Bush teaches history...
« on: 2007-08-23 12:40:50 »
[Blunderov] Fresh from sitting at the feet of that doyen of history scholarship Donald ("Duck") Rumsfeld, Alfred E. Bush delivers himself of a weighty judgment. Apparently, having failed to make history in the way he had intended, he now hopes to rewrite it instead.
Published: August 23, 2007 10:55 AM ET updated Thursday
NEW YORK After years of mocking those who drew comparisons between the U.S. engagements in Vietnam and Iraq, war supporters are now invoking them – led by commander-in-chief George W. Bush, in a much-publicized speech today at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City.
Now, how will the media respond to the “Vietnamization” of rhetoric on Iraq, as unveiled by President Bush today? At least three major papers quickly sought out critics who have tried to debunk it.
USA Today located Stanley Karnow, one of the leading scholars on the Vietnam war. “Vietnam was not a bunch of sectarian groups fighting each other,” as in Iraq. “Does he think we should have stayed in Vietnam?”
Robert Dallek, author of several celebrated biographies of recent U.S. presidents, including Lyndon Johnson, told the Los Angeles Times: “"It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president.
"We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn't work our will," he said.
"What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion," he continued. "We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out."
The New York Times also talked to Dallek, who pointed out that the slaughters of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia “was a consequence of our having gone into Cambodia and destabilized that country.” And it interviewed Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and now professor of international relations at Boston University (his son was recently killed in Iraq).
Bacevich said of the Vietnam pullout: "It was not a precipitous withdrawal, it was a very deliberate disengagement. The Vietnam comparison should invite us to think harder about how to minimize the consequences of our military failure. If one is really concerned about the Iraqi people, and the fate that may be awaiting them as this war winds down, then we ought to get serious about opening our doors and to welcoming to the United States those Iraqis who have supported us."
Ironically, in the now-famous video from 1994 which surfaced last week, Dick Cheney used the word “quagmire” to refer to what would likely happen to us in Iraq if we invaded.
In this morning's speech, Bush said, “Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see things differently.” He claimed that Osama bin Laden himself had predicted that the American public, remembering Vietnam, would also rise up against the Iraq occupation.
"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush added. "Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.' "
Latest figures from Iraqi officials and international humanitarian aid groups show that the current conflict in Iraq has led to 2 million refugees and 1.2 displaced Iraqis within the country. Estimates of the civilian death toll range from 100,000 to at least half a million.
Appearing on CNN today after the coverage of the Bush speech, former Reagan adviser and magazine editor David Gergen said, "He may well have stirred up a hornet's nest among historian. By invoking Vietnam, he raised the automatic question, 'Well, if you've learned so much from history, Mr. President, how did you ever get us involved in another quagmire?'" He added: "It's surprising to me that he would go back to that, and I think he's going to get a lot of criticism."
Gergen also pointed out that after 30 years Vietnam "has actually become quite a thriving country." He suggested that, as in that example, there will be some kind of bloodbath when we eventually pull out of Iraq, but perhaps it, too, will eventually prosper.
The Washington Post quoted Steven Smith, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations: "The president emphasized the violence in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early. It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The longer you stay the worse it gets."
Shortly before his death earlier this year, legendary Vietnam war correspondent David Halberstam said, “I thought that in both Vietnam and Iraq, we were going against history. My view — and I think it was because of Vietnam — was that the forces against us were going to be hostile, that we would not be viewed as liberators. We were going to punch our fist into the largest hornets’ nest in the world.”
***
Related: Greg Mitchell's column about George Bush citing Graham Greene* in his speech.
George Bush Meets Graham Greene In his speech linking Vietnam and Iraq, the president cited Greene's 1955 classic "The Quiet American." But who is the "naive" one? And who has "noble motives"?
By Greg Mitchell
(August 22, 2007) -- Now that’s going too far. George W. Bush cited my favorite 20th century novel and its author – Graham Greene’s prescient "The Quiet American" (also a fine movie starring Michael Caine) – in his speech on Wednesday that drew several dubious links between the catastrophic Vietnam and Iraq conflicts. Perhaps because it’s unlikely he’s ever read the book it was difficult to figure out exactly what the president meant.
Bush could have used a fact-checker as well. He describes Alden Pyle, the U.S. operative, as the “main character” in the book, when it’s actually the narrator of the story, Thomas Fowler, the Saigon-based British newspaper correspondent. And, of course, “many” back in the 1970s did not say there would be “no” consequences for the Vietnamese after our pullout, as Bush alleged. Finally, I would love to know the name of the purported “anti-war senator” and find out if the views ascribed to him are accurate or the stuff of urban legend.
In any case, here’s the Bush statement today: “In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called ‘The Quiet American.’ It was set in Saigon and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’
“After America entered the Vietnam War, Graham Greene -- the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. Matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people. In 1972, one anti-war senator put it this way: ‘What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?'"
