Imperial Ambition

In the midst of explaining how it’s more important to stay in Iraq than it was to stay in Vietnam, William Stuntz writes:

But on any plausible scale of strategic value, Iraq today easily beats Vietnam in the late 1960s or Korea in the early 1950s. America has three enemies in the Middle East today: secular or Sunni Baathism, violent Sunni jihadism, and violent Shiite jihadism. These three enemy forces have demonstrated their willingness to work together: witness Baathist Syria’s alliance with Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, and the sometime cooperation of Zarqawi’s Islamist killers with
pro-Saddam Iraqi insurgents. All three are dangerous because all have imperial ambitions; each seeks not control of a small piece of Middle Eastern real estate but regional hegemony–even, in the case of the jihadists, world domination. Needless to say, all three hate the West.

Ok, but I don’t recall any advocate of the Vietnam War or the Korean War ever suggest that the conflict was only for local goals, either. In Vietnam, hawks relentlessly argued that the aims of Democratic Republic of Vietnam were dominion over all of Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Moreover, the North Vietnamese were supposed to be the vanguard of international communism, the doormen for Soviet and Chinese imperialism. In short, the United States was fighting against forces who had regional and global imperial ambitions, and showing weakness in the face of those forces yada yada yada. In Korea the same claims were made, with the presumed victim of the aforementioned imperialism being Japan and a terrified Europe…

There’s certainly a strong argument to be made that Iraq is more strategically important today than Vietnam was in 1968, but to ma ke that argument by hyping the goals and capabilities of the enemy is a tactic that we’ve seen before.