush and Johnson took us to war in such distant lands. I used to dismiss examinations of the purely personal aspects of their decision making as the equivalent of pop fiction, less important than real facts, figures, historical trends and so forth. Nowadays I give a lot more weight to the personal. 

Many writers have said a big part of Lyndon Johnson’s decision to fight in Vietnam was his desire to beat Barry Goldwater in 1964 and win the presidency on his own, to get over being cast as Jack Kennedy’s ungainly, illegitimate heir. He was also personally offended by Ho Chi Minh’s intransigence. These were his private feelings while he was taking major, secret steps toward war and playing the role of “peace candidate” in public.  

Johnson knew better. On tape recordings made in the Oval Office in those days we hear him telling confidants like Richard Russell that he can’t see any way to avoid the war or any way to win it. Johnson was a fool. There were a lot of other ways to deal with Vietnam. After all, our people didn’t want to fight. We hardly knew how to find Vietnam on a map. Goldwater might have been a danger to the world, but Johnson could have whipped him without plunging into a foreign war. 

I was a GI then, stationed at Travis Air Force Base, just north of San Francisco. Everybody in my unit voted for Johnson. As soon as Goldwater came in view as a possible president, all those troopers—lifers and enlistees alike—decided he was too much of a nitwit to be trusted with their lives. So they believed LBJ’s lies. Me, too. As it happened, my enlistment ended before the war heated up, and like a lot of ex-GI’s, I lost track of the people I served with. But I know most of them were sent to Vietnam, a number of them were wounded, and I fear that some of them were killed. 

In American Dynasty, Kevin Phillips described Bush’s strong personal motives for making war on Iraq. We know from unchallenged news reports that when George Sr. was on a visit to Kuwait, Iraqi agents attempted to assassinate him. It has been less widely reported that Laura Bush was with him, and that she also would have been killed. As London’s Daily Telegraph put it (in “Unfinished Business for the Bush Family,” March 18, 2003), for the younger Bush, our current president, “toppling Saddam was a matter of the heart as well as an affair of state.” If true, this makes a grotesquely inadequate rationale for a war that has caused thousands and thousands of casualties. Everyone who paid attention knows there were real alternatives to invading Iraq in order to change the regime. 

As a causus belli, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was dubious at best. We know definitely that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Yet Johnson and Bush each claimed to be totally disinterested, patriotic custodians of our interests. Presenting Vietnam and Iraq as imminent dangers to us, they offered “national security” as the overwhelming justification for these unnecessary wars.  

Well, we lost the war in Vietnam. It’s hard to see what difference it made here at home. Our lives went on as though nothing had happened. Our standard of living didn’t drop. We did have a period of severe inflation when the cost of the war came due. (That will happen again.) And the air was a little clearer: we were no longer subjected to endless chatter about the domino theory or body counts as a measure of our military prowess. But in retrospect, it sure looks as though the Vietnamese threat to our “national security” was unreal. 

We were in even less danger of being conquered by the Iraqis. The Bush administration fouled the airwaves by substituting “weapons of mass destruction” for the domino theory. When the threat of WMDs became laughable, they switched (like their predecessors) to other rationalizations, the most unsavory of which is that we have a duty to impose democracy by force. Sometimes it sounds as though we are doing the Iraqis a good turn by blowing up their country, and that we have a moral obligation to complete the job, however long it takes. 

I’m afraid we’ve lost this war, too. Pretending we’re winning, Bush looks like a mortuary make-up artist trying to give the illusion of life to a corpse. His policy has failed completely. He and Johnson look more alike every day. But Bush may yet surpass him by becoming the first American president to lose two wars simultaneously. Remember Afghanistan? We’re also losing there. 

The Vietnam war seemed to go on forever. In fact, it lasted a decade. Today generals like Tommy Franks estimate that Iraq will last at least five more years. Perhaps, if things go on as they are now, we’ll see light at the end of the tunnel in 2009. Or 2010, or 2020. Perhaps the light at the end of the tunnel will turn out to be the headlight on a train coming at us. 

While we wait to find out, the waste of lives continues. When I was at Travis we welcomed the walking wounded when we met them on the base. There wasn’t much we could do beyond trying to find a comforting word. We usually didn’t see the severely maimed and crippled. They went directly to hospitals for long term care. The dead were en route to their graves. We’ve had thousands of casualties in Iraq. Bush must hope he can distract people’s attention from them for at least two more months. 

After John Kerry came back from Vietnam, he famously asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?” For him and for us, it will be a painful and bitter irony if he is elected and becomes the leader who arranges our withdrawal from another unnecessary field of battle, where one more American 

soldier will be the last to die. 

 

Berkeley resident Phil McArdle is a freelance writer and author of Exactly Opposite the Golden Gate (Berkeley Historical Society) and Fatal Fascination (Houghton Mifflin). 0