Now, what the hell does Bush mean by all this?
My initial reaction was that Bush was equating the novelist with critics of both the Vietnam and Iraq wars who found “naïve” the views of those promoting a war who had only “noble” ideals (e.g. Bush) and would succeed if the Greenes of the world just got out of the way. If this is true, Bush was trying to identify with Pyle.
Maybe someone should tell him that Pyle, in the novel, helps arrange and then defends a terror bombing that kills and maims civilians.
But others have suggested that Bush meant that Greene and his ilk are the naïve ones. Here’s Frank James of the Chicago Tribune at the paper’s blog The Swamp: “Bush seemed to be seizing on Greene's idea of U.S. naivete on entering the war and trying to turn it around and apply it to those now calling for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
“But Greene wrote his book about the way American bumbled into Vietnam, not how it left it. By reminding people of Greene's book, Bush was inviting listeners to recall the mistakes his administration made in entering and prosecuting the Iraq War. Did he really want to do that?”
Then there was Joe Klein at Time magazine's Swampland blog calling "The Quiet American" a novel "whose hero is the young William Kristol...actually, no, the hero is an idealistic American intelligence officer named Alden Pyle, who causes great disasters in the name of a higher good. In other words, he's a premature neoconservative. I would hope that the President will re-read, or perhaps just read the book, as soon as possible because it is as good a description as there is about the futility of trying to forcibly impose western ways on an ancient culture."
Well, you be the judge.
Greene’s novel, in any case, pits the cynical, apolitical newspaperman (who has a Vietnamese girlfriend and an opium habit) against the Pyle character, who seems to be a U.S. aid official linked to the CIA (and purportedly based on the legendary Edward Lansdale). Pyle is attempting to find a “third force, ” a democratic alternative to the French-backed puppet government and the Communist insurgents. With brilliant writing, biting humor and keen insight on local politics and customs (based on Greene’s research there), the novel perfectly anticipates the massive U.S. urge to intervene deeply and then escalate.
Fowler, the typical newspaperman, has no use for “isms" and "ocracies,” and just wants the “facts.” He tells Pyle “you and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren’t interested.” What do they want? “They want enough rice. They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.”
Pyle replies: “If Indo-china goes….”
“I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean?"
Pyle ultimately assists an urban bombing to be blamed on Viet Minh insurgents, and many civilians die. Greene observes that "a woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat." Fowler asks Pyle how many such deaths he would accept in “building a national democratic front.” Pyle responds: “Anyway, they died in the right cause. … They died for democracy."
Bush would never say something like that but plenty of Greene’s comments about Pyle would apply to him. (Philip Noyce, director of the recent film based on the book, has said "Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle.") Greene's description of the character even sounds like the young Bush, with a crew cut and a "wide campus gaze." If only he was merely "reading the Sunday supplements at home and following the baseball" instead of mucking around in foreign lands.
Pyle, he writes, was “impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance....Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. You can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity."
Long before that, Greene had opened his novel with a few lines from Byron:
"This is the patent age of new inventions For killing bodies, and for saving souls All propagated with the best intentions."
Or as Greene himself wrote of a character in "The Heart of the Matter," another novel: "He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return."
***
Related:Read Greg Mitchell's piece about the "Vietnamization" of rhetoric on Iraq.
Re:Bush teaches history...
« Reply #1 on: 2007-08-23 20:16:02 »
[Blunderov] Bush has a BA History. Incredible but true. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it into a silk purse as my father used to say.
Meanwhile the Brits prepare to leave Iraq having wearied of persistent casualties and no discernable progress and things continue to fall apart over the whole region.
IMO history will declare Gulf War 2 to be the greatest military blunder in history. So far, that is. Still 18 months of Bush to go.
Bush likens Iraq to Vietnam, draws flak 24 Aug 2007, 0000 hrs IST,Rashmee Roshan Lall,TNN
LONDON: Britain is interpreting George Bush’s invocation of Vietnam to buy time for his Iraq ‘surge’ strategy as an “imprudent” sign of “real desperation” even as the first tell-tale indication emerged of serious tension between PM Gordon Brown and Bush.
Bush on Wednesday likened the “terrorists” who wage war in Iraq to the communist forces in Korea and Vietnam and imperial Japanese army, and warned that a hasty Iraq withdrawal would trigger a bloodbath like the one in Southeast Asia after the US defeat and retreat from Vietnam.
Even as a senior US general blamed the planned British troop withdrawal for creating a fresh and unnecessary security crisis in southern Iraq, there were clear signs that the Anglo-American coalition that invaded the country four years ago is splintering.
Even as General Jack Keane controversially claimed that the security situation in British-controlled south-eastern Iraq had been allowed to deteriorate to “gangland warfare” with civilians at the mercy of rival Shia gunmen, British commentators acknowledged clear signs of a growing coalition rift.
