How is this: In some ways the Iraq War loosely resembles some aspects of Vietnam. In a huge number of ways it does not. That will prove deeply dissatisfying to ideologues who are unwilling to make comparisons except for when it helps them to make some larger point to lambaste the other side. A moderate stance on the analogy is a lot more true than the perspective of those who now argue that Iraq is like Vietnam in order to try to pin prospective failure on a party that was not in power in any branch of government in the first four years of a war that is now not quite four-and-a-half years old. And it is a lot more true than the stance of those who have tried to invoke Vietnam as shorthand for "bad war."
In our constant quest to develop a usable past, we almost always do so the wrong way. The reality is that in terms of planning at strategy and long-term approaches, this war in Iraq is, like nearly all wars, sui generis. At this point the only quagmire that seems apt is the one that ideologues on both sides find themselves mired in as a result of their desperate attempts to score points against those with the temerity to disagree with them.
4 comments:
I think that the biggest problem is the way that the analogy is used as something that supposedly ends an argument, rather than serves to illuminate one. If you were a political scientist looking at how a war of choice can be waged in order to create a democracy, it would be ludicrous not to use both Iraq and Vietnam as evidence of what barriers there are to such a policy.
Goodlib --
I've started expanding this into a longer piece on the pitfalls of historical analogies in order to address some of these questions in more depth. I don't know if the freshness date has passed, however.
Cheers --
dcat
In any conflict there will inevitably be apparent similarities and differences. The use of these to determine the characteristics of one or the other is, in my opinion, largely valueless. Almost invariably such comparisons are used to make a case one way or the other – as Goodlib says; to end an argument. Such comparisons appear to me to stifle constructive and effective discussion about topical issues by allowing debate to become unfocussed. Clearly, nothing that happened in Vietnam has stopped the Iraq conflict from becoming so difficult and it is hard to see the abandonment of Vietnam as being a model for the evacuation of Iraq. Just possibly it might have been better to have left Iraq alone and concentrated on Afghanistan. I’m just saying.
Steve --
The overwhelmong majority of historical analogies in the public sphere are the result of cherrypicking and have almost nothing to do with a search for truth, so, as you say, are almost valueless.
Cheers --
dcat
Post a Comment