Oh, NOW It's Vietnam

Seeing war apologist John O'Sullivan on Real Time with Bill Maher, it occurs to me how fundamentally dishonest these people are, how they'll use any justification to serve their needs, even one they reject wholeheartedly in other contexts.

O'Sullivan, a think-tank habitué who's never so much as touched a battlefield, pressed the now-familiar argument that, if we leave Iraq, the violence will be catastrophic and horrible. As opposed to, you know, NOW. Maher's standing parry to this is asking why anyone should trust the predictions of the same people that have been wrong about absolutely everything relating to this war since the day it began, even before. So O'Sullivan attempted to prove his point through past experience, and he cited two examples: the end of the British Raj in 1947, which preceded a violent conflict between India and Pakistan that, in many ways, continues to this day; and the American pullout of Vietnam, which (according to O'Sullivan) occasioned the indiscriminate murder of millions of Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge and further violence as the North Vietnamese crushed the South.

First of all, I object to the notion that American withdrawal was in any responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which was happening since the mid-1950s, which was also virulently anti-Vietnamese (ethnic Vietnamese were among those targeted for death), and which was eventually stopped by the Vietnamese Army in 1979. (And we gave AID to Cambodia when they raided Vietnamese villages in late 1978). Maybe America bombing supply lines in Cambodia and turning the people in the countryside against imperialist forces and into the waiting hands of the Communists had something to do with it, but we didn't have a garrison of Marines in Phnom Penh. Second, in the case of India and Vietnam, the logical conclusion of O'Sullivan preferred policy is that we stay as a colonial occupier forever. Which, considering he's a Thatcher-era Brit, doesn't surprise me.

But that's all besides the point. It consistently amazes me that Bush defenders will go to their deaths denying that Iraq is similar to Vietnam until the MINUTE their critics make the decision that we should leave. THEN it's Vietnam all over again, and leaving will wrest great victory from our hands just when it was almost complete. The idea that Iraq isn't Vietnam until you want to leave is so deeply dishonest that it shows there's no possible argument with these people. The vows that you must take at the altar of conservatism are so twisted and deluded that it's difficult to make sense of them at all.

This is essentially an extension of the theory of Republican Dolschstoss, which suggests that stupid Republican foreign policy decisions have never lost a war, but the leftist-liberal-elite complex have always just taken total victory away by stabbing the war effort in the back. This was the conservative lesson in Vietnam, and it will be the conservative lesson in Iraq when we eventually leave that country. They are so convinced of their own righteousness that this can be the only possible explanation. They don't see mistakes and bad judgment and flawed assumptions, they only see cabals and conspiracies and betrayal.

O'Sullivan also used a dubious lesson of history to defend the announcement that we're building a wall between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Baghdad, a wall that the Iraqi government does not want and will move to end construction on. He cited the wall in Belfast as an example of this kind of decision working. Right, because for 25 years, there was no safer place on Earth than Northern Ireland.

Really, it's this latest tactic, taken along with the news that the US has abandoned the "stand up-stand down" strategy, which proves that the administration isn't even serious about counterinsurgency, which can only be accomplished through the marshaling of national power. Separating those powers, and sidelining them, only moves the country closer to isolation, alienation, and the inevitable paroxysm of violence. The Administration really doesn't care what they unleash in the region, they're just concerned with keeping the lid on until January 2009. So they'll put up prefab walls and stand sentry until they can send the helicopters off the roof of the White House. In truth, they're just prepping the ground for their own withdrawal, a withdrawal of responsibility.