We've heard this before.
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The Vietnam Analogy
April 16, 2004
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Iraq isn't Vietnam. The most important difference is the
death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage
in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in
some ways Iraq looks worse.
It's true that the current American force in Iraq is much
smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S.
military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also
much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of
our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size
conflict.
And the stress Iraq places on our military is, if anything,
worse. In Vietnam, American forces consisted mainly of
short-term draftees, who returned to civilian life after
their tours of duty. Our Iraq force consists of long-term
volunteers, including reservists who never expected to be
called up for extended missions overseas. The training of
these volunteers, their morale and their willingness to
re-enlist will suffer severely if they are called upon to
spend years fighting a guerrilla war.
Some hawks say this proves that we need a bigger Army. But
President Bush hasn't called for larger forces. In fact, he
seems unwilling to pay for the forces we have.
A fiscal comparison of George Bush's and Lyndon Johnson's
policies makes the Vietnam era seem like a golden age of
personal responsibility. At first, Johnson was reluctant to
face up to the cost of the war. But in 1968 he bit the
bullet, raising taxes and cutting spending; he turned a
large deficit into a surplus the next year. A comparable
program today - the budget went from a deficit of 3.2
percent of G.D.P. to a 0.3 percent surplus in just one year
- would eliminate most of our budget deficit.
By contrast, Mr. Bush, for all his talk about staying the
course, hasn't been willing to strike anything off his
domestic wish list. On the contrary, he used the initial
glow of apparent success in Iraq to ram through yet another
tax cut, waiting until later to tell us about the extra $87
billion he needed. And he's still at it: in his press
conference on Tuesday he said nothing about the $50
billion-to-$70 billion extra that everyone knows will be
needed to pay for continuing operations.
This fiscal chicanery is part of a larger pattern. Vietnam
shook the nation's confidence not just because we lost, but
because our leaders didn't tell us the truth. Last
September Gen. Anthony Zinni spoke of "Vietnam, where we
heard the garbage and the lies," and asked his audience of
military officers, "Is it happening again?" Sure enough,
the parallels are proliferating. Gulf of Tonkin attack,
meet nonexistent W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links. "Hearts and
minds," meet "welcome us as liberators." "Light at the end
of the tunnel," meet "turned the corner." Vietnamization,
meet the new Iraqi Army.
Some say that Iraq isn't Vietnam because we've come to
bring democracy, not to support a corrupt regime. But
idealistic talk is cheap. In Vietnam, U.S. officials never
said, "We're supporting a corrupt regime." They said they
were defending democracy. The rest of the world, and the
Iraqis themselves, will believe in America's idealistic
intentions if and when they see a legitimate, noncorrupt
Iraqi government - as opposed to, say, a rigged election
that puts Ahmad Chalabi in charge.
If we aren't promoting democracy in Iraq, what are we
doing? Many of the more moderate supporters of the war have
already reached the stage of quagmire logic: they no longer
have high hopes for what we may accomplish, but they fear
the consequences if we leave. The irony is painful. One of
the real motives for the invasion of Iraq was to give the
world a demonstration of American power. It's a measure of
how badly things have gone that now we're told we can't
leave because that would be a demonstration of American
weakness.
Again, the parallel with Vietnam is obvious. Remember the
domino theory?
And there's one more parallel: Nixonian politics is back.
What we remember now is Watergate. But equally serious were
Nixon's efforts to suppress dissent, like the "Tell It to
Hanoi" rallies, where critics of the Vietnam War were
accused of undermining the soldiers and encouraging the
enemy. On Tuesday George Bush did a meta-Nixon: he declared
that anyone who draws analogies between Iraq and Vietnam
undermines the soldiers and encourages the enemy.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/16/opinion/16KRUG.html?ex=1083117934&ei=1&en=baed8c0e130163a6
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
