Lessons from the Past

My barber thinks we should bring our troops home and let Iraqis kill each other to their hearts content. I suspect he speaks for a lot of people who are frustrated with this war. They are bedrock Americans, they are the salt of the earth, and they are wrong. I think they know they are wrong. We also have one war critic after another insisting we are the problem, Iraqis will settle their differences and get along fine if we will just leave. These people aren’t that naïve. They are that cynical. George Bush is being excoriated in the press for invoking images of boat people, reeducation camps, and killing fields to suggest what will likely happen should we leave Iraq prematurely. The Dallas Morning News calls it a smoke screen. They deconstruct his comment line by line to make the absurd argument that the slaughter in Southeast Asia beginning in 1975 had nothing to do with our troop withdrawal two years earlier. The president made his remarks at a VFW convention. He got his history right and it struck a chord with his audience. Lots of those folks remember what the press did to us in those days, and what they are trying to do again. Mr. Bush didn’t just cite Vietnam in his history lesson. He talked about Japan and South Korea too. Japan’s mid-twentieth century transition from an authoritarian and militaristic society to a modern democracy and economic powerhouse stands as one of the most remarkable stories ever. South Korea isn’t so far behind and their success has been contagious. Much of East Asia today bears little resemblance to the backwater it was in the 1950s. There were plenty of nay sayers 60 years ago, those who said it couldn’t be done. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. There is much good that can come of seeing this thing through. Compelling as the moral issues are however, the strategic issues are even more important. We initially justified going to war in Vietnam with the Domino Theory, the idea that if South Vietnam fell to communists other states would fall too. They did, and the damage was horrific but it was confined to Indo China. Communist takeovers went as far as Laos and Cambodia but no further. Something like the Domino Theory applies to Iraq as well, but with an important difference. As Mister Bush points out, this time we face an enemy who will follow us home. That’s why I don’t think it will happen. Bush has made it abundantly clear he isn’t going to let it happen while he is in office. Any successor who does will be a one term president. Our enemies at home and abroad would like nothing more than to see a withdrawal from Iraq degenerate into an ignominious Saigon Embassy style rout, with a mad scene of helicopter evacuations from the Baghdad Green Zone. No presidency could survive such a scene, or the revival of jihadist enthusiasm which would surely follow. Some of those who think a debacle is inevitable are anxious to have it happen on George Bush’s watch. They are the greatest cynics of all. But we are going to complete the surge as planned. We will probably begin some troop withdrawals as security permits, but we will have a substantial military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. We made a lot of mistakes in Vietnam. The biggest was in not leaving behind a government strong enough to maintain internal order and defend itself from invasion. We aren’t going to make that mistake again. The consequences are too clear. We have been in Korea for more that six decades now. It took four for a genuine democracy to manifest itself. I hope it doesn’t take that long in Iraq, but it might.