Four Dead in Ohio

Forty years ago today students at gathered on the campus of a university to protest the Vietnam War. This likely happened on campuses all across the country on that day, but we only know of one protest from the 4th of May 1970. And it is not a protest at an elite, Ivy League institution like Columbia, or of a hotbed of activism such as the University of California at Berkeley. This protest took place at Ohio's Kent State University, a mid-tier school that not one American in a thousand knew existed prior to that terrible morning.

You know the story even if only from the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song "Four Dead in Ohio." James Allen Rhodes, Governor of Ohio, asked President Nixon to call in the National Guard. That set in motion a horrifying series of events leading to the death of four young people, not all of whom were at all involved in the protests. Kent State captures the tumult of the era, the feeling of a society on edge and on the verge of collapsing onto itself. One need not have opposed the Vietnam War, or to see it as America's greatest foreign policy misadventure, to understand just how wrong things had to have gone on that day for soldiers wearing the American uniform to open fire on unarmed protesters.

It's Ok To Be Both Best and Bright

This Banjamin Wallace-Wells article in The New Republic argues that we have learned the wrong lessons from David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. To put it in simple terms, the lesson is not that getting the most talented and smartest people is somehow a bad thing but rather that during the Kennedy and Johnson era the "best and brightest" were brilliant generalists and not specialists. Despite the seeming condemnation of the New Frontier whiz kids, the problem with American Vietnam policy was still a lack of expertise, not its excess.

Iraq and Vietnam: The Quagmire of Analogies

So now Iraq is like Vietnam. When for so long war supporters have fulminated and sputtered that it is not. And now the anti-war masses will argue that Iraq is not like Vietnam. When for so long they have fulminated and sputtered that it is.

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.

Quick Hits

Two worthwhile pieces today over at TNR online:

Rick Perlstein uncovers what he calls "the most perversely successful propaganda campaign in American history," namely that liberals sold out Vietnam in the last years of that conflict, abandoning our troops in a time of need and thus stealing victory in that conflict.

Meanwhile Joshua Kurlantzick explains why conservatives, for all their anti-State bombast, actually love, or at least need, Foggy Bottom. It comes down to reality versus rhetoric, not surprisingly. It is easy to lambaste the State department, but the reality is that the rle of the foreign service is vital, and conservatives in power know this as well as anyone. But why let facts get in the way of a good meme?