On Thursday, sections of the UK media quoted unnamed senior defence ministry officials as saying they did not want to get “involved in ‘tit-for-tat’ with the Americans” but anonymous UK military commanders have been insisting that the security situation in Basra is being misrepresented by US forces.
British Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup has refuted American bad-mouthing with the justification: “Our mission there was to get the place and the people to a state where the Iraqis could run the country if they chose to and we are very nearly there. Our mission was not to make the place look somewhere green and peaceful because that was never going to be achievable in that timescale and, in any case, only the Iraqis can fulfill that aspiration.”
Bush’s vow to “fight to win” and prevent another Vietnam has received disparaging coverage in the British press, with analysts expressing incredulity that he could use a “disputable history lecture” to justify the “oddity of a comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, the twin peaks of contemporary US foreign misjudgment”.
The number of UK troops in Iraq has fallen from 7,200 at the start of this year to 5,500. It will drop to 5,000 by the beginning of next month.
Re:Bush teaches history...
« Reply #2 on: 2007-08-24 10:00:08 »
[Blunderov] IMO history will declare Gulf War 2 to be the greatest military blunder in history. So far, that is. Still 18 months of Bush to go.
[Hermit] While Afghanistan is bad and Iraq is worse, I think that history will likely decide that the waging of yet another illegal and unwinnable war of aggression, that against Iran, will qualify for this description. Particularly given that the citizens of the USA and ruling class of both parties, knowing that their administration is insane enough to do this, having more than sufficient evidence to bring impeachment yet having repeatedly legalized illegal activities rather than even censured the administration over them, are going to be complicit in the attack and consequent blowback as and when it happens.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Bush teaches history...
« Reply #3 on: 2007-08-24 16:39:32 »
[Blunderov] The Wikipedia has a list of blunders not all of them military. Gulf War 2 qualifies in having had precisely the opposite of its intended effect; the USA, by expert concensus, is much less safe now than it was before.
To be included in this list an incident must meet two criteria: (1) It must be an extremely bad or otherwise significant failure. (2) It must be a notable blunder--that is, it must be widely considered to be a disaster which was the result of bad decision making. To be objectively considered famous, it must appear in a list of blunders compiled by a respectable authority or be noted as a blunder by multiple, unbiased sources. If there is disagreement as to the nature of the blunder, or whether it is even a blunder at all, then the opinions of both sides should be summarized in the listing.
The majority of famous blunders are of a military nature; however, there are also a number of famous and significant blunders in business, politics, and other disciplines.
Military
Military disasters commonly believed to be the result of a major mistake or extremely bad decision making.
1788 - The Battle of Karánsebes in which an Austrian army started firing at each other, thinking that they were under the attack of Ottoman Empire forces. The battle caused 10,000 casualties, while the enemy was a two day march away.
1854 - The suicidal and ill-advised Charge of the Light Brigade in the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. It was based on Cardigan's misunderstanding of, and failure to ask for clarification of Lord Raglan's orders. Tennyson, in his famous poem praising the valor of the cavalrymen, wrote: "'Forward the Light Brigade!'/Was there a man dismay'd?/Not tho' the soldier knew/Some one had blunder'd." Of the action, French marshal Pierre Bosquet said C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre ("It is magnificent, but it is not war.") (Saul David, 1998, p. 13-24)
1876 - The Battle of the Little Bighorn (also called Custer's last stand), the subject of a number of books and several films, was a catastrophic failure for George Armstrong Custer, leading to the death of Custer himself and all 210 men who were with him at the time. Many feel that this failure was a result of a series of blunders on the part of Custer, including poor communication, failure to wait for reinforcements, excessive cruelty in his treatment of the Native Americans, and general overconfidence. Others have argued that Custer was largely the victim of bad circumstance, and that his actions and decisions during the battle differed little from standard military strategy of the time. (Saul David, 1998, p. 236-251)
1899 - Battle of Colenso during the Second Boer War. Inadequate preparation and reconnaissance combined with uninspired leadership led to a heavy, and in some respects humiliating, British defeat.
1930 to 1940 - The Maginot Line in France. The Maginot Line is widely considered to be a great blunder because the German armies went around it. However, the German forces did not dare attack the Maginot Line directly; Germany had to invade Belgium in order to circumvent it, and in the few incidents during World War II where the line was involved, it proved a highly effective defensive fortification. Thus, many historians feel that France blundered, not in building the Maginot Line (which was effective for what it was), but in relying on it as its only major means of defense.[1] (GBIH)
1941 - The Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 (December 8 in Japan standard time). Although the attack sunk or crippled numerous US Navy capital ships, many military historians consider the attack a long-term strategic blunder. For instance, the American aircraft carriers (a priority target) were absent, and the oil storage facilities and drydock naval repair yard (whose destruction could have crippled the Pacific Fleet's operating capacity) were untouched. Worst of all was the psychological effect: instead of discouraging the USA as intended, it enraged the American population into waging relentless war against Japan in revenge.
