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Thursday, September 22, 2005

AP has sworn off the Kool-Aid
Posted by Jill | 6:21 AM
...at least for now.

Six months ago you NEVER would have seen a headline like this from ANYONE in the MSM:

Bush's Words on Iraq Echo LBJ in 1967

Bush officials bristle at the suggestion the war in Iraq might look anything like Vietnam. Yet just as today's anti-war protests recall memories of yesteryear, President Bush's own words echo those of President Johnson in 1967, a pivotal year for the U.S. in Vietnam.

"America is committed to the defense of South Vietnam until an honorable peace can be negotiated," Johnson told the Tennessee Legislature on March 15, 1967. Despite the obstacles to victory, the president said, "We shall stay the course."

After 14 Marines died in a roadside bombing on Aug. 3, Bush declared: "We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. And the job is this: We'll help the Iraqis develop a democracy."

The two wars were waged quite differently even though they shared similar aims.

About 500,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam in 1967 after a three-year buildup, compared with about 140,000 in Iraq today. Heavy aerial bombing was a primary U.S. strategy in Vietnam while Iraq, after the initial campaign of "shock and awe," has been mainly a ground war. The U.S. negotiated for peace in Vietnam, but there is no single entity with which to negotiate in Iraq.

"The differences are so notable that it would take too long to list them," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld remarked recently.

Knowing the long, painful and divisive Vietnam War ended with an unceremonious U.S. withdrawal and the fall of South Vietnam, administration officials have blanched at comparisons with Iraq. The administration declined to comment on comparisons between the rhetoric of Johnson and Bush.

Johnson's main arguments were much like those Bush has employed: War was justified to protect the U.S. and to encourage freedom everywhere. When faced with mounting losses on the battlefield, both presidents offered the dead as a reason to keep fighting.

"When a war is long-lived and the outcome is not demonstrably positive, the lines of argument available to a president are seriously constrained," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "Democrat or Republican, 1960s or early part of the 21st century, you're going to hear a common rhetoric."

South Vietnam, politically unstable because of internal violence and corruption, stumbled toward elections to adopt a constitution and to select officials — not unlike the process Iraq is undergoing.

"Our nation was not born easily. There were times in those years of the 18th century when it seemed as if we might not be born at all," Johnson said in a speech on Aug. 16, 1967.

"Given that background, we ought not to be astonished that this struggle in Vietnam continues," Johnson said. "We ought not to be astonished that that nation, wracked by a war of insurgency and beset by its neighbors to the north, has not already emerged, full-blown, as a perfect model of two-party democracy."

Bush, too, has compared Iraq's difficulties in determining its political future to postcolonial America's.


But of course, when you're as incurious and ignorant of history as George W. Bush is, and when you're as consistently plastered as he was in 1967, you wouldn't even be aware that you're channelling LBJ.

There is one difference, though, aside from party. LBJ also signed the Civil Rights Act, despite knowing that it meant the end of the Democratic Party in the south -- because it was the right thing to do. Vietnam was folly, but on domestic policy, he may have been one of our greatest presidents...and in 1967, the frame of reference was WWII. A president of LBJ's age would understandably frame the idea of American infallibility in war against that reference. A president today has Vietnam as a frame of reference -- and ought to know better. As for domestic policy, well, take a look around you -- nothing but debt as far as the eye can see; a diminishing middle-class, a shrinking base of decent-paying jobs, an environment in shambles, and a nation polarized to an unprecedented degree since the Civil War.
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