Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “NYT: Analogies Are Meaningless (Unless They Favor the Left)”

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August 28, 2007

NYT: Analogies Are Meaningless (Unless They Favor the Left)

Hatched by Dafydd

The New York Times adopts a particularly cynical, even arch position on analogies: They propound the case that only highly trained historians can make proper analogies of one war to another... and even then, only when those historians are reliably liberal (e.g., teaching classes at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government).

The case is weak. Not once does the Times actually address specifics of the analogy that has them particularly vexed: President George W. Bush's recitation of what happened after our abandonment of Vietnam, as an object lesson of what would surely follow if we abandoned Iraq today. Rather than knock down that claim per se, the elite media (in the avatar of the Times) appear to believe that they need only sneer at the very idea of analogies in general, scoff at the suggestion that Bush knows anything about history... and the rest will follow in a burst of some new class of logic hitherto unknown in the world of rhetoric.

To begin with, they must naturally dispute that Bush knows what he is talking about when he recounts what happened after 1973. Since not even the New York Times can plausibly deny the Vietnamese "reeducation" camps, the Cambodian "killing fields," or the Boat People who washed upon our shores, they must sever the causal connection as best they can.

Again, they cannot simply come out and say there was no link -- that all these things would have happened even if we'd still had hundreds of thousands of troops in South Vietnam -- because that would be patently absurd. So this is the best they can do; and they seem to think it pretty clever indeed:

President Bush sent historians scurrying toward their keyboards last week when he defended the United States occupation of Iraq by arguing that the pullout from Vietnam had led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. His speech was rhetorical jujitsu, an attempt to throw back at his critics their favorite historical analogy -- Vietnam -- for the Iraq war. His argument aroused considerable skepticism from historians and political scientists, who note that the United States’ military action in Vietnam was among the factors that destabilized Cambodia.

Probably true, but so what? The Times statement (citing unnamed "historians and political scientists") is a raging non-sequitur. Regardless of whether there would have been re-education camps and killing fields if we had simply stayed out and allowed Ho Chi Minh to swiftly conquer all of Vietnam, the proximate cause of the human catastrophe was our departure, not our arrival.

The proof is easy:

We pulled our last soldiers out of Vietnam in March of 1973; but South Vietnam did not surrender until April 1975, more than two years later.

The mass killings by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, culminating in the massacre of two million Cambodians, started in 1975 and continued until Vietnam conquered Cambodia in 1979;

And the mass waves of Vietnamese "Boat People" fleeing the victorious Communists started in the late 1970s and continued into the 1980s.

None of the horrific consequences ensued until at least two years after we left, continuing up to ten years. The Vietnam calamity did not occur while we were there but only long after we left. Not even the Times' "historians and political scientists" can deny that inconvenient truth, nor pretend not to understand its implication.

As it happens, and despite the liberal tut-tutting, George Bush's history lesson was exactly correct.

In fact, it is the Times itself that is both glib and errant in its misunderstanding of what happened in Vietnam. One can almost hear the writer of the article, David D. Kirkpatrick, chuckling knowingly as he wrote the following:

Historical analogies in public statements are especially suspect. Talking about Vietnam during the run-up to the war there, for example, United States government officials most often invoked Korea or — with increasing frequency as the escalation began — the appeasement of Hitler, according to a tally by Yuen Foong Khong, a professor of international relations at Oxford. The French retreat from Vietnam in 1954 — a precedent that augured failure — was almost never mentioned.

In private, however, the French defeat came up much more often — far more often than Munich and nearly as often as Korea, Professor Khong concluded in his 1992 book, “Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965.”

Policymakers also sometimes bat away facts that mar their analogies. Before the Vietnam War, for example, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball repeatedly reminded President Lyndon Johnson and his other aides of Vietnam’s overriding differences from both Munich and Korea. Arguing that Vietnam was “sui generis,” Ball predicted that the United States would suffer the same fate as the French in 1954.

With admirable restraint, Kirkpatrick abjures writing, "and as we all know, that's exactly what happened!" Which is good, because that's exactly what didn't happen (as Senior Greco reminds us, one should not argue about the statements a man does not make).

