John Quiggin has a good post over on Crooked Timber discussing the need for the Democrats to put an end to the Iraq debacle as soon as possible. Since a direct motion to end the war probably wouldn't work, Quiggin advocates that Congress repeat the tactic that brought Vietnam to an end: simply stop paying for it.
This leads to a sub-debate in the comments on whether the emerging Vietnam <=> Iraq consensus has any merit. It probably does. Still, I'm concerned at the idea that the ending-the-war options are the same for the Democrats now as they were then. I think that things are much much worse for them this time around.
For a start, the conclusion to the Vietnam disaster was a stablising moment for Vietnam itself. After all, the conflict had never really been a war of liberation. It had been an intervention in a civil war. The end of the war was a clarification of a fact that had been apparent for a long time: successive American administrations had not been trying to do the impossible and win the but rather had been shoring up the twilight of a tyrannical and unpopular proxy's regime.
The belated acceptance of this fact had only served to underline that Vietnam had been kept in ruins for longer than it would otherwise have been. Moreover, the primary consequence of the American withdrawal was reduction in misery and the political stability that comes with the restoration of civil order.
Today's problem for the Democrats (never mind for the Iraqis) is that the American pull-out will not coincide with the end of a civil war. Rather it will provide the opportunity for the various parties to the civil war that the Americans kicked off to take their conflict to a whole new level.
If George Packer is correct for instance, then Baghdad will undergo an unprecedented and pre-meditated bout of anti-Sunni ethnic cleansing. The end of American involvement, in other words, will likely be accompanied by intensified misery in Iraq.
This leaves the Democratic candidates in a bind that brings them half-way towards a succession of Vietnam era American Presidents. American involvement in Vietnam, at least if Daniel Ellsberg is to be believed, was prolonged because successive presidents didn't want to be seen as the ones who had lost the war. Better to prop the regime up than be on watch when it falls.
Problem is, assuming Bush leaves his mess for someone else to clean up, and assuming the media will be inclined to cover events post-withdrawal, it'll be very hard to for the Clinton/Obama/whoever administration to explain that the images of intensified disaster people will see will only be a result of the withdrawal to the extent that the circumstances of withdrawal were set during and straight after the invasion.
In other words, opprobrium tends to land on those in power at the time no matter whether they are responsible or not.
This, when it comes, won't be helped by the fact, as Henry Farrell points out, that the ambiguity of defeat will allow the Republican post-war narrative to remain unchanged from its Vietnam iteration. Even at its most triumphalist pitch, the right's narrative of this war has been about defeating their political opponents at home, with Iraq almost a sideshow. They won't be the first to put their losses down to liberal and fifth-columnist inspired moral turpitude at home. Most likely, the American right and their few remaining European harlequins will continue to propagate the myth that the wars they start end not in defeat but in betrayal.
American public discourse has always had a problem in thinking that suffering in Iraq was all its own. When the war finally ends, at least for them, the debate will continue as to precisely whose chickens have come home to roost.
Post new comment