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his past August, President George W. Bush stood at a lectern in a
VFW hall in Kansas City, Missouri, and launched an attack on critics
calling for an early withdrawal from Iraq. Invoking "the legacy of
Vietnam," he rued the prospect that Congress would "pull the rug out
from under" American soldiers "just as they are gaining momentum and
changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq." And even though many
expert commentators, including Boston University professor and Vietnam
veteran Andrew Bacevich, have roundly discredited it, the Vietnam
analogy is not likely to fade away. Voicing the Bush Administration’s
stance last month in the Washington Post, former Assistant Secretary of
Defense Peter Rodman asserted as the "widely accepted narrative of the
endgame in Vietnam" that "there was a much-improved balance of forces
in Vietnam, reflected in the 1973 Paris agreement, and that Congress
subsequently pulled the props out from under that balance of
forces–dooming Indochina to a bloodbath." Rudolph Giuliani, the
frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, draws the
same comparison in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs. "The
consequences" of withdrawal, he writes, "were dire, and not only in
Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of
Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker
America. The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse."
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Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson are, respectively, the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College.
[Editors' Note: Due to a production error, a previous version of this article appears in the print edition of Issue #7. The pdf, bookview, and web editions all represent the intended final version.]
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