In 2004, as Iraq was mutating from desert to quicksand, George W. Bush flatly rejected the Vietnam analogy. Yesterday he went over the top to seize it, to claim it as his own.
He argued before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that ending our ill-conceived and dreadfully executed occupation would amount to "pull[ing] the rug out from under" our troops -- as, presumably, we did in Vietnam -- and urged "today’s generation of Americans [to] resist the deceptive allure of retreat." Taking yet more historical license, he said "Then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence, and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.... The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be."
The New York Times reported that "Mr. Bush’s speech was interrupted frequently by cheers from the crowd and by occasional standing ovations." Yes, and odds are, next week the cheers and ovations from the American Legion crowd will be even greater, as this vulgar hysteria feeds on itself.
The pundits are stumped. What could Bush be thinking? Why this Vietnam-analogy argument, now? Why the 180? What's the sense of it all?
Well, as one is so justifiably inclined to do with this endlessly scheming White House, I smell a rat. A big, ugly one.
First a little background, as dangled by the Times: "With his comments, Mr. Bush tried something that few leading politicians of either party have tried in a generation: Reopening the national argument over the Vietnam War, a conflict that ended more than three decades ago but has remained an emotional national touchstone.
"And he was giving rare political voice to the views of those who -- like many in the [VFW] hall today -- believe that the American pullout from Vietnam was a mistake, and who reject the popular view among Baby Boomers that America should never have sent troops there in the first place."
And therein, I suspect, lies the aforementioned rat.
Bush Inc. originally wanted to muscle its way into Iraq to demonstrate American power; specifically, to undo the damage that Vietnam's legacy had done to America's superpower image. The administration was, in a sense, refighting Vietnam in 2003. This time we would win -- quickly, easily, cleanly -- and thus restore our superpower status in full. And with the Soviet Union gone, that status would be a lone one.
But, of course, nothing went according to plan. So now, the Bush administration has made the conscious and calculated decision to refight Vietnam at home as well -- partially as an arm-twisting tactic against a disgruntled Congress, but principally as a political strategy that goes far beyond that.
Which is to say, the administration may be hoping to violently divide this nation at large -- much as Vietnam violently divided us -- and, above all, put that violence and divide on the streets. It seeks to reawaken Nixon's hardhats-and-veterans crowd as its visible cadre. It longs for a reissuance of right-wing "America: Love it or leave it" sloganeering in action.
Perhaps this, finally, will prod the antiwar crowd to take to the streets -- to protest and make rude, loud, and "unAmerican" noises. Nothing would please the White House more. With a little luck, the antiwar crowd will emerge as ill-clad youth; the media can then have a grand time portraying them as the benighted, menacing face of all antiwar Americans. Many still sitting on the ideological fence would side with the clean cut, and others with mild antiwar inclinations might retreat out of disgust.
In short, the administration's seemingly bizarre reversal on the Vietnam analogy might very well come down to nothing more than a sociopolitical do-over at home. In seeking that bloody division of old -- which the political right then cynically cast as the dividing line between the patriotic and unpatriotic, the American and unAmerican -- it can at least buy some time, if not remake America, at long last, in its right-wing image.