This is Bush’s Vietnam - the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place

There was no popular clamour for war. If we had not gone to
war, few Americans would even have noticed

This has been a rough time for Americans. Just a year ago,
Americans and Iraqis triumphantly pulled down the statue of
Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. A year later, a spreading anti-
American insurgency ripped across Iraq, accompanied by Iraqi
mobs mutilating dead Americans and shouting hatred of the
occupiers. An American year of miscalculations and
misjudgements seems to have led Iraq into a chaos bordering
on anarchy.

Senator Kennedy’s crisp assertion - "Iraq is George Bush’s
Vietnam" - crystallises emotions in the United States and
stirs powerful memories. "Failure is not an option" had been
a favourite Pentagon cliché, but Pat Buchanan, an
isolationist of the old school, now declares, "what Fallujah
and the Shia attacks tell us is that failure is now an
option."

A respected professional diplomat Morton Abramowitz, asks
"Does Iraq Matter?" in The National Interest, a sober
conservative journal. "America’s pre-eminent power position
in the world," Ambassador Abramowitz argues, "can endure an
early withdrawal from Iraq. US forces are so overstretched
that a withdrawal might enhance our overall power position
and our capacity to do more about Osama bin Laden and other
terrorist groups." After all, did US withdrawal from Vietnam
seriously undermine the American position in the world?

Vietnam and Iraq are dissimilar in vital respects. In Vietnam
we Americans inserted ourselves in an ongoing civil war; in
Iraq we imposed war on the country for reasons that turned
out to be false. But Vietnam and Iraq are indeed similar in
the "quagmire" effect - and in the lack of historical
experience and cultural knowledge and the consequent
ignorance and arrogance that lead us into quagmires.

Meanwhile a battle of the books is taking place for the
hearts and minds of the American people. Against All Enemies
an indictment of the Bush administration by Richard Clarke,
counter-terrorism director for Presidents Clinton and Bush,
tops the New York Times best-seller list. Second is Deliver
us from Evil by Sean Hannity, a television pundit who defines
"evil" as liberalism. The fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth and
10th books on the list are anti-Bush; the ninth and 14th are
anti-liberal. A new contender, moving to the top, is Worse
than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W Bush by
John W Dean, one time counsel to President Nixon.

Of course 2004 is the year when Americans indulge in the
quadrennial ritual of electing a president. The situation
today is that roughly 45 per cent of the electorate,
according to most polls, love George Bush; and roughly 45 per
cent loathe him. Most of the 90 per cent have made up their
minds and are unlikely to change their votes.

The remaining 10 per cent consists of undecided independents,
largely in the suburbs, economically conservative but
culturally tolerant. The outcome in November will depend
partly on that 10 per cent. It will also depend on the
turnout of each candidate’s basic source of support. The Bush
base lies in the religious right; the Kerry base lies in the
anti-corporate left. The dilemma each candidate faces is that
the positions he takes to please his base may well displease
the undecided 10 per cent.

Thus President Bush, worried about his base, seeks to
reassure the religious right by proposing an amendment to the
US Constitution banning homosexual marriage. That will very
likely hurt him among the undecided 10 per cent, who think
that government should not interfere with private lives.

Senator Kerry has a similar dilemma. He faces the challenge
of Ralph Nader, the anti-corporate crusader, who four years
ago took enough votes away from the Democrats to defeat Al
Gore and elect George Bush. Yet Senator Kerry, in moving to
the left in order to defend himself against Nader, risks
upsetting the undecided 10 per cent, mostly moderate in their
views.

But will not the war be the decisive issue? It is, after all,
President Bush’s war. There was no popular clamour for a war
against Iraq. If we had not gone to war, few Americans would
have cared. Few would even have noticed.

Why was President Bush, as both Richard Clarke and the former
Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill have testified, so
obsessed with Iraq? I do not think it is for petty reasons.
Mr Bush very likely buys into the neo-conservative fantasy
that the victory of democracy in Iraq will democratise the
entire Islamic world and establish his own place in history.
"A free Iraq," as President Bush said yesterday, "will stand
as an example to reformers across the Middle East."

Other reasons - oil, Israel, the search for military bases in
place of Saudi Arabia, liberation of Iraq from a monstrous
tyrant - are secondary compared to the historic mission for
which the Almighty has chosen him.

To accomplish the mission, Mr Bush has transformed the basis
of American foreign policy. For the nearly half century of
the Cold War, US foreign policy was founded on containment
plus deterrence. Mr Bush scrapped that. The new basis of US
foreign policy is preventive war. As President Bush has said,
"We must take the battle to the enemy... and confront the
worst threats before they emerge."

The immediate reason that Mr Bush opened Pandora’s box in the
Middle East and invaded Iraq was his moral certitude that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he
was working in close partnership with Osama bin Laden and al-
Qa’ida. Those convictions turned out to be delusions. This
denouement does great harm to Mr Bush’s credibility and to
that of the United States; it has got us into a ghastly mess
in Iraq; and it has diverted attention, resources and
military might from the war that should have commanded the
Bush administration’s highest priority - the Afghan war
against al-Qa’ida and international terrorism. Meanwhile
Afghanistan is a mess too. Mr Bush chose the wrong war in the
wrong place at the wrong time.

The impact of the war on the election is hard to predict. In
international crises, the American instinct is to rally round
the flag and the President - for a while at least. Thus far,
the protests against the war have not been extensive. But
Fallujah has been compared to the Viet Cong’s Tet offensive
in 1968, which set in motion a process that drove President
Lyndon B Johnson from the White House.

The war’s impact depends on the success of the American
occupation in stopping the disintegration of Iraq and
achieving a measure of stability. It depends on the possible
capture of Osama bin Laden. It depends on the possible trial
of Saddam Hussein. It depends on all sorts of unforeseeable
variables. As Harold Wilson used to say, "In politics, a week
is a very long time." Six months is an eternity.

In a democracy, elected leaders must be held accountable. The
war on Iraq was a matter of presidential choice, not of
national necessity. The rekindled memory of Vietnam calls to
mind a highly decorated young naval lieutenant returning from
Vietnam named John Forbes Kerry, who put a poignant question
to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 22 April 1971:
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a
mistake?"

[The author is a former Special Assistant to President
Kennedy, 1961-4, and author of ’The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam
and American democracy, 1941-1966’]

Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=511530