Adolf Hitler declaring war on the USA immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack. In doing so, Hitler played directly into President Franklin Roosevelt's desire to openly join the war against the Führer with full force, by giving him a compelling self-defense rationale to do so. This led to a grand alliance of the USA, UK and the USSR that would defeat Nazi Germany.
1954 - Battle of Dien Bien Phu - Prior to the battle, the French forces established a military base in the bowl of a valley and left the heights surrounding the base unguarded since they were considered inaccessible for any military advantage; however, the Vietnamese under Vo Nguyen Giap used those heights to position heavy artillery and anti-aircraft weapons to bombard the base from an unassailable position and ward off air support respectively.
1971 - Battle of Longewala - a pivotal battle of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, during which Pakistan's two Infantry Divisions and two Armored Divisions fail to take over India's 120-men strong Longewala base and was finally decimated by the Indian Air Force. Pakistan lost more than 50 tanks and 100 armored vehicles, remaining one of the largest disproportionate tank casualties for one side in a single battle after WWII.
1999 - Kargil War - Considered to be a military, diplomatic and political blunder for Pakistan. Pakistani Army-backed militants infiltrated into Indian-administered Kashmir and captured Kargil, a mountainous region in north-western Kashmir. Though the operation, which also involved Pakistan's NLI & SSG, was a well planned and executed one, Indian Army's swift counter-attack, coupled with worldwide condemnation, resulted in an immediate withdrawal of Pakistani troops and a military coup which placed Pervez Musharraf as the President of Pakistan. Pakistani columnist Ayaz Amir remarked Kargil was "a piece of folly which only a Homer writing of another Trojan War can do full justice to.</snip>
French Egypt and American Iraq can be considered bookends on the history of modern imperialism in the Middle East. The Bush administration's already failed version of the conquest of Iraq is, of course, on everyone's mind; while the French conquest of Egypt, now more than two centuries past, is all too little remembered, despite having been led by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose career has otherwise hardly languished in obscurity. There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures, not least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery, invoking the spirit of liberty, security, and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts.
The French general and the American president do not much resemble one another--except perhaps in the way the prospect of conquest in the Middle East appears to have put fire in their veins and in their unappealing tendency to believe their own propaganda (or at least to keep repeating it long after it became completely implausible). Both leaders invaded and occupied a major Arabic-speaking Muslim country; both harbored dreams of a "Greater Middle East"; both were surprised to find themselves enmeshed in long, bitter, debilitating guerrilla wars. Neither genuinely cared about grassroots democracy, but both found its symbols easy to invoke for gullible domestic publics. Substantial numbers of their new subjects quickly saw, however, that they faced occupations, not liberations.
My own work on Bonaparte's lost year in Egypt began in the mid-1990s, and I had completed about half of Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East before September 11, 2001. I had no way of knowing then that a book on such a distant, scholarly subject would prove an allegory for Bush's Iraq War. Nor did I guess that the United States would give old-style colonialism in the Middle East one last try, despite clear signs that the formerly colonized would no longer put up with such acts and had, in the years since World War II, gained the means to resist them.
The Republic Militant Goes to War
In June of 1798, as his enormous flotilla--36,000 soldiers, thousands of sailors, and hundreds of scientists on 12 ships of the line--swept inexorably toward the Egyptian coast, the young General Napoleon Bonaparte issued a grandiose communiqué to the bewildered and seasick troops he was about to march into the desert without canteens or reasonable supplies of water. He declared, "Soldiers! You are about to undertake a conquest, the effects of which on civilization and commerce are incalculable."
The prediction was as tragically inaccurate in its own way as the pronouncement George W. Bush issued some two centuries later, on May 1, 2003, also from the deck of a great ship of the line, the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln. "Today," he said, "we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians."
Both men were convinced that their invasions were announcing new epochs in human history. Of the military vassals of the Ottoman Empire who then ruled Egypt, Bonaparte predicted: "The Mameluke Beys who favor exclusively English commerce, whose extortions oppress our merchants, and who tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile, a few days after our arrival will no longer exist."
Bonaparte's laundry list of grievances about them consisted of three charges. First, the beys were, in essence, enablers of France's primary enemy at that time, the British monarchy which sought to strangle the young French republic in its cradle. Second, the rulers of Egypt were damaging France's own commerce by extorting taxes and bribes from its merchants in Cairo and Alexandria. Third, the Mamluks ruled tyrannically, having never been elected, and oppressed their subjects whom Bonaparte intended to liberate.
