Vietnam
Recently, George W. Bush addressed a VFW convention in Kansas City, MO.He told the cheering crowd, “I stand before you as a wartime president. I wish I didn't have to say that. But an enemy that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001, declared war on the United States of America, and war is what we're engaged in.”1
Note the faulty reasoning:
Premise #1: We were attacked on September 11, 2001.
Premise #2: This attack was a declaration of war.
So far, so good—these premises are true, right?
Unstated conclusion: The war in Iraq has something to do with the attacks of September 11.
Oops!Once we examine this as a syllogism, Bush’s faulty logic becomes abundantly clear; however, by not actually stating his conclusion, he manages to avoid saying anything that is explicitly false—rather, it is implicitly false in a weasel-word way reminiscent of the Nixon administration, whose rhetoric provided so many marvelous examples of logical fallacies when I first began teaching English 101 thirty years ago.2
But since Bush is a world leader, no doubt he will immediately see the error in his reasoning and—wait, no, sorry, what he actually says next is truly scary:
“The struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it's a struggle for civilization. We fight for a free way of life against a new barbarism, an ideology whose followers have killed thousands on American soil and seek to kill again on even a greater scale.”
Again, this apocalyptic line of patter implies that there is a connection between the government of Saddam Hussein, which we overthrew several years ago for reasons known only to Bush, and the actions of the primarily Saudi hijackers of 9/11. True, Saddam was a dictator who liked to execute his opposition, but you didn’t hear any complaining about his bumping people off when he was our pal, allied against Iran.More frighteningly, Bush is suggesting here that we are fighting “an ideology,” not specific people, which sounds suspiciously like the old Cold War against Communism that led to, among other things, the war in Vietnam.
For many years, Americans seemed to agree that the war in Vietnam was a Big Mistake.The number of Americans killed in it is still mind-boggling—just stroll past the Vietnam Memorial wall again if you’ve forgotten—and the Vietnamese casualties were even higher.
Here is what Time magazine, never a bastion of left-wing sentiment, said in 1975:
It is now almost universally conceded that the American intervention in Viet Nam was a mistake—a mistake that involved four Presidents, many of the nation's top statesmen. Once they had followed the French into the wrong war for the wrong reasons, they failed to heed the evidence that—short of the notorious suggestion to bomb the country back into the Stone Age—the Viet Nam War could never be "won" in the traditional sense. At fault perhaps was an American inability to accept defeat, or a hypnotic preoccupation with the models of previous, simpler wars. There was no precedent to quote, no guidebook to lead the way out.3
Does this sound eerily familiar?
For those of us who were against the Vietnam War—I participated in my first debate against it in sixth grade—as tragic and awful as the war was for all those years it dragged on and on, at least we finally had if not an outright apology from the politicians, news media, and rightwing cranks who had supported it, an admission of error.It was a joyless “I told you so” for us “peace-niks,” but at least we got it.
But wait—here’s Bush—who famously avoided service in Vietnam by joining the National Guard and then evidently going AWOL—in August, 2007.He tells the VFW members, “I'm going to try to provide some historical perspective to show there's a precedent for the hard and necessary work we're doing, and why I have such confidence in the fact that we'll be successful.”Then he takes them on a tour of recent world history, beginning with World War II, touring Pearl Harbor and Korea and then ending up—guess where:
“Finally,” he says, “there’s Vietnam.”He continues:
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There's no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America.
(APPLAUSE)
Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms, like "boat people," "reeducation camps," and "killing fields."
There's another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam.
The implication here is however we got into the Vietnam war, our leaving there was a mistake. Presumably, we should have built a number of military bases and some green zones and stayed put there all these years.
In a 2004 poll USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll cited in USA Today with the headline “Poll: Iraqis out of Patience,” it was reported that “Only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led occupation of their country is doing more good than harm, and a solid majority support an immediate military pullout even though they fear that could put them in greater danger.”4
In the most recent poll, “More than six in 10 [Iraqis] now call the U.S.-led invasion of their country wrong, up from 52 percent last winter. Fifty-seven percent call violence against U.S. forces acceptable, up six points. And despite the uncertainties of what might follow, 47 percent now favor the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq -- a 12-point rise.”5
As for Americans, in the most recent AP/Ipsos poll, 57% feel that sending troops into Iraq was “a mistake,” and 59% think history will judge the war as “More of a failure/a complete failure.”6
During the 2004 election, one of the more shameful excesses of the Bush team was the “Swift-boating” of Senator John Kerry, whose record in Vietnam was surrealistically maligned, perhaps one of American history’s only instances of a decorated veteran being successfully smeared by someone for whom the term “draft-dodger” did not begin to encompass the lengths to which he went to avoid active duty.In 1971, a younger John Kerry, having symbolically tossed his war medals onto the ground at the Capitol, asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
George W. Bush’s answer to this question was made frighteningly clear in his speech to the VFW: as far as he is concerned, there will be no last man or woman; we’ll be in Iraq forever, fighting an ever-widening swath of radicalized “insurgents” as the war drags on and on and on.
2.When I was five years old. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
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