I wasn't kidding about the ultra-liberal Kennedy School of Government, by the way:

The Central Intelligence Agency has worried enough about the pitfalls of drawing historical analogies that two decades ago it spent $400,000 commissioning a course in the subject for senior analysts from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The Kennedy School ran the program until 2001, when the agency itself took it over.

A wealth of military historians have examined the progress of the Vietnam war, first under the "attrition of the enemy" strategy of Gen. William Westmoreland, then under the "counterinsurgency" of Gen. Creighton Abrams. Victor Davis Hanson and Max Boot have been particularly prominent.

Boot notes, for example:

• The danger of winning militarily and losing politically. In 1968, after Gen. Creighton Abrams took over as the senior U.S. military commander in South Vietnam, he began to change the emphasis from the kind of big-unit search-and-destroy tactics that Gen. William Westmoreland had favored, to the sort of population-protection strategy more appropriate for a counterinsurgency. Over the next four years, even as the total number of American combat troops declined, the communists lost ground.

By 1972 most of the south was judged secure and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the U.S. had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived. It was no less viable than South Korea, another artificial state kept in existence by force of arms over many decades. But after the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, we all but cut off South Vietnam, even while its enemies across the borders continued to be resupplied by their patrons in Moscow and Beijing.

Following in Abrams's footsteps, Gen. Petraeus is belatedly pursuing classic counterinsurgency strategies that are paying off. The danger is that American politicians will prematurely pull the plug in Iraq as they did in Vietnam. If they do so, the consequences will be even worse, since Iraq is much more important strategically than Vietnam ever was.

Defeat was not foreordained in Vietnam, Boot says; we chose defeat, though we could have chosen victory. Similarly -- and this is the point the "dummy" Bush was making -- we can choose defeat in Iraq, or we can choose victory; it's up to us.

Victor Davis Hanson disputes the Times' entire pooh-poohing of studying past wars to draw analogies to current or future conflicts. In "Why Study War?," Hanson argues (among other points) that war will always be with us:

We must abandon the naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past.

Since human societies are by nature warlike, we have no choice but to learn from yesterday's defeats to seize victory tomorrow.

Finally, we must recognize that America's enemies (such Ayman Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two) regularly use the "lessons" of our "defeat" in Vietnam thirty years ago to recruit killers of Americans today; they argue that we gave up in Vietnam, and we shall give up in Iraq. And were it up to the elite media, I believe that Zawahiri would be correct.

But it's not up to them; more than anybody else in America, it's up to the president whether we continue with a war or don't. Even in Nixon's case, he could have shifted funds around to maintain an Air-Force presence in South Vietnam and could have fought vigorously for economic aid to that country; he chose instead to allow Congress to zero-out the budget, condemning our allies in the region either to a bitter death by torture or to mad flight to get out.

Today we have a president who has chosen victory -- and a congressional majority that has chosen ignominious defeat. I'll let you know later who wins, but the early rounds are trending strongly towards the strong Executive.

So, far from waving away the president's historical excursion at the VFW, lightyears away from persuading us that military analogies are useless, the actual history of the past century tells us precisely the opposite:

That analogies can be drawn;

That they can contain important and valuable lessons for future conflicts;

And that our enemies incessantly cite our failures as defeatist lessons for future wars.

Even Zawahiri believes that America's behavior in past conflicts is a reliable guide to our future actions; so who are we to dispute so eminent an authority? Once again, the Times is full of itself... and just plain full of it.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 28, 2007, at the time of 5:17 AM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: David M

Trackbacked by The Thunder Run - Web Reconnaissance for 08/28/2007
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

The above hissed in response by: David M at August 28, 2007 8:57 AM

The following hissed in response by: Fritz

Dafydd, redundancy is not needed. Your statement, "Once again, the Times is full of itself... and just plain full of it" is an example of such redundancy. A little better editing would eliminate unnecessary words as the first part of your statement says all that is needed. However, I'll give you a pass this time in case there is someone reading this who is unfamiliar with the caviling excesses of the Times. And make no mistake, I read the linked article and caviling is what they were doing.