This holy trinity of justifications for imperialism--that the targeted state is collaborating with an enemy of the republic, is endangering the positive interests of the nation, and lacks legitimacy because its rule is despotic--would all be trotted out over the subsequent two centuries by a succession of European and American leaders whenever they wanted to go on the attack. One implication of these familiar rhetorical turns of phrase has all along been that democracies have a license to invade any country they please, assuming it has the misfortune to have an authoritarian regime.
George W. Bush, of course, hit the same highlights in his "mission accomplished" speech, while announcing on the Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" in Iraq "had ended." "The liberation of Iraq," he proclaimed, "is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding." He put Saddam Hussein's secular, Arab nationalist Baath regime and the radical Muslim terrorists of al-Qaeda under the sign of September 11th, insinuating that Iraq was allied with the primary enemy of the United States and so posed an urgent menace to its security. (In fact, captured Baath Party documents show that Saddam's fretting security forces, on hearing that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had entered Iraq, put out an all points bulletin on him, imagining--not entirely correctly--that he had al-Qaeda links.) Likewise, Bush promised that Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction" (which existed only in his own fevered imagination) would be tracked down, again implying that Iraq posed a threat to the interests and security of the U.S., just as Bonaparte had claimed that the Mamluks menaced France.
According to the president, Saddam's overthrown government had lacked legitimacy, while the new Iraqi government, to be established by a foreign power, would truly represent the conquered population. "We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq," Bush pledged, "as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people." Bonaparte, too, established governing councils at the provincial and national level, staffing them primarily with Sunni clergymen, declaring them more representative of the Egyptian people than the beys and emirs of the slave soldiery who had formerly ruled that province of the Ottoman Empire.
For a democracy to conduct a brutal military occupation against another country in the name of liberty seems, on the face of it, too contradictory to elicit more than hoots of derision at the hypocrisy of it all. Yet, the militant republic, ready to launch aggressive war in the name of "democracy," is everywhere in modern history, despite the myth that democracies do not typically wage wars of aggression. Ironically, some absolutist regimes, like those of modern Iran, were remarkably peaceable, if left alone by their neighbors. In contrast, republican France invaded Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Egypt in its first decade (though it went on the offensive in part in response to Austrian and Prussian moves to invade France). The United States attacked Mexico, the Seminoles and other Native polities, Hawaii, the Spanish Empire, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in just the seven-plus decades from 1845 to the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I.
Freedom and authoritarianism are nowadays taken to be stark antonyms, the provinces of heroes and monsters. Those closer to the birth of modern republics were comforted by no such moral clarity. In Danton's Death, the young Romantic playwright Georg Büchner depicted the radical French revolutionary and proponent of executing enemies of the Republic, Maximilien Robespierre, whipping up a Parisian crowd with the phrase, "The revolutionary regime is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." And nowhere has liberty proved more oppressive than when deployed against a dictatorship abroad; for, as Büchner also had that famed "incorruptible" devotee of state terror observe, "In a Republic only republicans are citizens; Royalists and foreigners are enemies."
That sunlit May afternoon on the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush seconded Büchner's Robespierre. "Because of you," he exhorted the listening sailors of an aircraft carrier whose planes had just dropped 1.6 million pounds of ordnance on Iraq, "our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free."
Security for the republic had already proved ample justification to launch a war the previous March, even though Iraq was a poor, weak, ramshackle Third World country, debilitated by a decade of sanctions imposed by the United Nations and the United States, without so much as potable drinking water or an air force. Similarly, the Mamluks of Egypt--despite the sky-high taxes and bribes they demanded of some French merchants--hardly constituted a threat to French security.
The overthrow of a tyrannical regime and the liberation of an oppressed people were constant refrains in the shipboard addresses of both the general and the president, who felt that the liberated owed them a debt of gratitude. Bonaparte lamented that the beys "tyrannize over the unfortunate inhabitants of the Nile"; or, as one of his officers, Captain Horace Say, opined, "The people of Egypt were most wretched. How will they not cherish the liberty we are bringing them?" Similarly, Bush insisted, "Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food and water and air. Everywhere that freedom arrives, humanity rejoices; and everywhere that freedom stirs, let tyrants fear."
Not surprisingly, expectations that the newly conquered would exhibit gratitude to their foreign occupiers cropped up repeatedly in the dispatches and letters of men on the spot who advocated a colonial forward policy. President Bush put this dramatically in 2007, long after matters had not proceeded as expected: "We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That's the problem here in America: They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq."
Liberty in this two-century old rhetorical tradition, moreover, was more than just a matter of rights and the rule of law. Proponents of various forms of liberal imperialism saw tyranny as a source of poverty, since arbitrary rulers could just usurp property at will and so make economic activity risky, as well as opening the public to crushing and arbitrary taxes that held back commerce. The French quartermaster Francois Bernoyer wrote of the Egyptian peasantry: "Their dwellings are adobe huts, which prosperity, the daughter of liberty, will now allow them to abandon." Bush took up the same theme on the Abraham Lincoln: "Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life."
