2 +2 = ?

Recently, George Bush has been playing a new card in the rhetoric of selling the Iraq war thing. He's started telling us that Iraq is just like other wars, and that we should learn from our countries history before we call for withdrawal.

This is the height of his arrogance. This is Bush at his absolute cherry picking worst. And in many ways, this is Bush at his most sociopathic. He really is trying as hard as he possibly can to say that 2 + 2 = 5. Or maybe 11.

First, its completely insane for him to criticize others for not being attuned to the lessons of history in a general sense. How about an invasion that completely ignored the entire history of the area? No one who has read Middle Eastern History and wasn't specifically trying to make up reasons to invade could have thought this war would go well. In 2003, Swarthmore Professor John Turner told my class in no uncertain term that American policy was whitewashing the situation far too much, and that no one knew the chaos that was coming. Religion Matters. Beyond the whole Sunni-Shia thing, we have a truly miserable track record with installing "democratic" leaders in these countries, and we are really bad at picking horses. It's just complete hypocrisy for him to suddenly decide to become a student of history.

Second, its not the work of a balanced man to chastise us for misinterpreting the lessons we learned from Vietnam. Look, I wasn't even ALIVE for that freaking war, and I learned its lessons a lot better then Bush seems to. How about: you can't wage a war without telling your people what you are doing? Or how about: the only way you defeat a truly sunk in Guerilla war is to bomb the entire country into small bite-size pieces until the entire population is dead? But, as all things in this world, if you are looking for a lesson of merit from Vietnam, look no further then the all seeing, all knowing Wikipedia:

As General Maxwell Taylor, one of the principal architects of the war noted "first, we didn't know ourselves. We thought that we were going into another Korean war, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn't know our South Vietnamese allies … And we knew less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh? Nobody really knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, we'd better keep out of this kind of dirty business. It's very dangerous."

But bush is ignoring these lessons, citing instead the "terrible bloodbath" that resulted from us leaving Vietnam. I'm going to go ahead and take issue with this historical "fact" as well.

Firstly, terrible things did happen in the area of Vietnam directly post our withdrawal. But to blame the American's leaving on the Khmer Rouge is completely absurd. It was America's secret war in Cambodia that opened the door to them coming to power, but we never formally admitted that happened. We were responsible for most of those things. But staying longer? If you can find a historian that argues we would have been able to "win" (whatever that means) with more time and more troops, even if we DID have home support, I will be shocked.

So, what, we were going to bomb all of Cambodia to the ground, and kill all of them whilst defeating the north Vietnamese? No no and no. Lots of bad things happened under the banner of communism, but to connote that the Cambodian genocide was caused by our inability to "hold the course" in Vietnam is about the equivalent of blaming the Darfurian Genocide on our inability to hold the course in Somalia. The conflicts were different, they grew out of different things, and even staying in Vietnam wasn't going to make one tiny bit of difference to the Khmer Rouge in their push for power. Also, let us not forget that it was the Vietnamese government that we were supposedly fighting against that eventually deposed of the Khmer Rouge.

And, yes, there were thousands of south Vietnamese officers who where held. Some of them were killed. But that's not a lesson that applies to Iraq. I have idea what would happen if our troops pull out of Iraq, but I can tell you that if they do, there wont be an army waiting to roll into Baghdad and take over. No, there will be huge number of poorly organized, heavily armed militias. Will these militias calm down and disarm after the irritating piece of American grit is gone from behind their collective war scarred eye-lid? I don't know, but we have no reason to believe staying there is doing anyone any good at this point.

And look! The very Historian that Bush Cites in his recent comparisons in the past to Japan, Korea and Vietnam doesn't think the current analogy fits.

"They [war supporters] keep on doing this," said MIT professor John Dower. "They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it's always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They're desperately groping for a historical analogy, and their uses of history are really perverse."

I think that bit sort of sums it up for me. What's really wild is that George Orwell was only partially right. Even in a world of information, where ten minutes on wikipedia totally refutes every large point that Bush has made (read it yourself, he missed all the important lessons, and then made up some of his own) he is still able to preach a revised history. He is still able to stand up there and repeat that 2 + 2 = 5, and because he repeats it again and again, it starts to become fact. He really DOES control the rhetoric of the present, and as a really is using that to make us change the past. It doesn't equal five, by the way. It equals Four. And it's going to keep equaling four. I just hope that the generation who took us through the shit storm that was American involvement in Vietnam wakes up and remembers what actually happened.

Here's a prediction based on my own study of history: pretty soon, the shiny shell of democracy that Bush has been hiding behind will crack. We will realize that the current government is too disjointed, too partisan, too divided. Instead of letting the government under nouri al-maliki stumble along, we will use our considerable clout in America to put someone in charge who can get control. who might be a little Machiavellian, might cut a few corners, but in the end, will lead with a strong hand. Sure, he might suppress portions of the population, but sometimes you...

I give it a year before we run another CIA strong man back in, declare victory, and stop hearing the words "democracy" nearly as much. Because Bush is studying history now, and that's what his predecessors would have done.

Update: If you want to read the same article, only well written and with real references... click here