The above hissed in response by: Fritz at August 28, 2007 11:26 AM

The following hissed in response by: Fat Man

Even in Nixon's case, he could have shifted funds around to maintain an Air-Force presence in South Vietnam and could have fought vigorously for economic aid to that country

Watch your footing here Dafydd. Nixon resigned as President in August 1974, and the economy was in recession.

In November of that year, there was of course an election, and it was a wipe out for the Republicans.

When the new Congress voted to cut off funding of the South Vietnamese government (as you noted the American Military was no longer involved), President Ford, the only man ever to hold the office who was not elected President or Vice President, was unable to do anything about it.

The real lesson of Vietnam is that the Democrat Party are traitors who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and who should never be given a political role in the Federal Government.

The above hissed in response by: Fat Man at August 28, 2007 11:45 AM

The following hissed in response by: howardhughes

The corollary to Dafydd's deduction is that while those in America whom sought defeat and a quick retreat from Viet Nam may not have known the catastrophe that would follow, they do now know what will follow a retreat from Iraq because of the Viet Nam experience. They will bear the responsibility for the killing and mayhem following a quick withdrawal. If these liberals are truly interested in saving American lives, let them move to lower the speed limit to 40 mph, eliminate cigarettes, alter the employment characteristics of dangerous occupations in America and a myriad of other endeavors that would save far more American lives than are lost in Iraq.

The above hissed in response by: howardhughes at August 28, 2007 12:39 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Fat Man:

Watch your footing here Dafydd. Nixon resigned as President in August 1974, and the economy was in recession.

In November of that year, there was of course an election, and it was a wipe out for the Republicans.

Gerald Ford was also complicit; but my footing is sound, Fat Man. The House first passed a bill cutting off funding for the war in May of 1973; the full Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment (ending all American miltary action in Vietnam) in June of that year.

Nixon would still be president for another fourteen months -- and he had no reason to believe he had anything less than the nearly four years his reelection in 1972 promised... he didn't know he would resign a little more than a year later.

Thus, he was on notice early on that Congress was not going to fund (officially) even enough military presence to fulfill Nixon's secret promise to Le Duc Thieu that we would swoop in to save South Vietnam's bacon if the North broke their agreement and invaded. But he was embroiled in Watergate by then, and he had bigger congressmen to fry.

In fact, it was likely that very cut-off of funding -- and Nixon's acquiescence -- that prompted the NVA to invade in 1975. It was, after all, the most major topic of conversation across the two Vietnams. Our Congress not only made no secret that they would not fund any military help for South Vietnam at all, they shouted it from the rooftops.

Thus, you cannot exonerate Richard Nixon: He unquestionably knew by mid-1973 that either he would have to find black funding for air support -- or else the south would fall, sooner rather than later. As president, as the disburser of federal funds, he had ample power to suck money already appropriated for other purposes and put it to this use. If Congress wanted to sue him (or try to zero out the entire DoD budget), let them; they may win the fight, but they might not.

However, I personally believe that Nixon clung to the hope -- and may even have been bamboozled into believing -- that if he threw the entire nation of South Vietnam under the wheels of the bus, giving Democrats what they most desired in all the world (a fully Communist Vietnam and staggering victory for the Soviet Union), that a grateful Democratic Congress would spare Nixon's political life. I believe, in the end, that Richard Nixon sacrificed Vietnam to save his own sorry career.

I stand by my guns: Nixon could have set up a black-ops funding program to at least allow for close air support, if not strategic bombing, in the event the NVA broke the truce and swarmed into the south. Reagan kept the Contras alive in the face of a Congress determined to wipe them out, as their predecessors wiped out the Republic of Vietnam. Bush-43 has kept the Iraq war alive and kicking, in the face of a congressional majority hysterically determined to surrender. Both Reagan and Bush took tremendous hits to their approval ratings; but some policies are more important than politics, and the Vietnam war definitely fell into this category.

The Left is fond of saying "the personal is political." But to Nixon, the political was always personal: He always believed (and rightly so) that people were out to get him; but in 1973-1974, he simply wasn't the man he was in the late 1940s, going after Alger Hiss and revealing Helen Gahagan Douglas's membership in the Communist Party.