"Heads Must Roll"
In both eighteenth century Egypt and twenty-first century Iraq, the dreary reality on the ground stood as a reproach to, if not a wicked satire upon, these high-minded pronouncements. The French landed at the port of Alexandria on July 1, 1798. Two and a half weeks later, as the French army advanced along the Nile toward Cairo, a unit of Gen. Jean Reynier's division met opposition from 1,800 villagers, many armed with muskets. Sgt. Charles Francois recalled a typical scene. After scaling the village walls and "firing into those crowds," killing "about 900 men," the French confiscated the villagers' livestock--"camels, donkeys, horses, eggs, cows, sheep"--then "finished burning the rest of the houses, or rather the huts, so as to provide a terrible object lesson to these half-savage and barbarous people."
On July 24, Bonaparte's Army of the Orient entered Cairo and he began reorganizing his new subjects. He grandiosely established an Egyptian Institute for the advancement of science and gave thought to reforming police, courts, and law. But terror lurked behind everything he did. He wrote Gen. Jacques Menou, who commanded the garrison at the Mediterranean port of Rosetta, saying, "The Turks [Egyptians] can only be led by the greatest severity. Every day I cut off five or six heads in the streets of Cairo.... [T]o obey, for them, is to fear." (Mounting severed heads on poles for viewing by terrified passers-by was another method the French used in Egypt...)
That August, the Delta city of Mansura rose up against a small French garrison of about 120 men, chasing them into the countryside, tracking the blue coats down, and methodically killing all but two of them. In early September, the Delta village of Sonbat, inhabited in part by Bedouin of the western Dirn tribe, also rose up against the Europeans. Bonaparte instructed one of his generals, "Burn that village! Make a terrifying example of it." After the French army had indeed crushed the rebellious peasants and chased away the Bedouin, Gen. Jean-Antoine Verdier reported back to Bonaparte with regard to Sonbat, "You ordered me to destroy this lair. Very well, it no longer exists."
The most dangerous uprisings confronting the French were, however, in Cairo. In October, much of the city mobilized to attack the more than 20,000 French troops occupying the capital. The revolt was especially fierce in the al-Husayn district, where the ancient al-Azhar madrassa (or seminary) trained 14,000 students, where the city's most sacred mosque stood, and where wealth was concentrated in the merchants and guilds of the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. At the same time, the peasants and Bedouin of the countryside around Cairo rose in rebellion, attacking the small garrisons that had been deployed to pacify them.
Bonaparte put down this Egyptian "revolution" with the utmost brutality, subjecting urban crowds to artillery barrages. He may have had as many rebels executed in the aftermath as were killed in the fighting. In the countryside, his officers' launched concerted campaigns to decimate insurgent villages. At one point, the French are said to have brought 900 heads of slain insurgents to Cairo in bags and ostentatiously dumped them out before a crowd in one of that city's major squares to instill Cairenes with terror. (Two centuries later, the American public would come to associate decapitations by Muslim terrorists in Iraq with the ultimate in barbarism, but even then hundreds such beheadings were not carried out at once.)
The American deployment of terror against the Iraqi population has, of course, dwarfed anything the French accomplished in Egypt by orders of magnitude. After four mercenaries, one a South African, were killed in Falluja in March of 2004 and their bodies desecrated, President Bush is alleged to have said "heads must roll" in retribution.
An initial attack on the city faltered when much of the Iraqi government threatened to resign and it was clear major civilian casualties would result. The crushing of the city was, however, simply put off until after the American presidential election in November. When the assault, involving air power and artillery, came, it was devastating, damaging two-thirds of the city's buildings and turning much of its population into refugees. (As a result, thousands of Fallujans still live in the desert in tent villages with no access to clean water.)
Bush must have been satisfied. Heads had rolled. More often, faced with opposition, the U.S. Air Force simply bombed already-occupied cities, a technology Bonaparte (mercifully) lacked. The strategy of ruling by terror and swift, draconian punishment for acts of resistance was, however, the same in both cases.
The British sank much of the French fleet on August 1, 1798, marooning Bonaparte and his troops in their newly conquered land. In the spring of 1799, the French army tried--and failed--to break out through Syria; after which Bonaparte himself chose the better part of valor. He slipped out of Egypt late that summer, returning to France. There, he would swiftly stage a coup and come to power as First Consul, giving him the opportunity to hone his practice of bringing freedom to other countries--this time in Europe. By 1801, joint British-Ottoman forces had defeated the French in Egypt, who were transported back to their country on British vessels. This first Western invasion of the Middle East in modern times had ended in serial disasters that Bonaparte would misrepresent to the French public as a series of glorious triumphs. Ending the Era of Liberal Imperialism
Between 1801 and 2003 stretched endless decades in which colonialism proved a plausible strategy for European powers in the Middle East, including the French enterprise in Algeria (1830-1962) and the British veiled protectorate over Egypt (1882-1922). In these years, European militaries and their weaponry were so advanced, and the means of resistance to which Arab peasants had access so limited, that colonial governments could be imposed.
