Today in stupid historical analogies

Michael Barone’s latest vow to follow his President to the bitter end is plump with dumbness. Not only does he recycle two of the most embarrassing of the faux historical analogies preferred by the right — that bad as he seems now George Bush may one day come to be recalled as fondly as either Harry Truman or Winston Churchill — but he resorts to perhaps the greatest of all the historical falsehoods repeated to young conservatives in the soft glow of the wingnut campfire. According to Barone, the United States was charging its way toward victory in Southeast Asia after the 1968 Tet Offensive provoked a strategic recalibration. As the US turned away from the body counts of the Westmoreland years, Barone insists, “Gen. Creighton Abrams produced a strategy that was proving successful — until Congress prevented the United States from fulfilling its promises of aid against the North Vietnamese offensive in 1975.”

This narrative about Vietnam has been a part of the conservative foreign policy liturgy since the late 1970s. Not suprisingly, it’s completely untrue. The basic claim — drawn most recently from Lewis Sorley’s 1999 book A Better War — is that the American strategy of “clear and hold” was working and that if Congress had not lost its nerve and severed US funds to its ally, the South would have survived, independent from communist rule. And so, stabbed in the back by a defeatist media and a Democratic Party overtaken by the onanic spasms of the counterculture, America betrayed the South Vietnamese and spoiled its “credibility” for years to come. If not for the deus ex Reagana, the loss of will in Vietnam would certainly have “emboldened” the Soviet Union and prolonged the Cold War for decades.

Rob has written about the shibboleth of “clear and hold” before (see also here), so I won’t repeat his arguments here, except to note that Sorley is one of the only historians of the American War in Vietnam who actually claims that “clear and hold” was successful. Conservatives cite Sorley all the time, but they do so because they fall prey to what I’m going to call the Bob Owens Fallacy — i.e., “Somebody wrote something once that endorses my previously-held views, so I will continue to cite this person as if s/he represents the intellectual consensus.” The consensus on the Vietnam War is unambiguous. The United States lost. It was losing in 1967, and it was losing in 1972. The major historians of the conflict — George Herring, Marilyn Young, William Turley, David Elliott and others — all demonstrate that “clear and hold” actually depopulated the countryside of the South, creating a massive refugee crisis that fatally undermined the country’s agricultural and social base. More importantly, no one could seriously argue that the South Vietnamese military would have been capable of withstanding the North’s invasion in 1975 if only American dollars had been flowing into the corrupted treasury of the Saigon government. The whole argument is willfully counterfactual — but then again, so have been all the arguments for sustaining the war in Iraq.

More desperately, Barone concludes his piece by endorsing the other aspect of the Nixon strategy on Southeast Asia — bombing a neighboring country in the hope of resolving a conflict that’s spiraled beyond our control. Displaying the same “ah, fuck it, Jesus is coming soon anyway” attitude that characterized the run-up to the Iraq War, Barone recommends more rubble and less trouble in Iran:

That’s a move that might be condemned by the “international community,” and it risks antagonizing the people of Iran, many of whom tend to hate the mullahs and admire America. But it also might destabilize the regime and dislodge a president who has threatened the destruction of Israel and America. Who today regrets Israel’s strike against Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981?

And who needs actual thought when you’ve got a rolodex of right-wing historical analogies at your fingertips?