Nixon could no longer stand the heat... so in 1973, he tried to appease the Democrats by giving them a "victory" in Vietnam.

It didn't work.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at August 28, 2007 3:13 PM

The following hissed in response by: DaveR

"....we chose defeat."

No "we" did not. The despictable Democrats chose defeat, and with the help of the dirty rotten media, forced it on real Americans.

I get so tired of hearing what "we" did, like when some Greenpeace twit tells us now that 40 years ago "we" failed to comprehend that Three-mile Island was proof that the nuclear safety systems actually worked.

No, you twit, "we" did not fail to comprehend that - YOU did, even though most adults at the time knew full well what it meant, and tried to explain it. But the media gave the microphones only to you children and you got your way, just like you did in Vietnam.

You know what... I am getting damn sick of the media running this country! I hope they all rot in Hell, and I am getting closer every day to being willing to send them on their way!!

The above hissed in response by: DaveR at August 28, 2007 6:54 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

DaveR:

I hope they all rot in Hell, and I am getting closer every day to being willing to send them on their way!!

Not even in jest, DaveR.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh at August 29, 2007 2:11 AM

The following hissed in response by: Terrye

Well Dave, without the assistance of a lot of venal and self serving people on the right side of the aisle the Democrats would not have a shot at this at all. The Republicans are their own worse enemy, always have been, and so threatening to send people to hell will not help.

The above hissed in response by: Terrye at August 29, 2007 2:56 AM

The following hissed in response by: Rovin

Regardless of whether there would have been re-education camps and killing fields if we had simply stayed out and allowed Ho Chi Minh to swiftly conquer all of Vietnam, the proximate cause of the human catastrophe was our departure, not our arrival.

A colleague of mine caught this little tid-bit of info regarding the re-education camps and wrote Brian Williams at NBC:

Dear Mr. Williams: I know that NBC is interested in stories that are newsworthy. I think there is one that I'm sure would be of interest. A sitting U. S. Senator thinks that the reeducation camps in Vietnam, after the fall of South Vietnam, were actually beneficial for some of its "visitors." Yes, you heard me; a U.S. Senator has apparently endorsed Communist reeducation camps! On C-SPAN's Washington Journal, on Julu 19, Sen. John Kerry told a caller that some of the "visitors" to those camps are now leading thriving lives in Vietnam! To my knowledge, this is the first time a high-ranking U.S. official has had kind words to say about Communist "reeducation" camps. Now, that is certainly newsworthy, don't you think, Mr. Williams? I'm sure C-SPAN would let you borrow the tape. And I even have a suggestion for a follow-up question you could ask Sen. Kerry. Doubtless Aleksander Solzhenitsyn would not have become such a successful author and noted celebrity unless he had spent time in the gulags. Perhaps Sen. Kerry will want to endorse the Soviet gulags, as well. Please ask him. Oh, and I know what a good friend of the Senator's Joe Scarborough has become; please share this with him. Perhaps he will want to bring Sen. Kerry back on, since Mr. Scarborough thinks that the Senator has such insight into Iraq policy.

And to think this man could have Presidential?

The above hissed in response by: Rovin at August 29, 2007 3:14 AM

The following hissed in response by: MTF

My congratulations Dafydd: great post. The tortuous dynamic that eventually led to the fall of Saigon won't be repeated here, since AQ won't be willing to be complicit in our fickleness and go to Paris with us as the North Vietnamese were willing to do.

No negotiations means that AQ is committed to defeating us on the battle field, and even the Democrat party can't stop them in pursuit of their goal. In other words, despite an earnest desire to surrender the Democrats won't be able to do so.

The above hissed in response by: MTF at August 29, 2007 3:05 PM

The following hissed in response by: Laer

... who note that the United States’ military action in Vietnam was among the factors that destabilized Cambodia. (NYT)

Are we to believe that had we not gone into Vietnam, the Communist conquest would have stopped at South Vietnam, and no destabilization of Cambodia ever would have happened? It is so easy, and so useless, to project historical what-ifs.

The above hissed in response by: Laer at August 30, 2007 3:42 PM