That imperial moment passed with celerity after World War II, in part because the masses of the Third World joined political parties, learned to read, and--with how-to-do-it examples all around them--began to mount political resistance to foreign occupations of every sort. While the twenty-first century American arsenal has many fancy, exceedingly destructive toys in it, nothing has changed with regard to the ability of colonized peoples to network socially and, sooner or later, push any foreign occupying force out.
Bonaparte and Bush failed because both launched their operations at moments when Western military and technological superiority was not assured. While Bonaparte's army had better artillery and muskets, the Egyptians had a superb cavalry and their old muskets were serviceable enough for purposes of sniping at the enemy. They also had an ally with advanced weaponry and the desire to use it--the British Navy.
In 2007, the high-tech U.S. military--as had been true in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as was true for the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s--is still vulnerable to guerrilla tactics and effective low-tech weapons of resistance such as roadside bombs. Even more effective has been the guerrillas' social warfare, their success in making Iraq ungovernable through the promotion of clan and sectarian feuds, through targeted bombings and other attacks, and through sabotage of the Iraqi infrastructure.
From the time of Bonaparte to that of Bush, the use of the rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny, of uplift versus decadence, appears to have been a constant among imperialists from republics--and has remained domestically effective in rallying support for colonial wars. The despotism (but also the weakness) of the Mamluks and of Saddam Hussein proved sirens practically calling out for Western interventions. According to the rhetoric of liberal imperialism, tyrannical regimes are always at least potentially threats to the Republic, and so can always be fruitfully overthrown in favor of rule by a Western military. After all, that military is invariably imagined as closer to liberty since it serves an elected government. (Intervention is even easier to justify if the despots can be portrayed, however implausibly, as allied with an enemy of the republic.)
For both Bush and Bonaparte, the genteel diction of liberation, rights, and prosperity served to obscure or justify a major invasion and occupation of a Middle Eastern land, involving the unleashing of slaughter and terror against its people. Military action would leave towns destroyed, families displaced, and countless dead. Given the ongoing carnage in Iraq, President Bush's boast that, with "new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians," now seems not just hollow but macabre. The equation of a foreign military occupation with liberty and prosperity is, in the cold light of day, no less bizarre than the promise of war with virtually no civilian casualties.
It is no accident that many of the rhetorical strategies employed by George W. Bush originated with Napoleon Bonaparte, a notorious spinmeister and confidence man. At least Bonaparte looked to the future, seeing clearly the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the likelihood that European Powers would be able to colonize its provinces. Bonaparte's failure in Egypt did not forestall decades of French colonial success in Algeria and Indochina, even if that era of imperial triumph could not, in the end, be sustained in the face of the political and social awakening of the colonized. Bush's neocolonialism, on the other hand, swam against the tide of history, and its failure is all the more criminal for having been so predictable.
To Invoke Vietnam Was a Blunder Too Far for Bush The Presidents's crass comparison between Iraq and war in south east Asia was the most ludicrous misreading of history Christopher Hitchens http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2156380,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12
How do I dislike President George Bush? Let me count the ways. Most of them have to do with his contented assumption that 'faith' is, in and of itself, a virtue. This self-satisfied mentality helps explain almost everything, from the smug expression on his face to the way in which, as governor of Texas, he signed all those death warrants without losing a second's composure.
It explains the way in which he embraced ex-KGB goon Vladimir Putin, citing as the basis of a beautiful relationship the fact that Putin was wearing a crucifix. (Has Putin been seen wearing that crucifix before or since? Did his advisers tell him that the President of the United States was that easy a pushover?)
It also explains the unforgivable intervention that Bush made into the private life of the Schiavo family: leaving his Texas ranch to try and keep 'alive' a woman whose autopsy showed that her brain had melted to below flatline a long time before. Here is a man who believes the 'jury' is still 'out' on whether we evolved as a species, who regards stem cell research as something profane, who affects the odd belief that Islam is 'a religion of peace'. However that may be, I always agreed with him on one secular question, that the regime of Saddam Hussein was long overdue for removal. I know some critics of the Iraq intervention attribute this policy, too, to religious motives (ranging from messianic, born-again Christian piety to the activity of a surreptitious Jewish/Zionist cabal: take your pick).
In this real-world argument, there is a very strong temptation for opponents of the war to invoke the lessons of Vietnam. I must have written thousands of words attempting to show that there is absolutely no analogy between the two conflicts.
Then, addressing the convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week, the President came thundering down the pike to announce that a defeat in Iraq would be - guess what? - another Vietnam. As my hand smacks my brow, and as I ask myself not for the first time if Mr Bush suffers from some sort of political death wish, I quickly restate the reasons why he is wrong to join with his most venomous and ignorant critics in making this case.
1) The Vietminh, later the Vietnamese NLF, were allies of the United States and Britain against the Axis during the Second World War. The Iraqi Baath party was on the other side.
2) Ho Chi Minh quoted Thomas Jefferson in proclaiming Vietnam's own declaration of independence, a note that has hardly been struck in Baathist or jihadist propaganda.
3) Vietnam was resisting French colonialism and had defeated it by 1954 at Dien Bien Phu; the real 'war' was therefore over before the US even landed troops in the country.
4) The subsequent conflict was fought to preserve an imposed partition of a country striving to reunify itself; if anything, the Iraqi case is the reverse.
5) The Vietnamese leadership appealed to the UN: the Saddamists and their jihadist allies murdered the first UN envoy to arrive in Iraq, saying that he was fit only for death because he had assisted in securing the independence of East Timor from Indonesia.
6) Vietnam never threatened any other country; Iraq under Saddam invaded two of its neighbours and declared one of them (Kuwait) to be part of Iraq itself.
7) Vietnam was a victim of chemical and ecological warfare; Iraq was the perpetrator of such illegal methods and sought to develop even worse nuclear and biological ones.
8) Vietnam neither sponsored nor encouraged terrorist tactics beyond its borders; Iraq under Saddam was a haven for Abu Nidal and other random killers and its 'insurgents' now proclaim war on Hindus, Jews, unbelievers and the wrong sort of Muslim.
9) There has for years been a 'people's war' fought by genuine guerrillas in Iraq; it is the war of liberation conducted by Kurdish fighters against genocide and dictatorship. Inconveniently for all analogies, these fighters are ranged on the side of the US and Britain.
10) The Iraqi Communist party and the Iraqi labour movement advocated the overthrow of Saddam (if not necessarily by Bush), a rather conspicuous difference from the situation in Indochina. These forces still form a part of the tenuous civil society that is fighting to defend itself against the parties of God.
11) The American-sponsored regimes in Vietnam tended, among other things, to be strongly identified with one confessional minority (Catholic) to the exclusion of secular, nationalist and Buddhist forces. The elected government in Iraq may have a sectarian hue, but at least it draws upon hitherto repressed majority populations - Kurds and Shias - and at least the American embassy works as a solvent upon religious and ethnic divisions rather than an inciter of them.
12) President Eisenhower admitted that if there had ever been a fair election in Vietnam, it would have been won by Ho Chi Minh; the Baath party's successors refused to participate in the Iraqi elections and their jihadist allies declared that democracy was an alien concept and threatened all voters with murder.
13) The Americans in Vietnam employed methods ('search and destroy'; 'body count') and weapons (napalm, Agent Orange) that targeted civilians. Today, those who make indiscriminate war on the innocent show their hand on the streets of Baghdad and are often the proxies of neighbouring dictatorships or of international gangster organisations.
The above list is by no means exhaustive, but will do, I think, as a caution against any glib invocation of historical comparisons. One might add that among the results of the Vietnamese revolution was an admittedly crude form of market socialism, none the less wedded to ideas of modernisation; a strong resistance to Chinese expansionism (one excuse for Washington's invasion); and a military expedition to depose the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
I cannot see how any self-respecting Republican can look at this record without wincing and moaning with shame or how any former friend of the Vietnamese can equate them with either a fascist dictatorship or a nihilistic Islamist death-squad campaign. And now Bush has joined forces with anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan in making the two struggles morally equivalent.
It is true that the collapse of the doomed American adventure in Indochina was followed by massive repression and reprisal, especially in Cambodia, and by the exile of huge numbers of talented Vietnamese. But even this grim total was small compared to the huge losses exacted by the war itself. In Iraq, the genocide, repression, aggression and cultural obliteration preceded the coalition's intervention and had been condemned by a small but impressive library of UN resolutions. Thus, the argument from 'bloodbath', either past or future, has to be completely detached from any consideration of the Vietnamese example.
Bush made his speech just as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, a distinguished socialist and humanitarian, visited Baghdad and embraced some Iraqi and Kurdish freedom fighters, such as President Jalal Talabani, the leader of a party that is a member of the Socialist International. It takes a special kind of political and moral idiocy to choose such a moment to wax nostalgic for America's inheritance of a moribund French colonialism in Indochina. If one question is rightly settled in the American and, indeed, the international memory, it is that the Vietnam War was at best a titanic blunder and at worst a campaign of atrocity and aggression.
But not all the ironies are at Bush's expense. Change only the name of the analogous country and it becomes fairly clear that in Iraq we are fighting not the Vietcong, but the Khmer Rouge, as the Vietcong eventually had to do on our behalf. The logic of history is pitiless and Bush is not the only one who will find this out.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great
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