Why Iraq matters for Israel
For those of you who support Israel who believe that what's going on in Iraq doesn't matter for Israel, and for those of you who believe that it 'only' matters because parts of Iraq are within 300 miles of parts of Israel, Mark Steyn has a powerful wake-up call this morning:American victory in the Cold War looks inevitable in hindsight. It didn't seem that way in the Seventies. And, as Iran reminds us, the enduring legacy of the retreat from Vietnam was the emboldening of other enemies. The forces loosed in the Middle East bedevil to this day, in Iran, and in Lebanon, which Syria invaded shortly after the fall of Saigon and after its dictator had sneeringly told Henry Kissinger, "You've betrayed Vietnam. Someday you're going to sell out Taiwan. And we're going to be around when you get tired of Israel."Read it all.
President Assad understood something that too many Americans didn't. Then as now, the anti-war debate is conducted as if it's only about the place you're fighting in: Vietnam is a quagmire, Iraq is a quagmire, so get out of the quagmire. Wrong. The "Vietnam war" was about Vietnam, if you had the misfortune to live in Saigon.
But if you lived in Damascus and Moscow and Havana, the Vietnam war was about America: American credibility, American purpose, American will. For our enemies today, it still is. Osama bin Laden made a bet – that, notwithstanding the T-shirt slogan, "These Colors Do Run": They ran from Vietnam, and they ran from the helicopters in the desert, and from Lebanon and Somalia – and they will run from Iraq and Afghanistan, because that is the nature of a soft, plump ersatz-superpower that coils up in the fetal position if you prick its toe. Even Republicans like Sen. John Warner seem peculiarly anxious to confirm the bin Laden characterization.
...
At least in Indochina, those who got it so horribly wrong – the Kerrys and Fondas and all the rest – could claim they had no idea of what would follow.
To do it all over again in the full knowledge of what followed would turn an aberration into a pattern of behavior. And as the Sirik Mataks of Baghdad face the choice between staying and dying or exile and embittered evenings in the new Iraqi émigré restaurants of London and Los Angeles, who will be America's allies in the years ahead?
Professor Bernard Lewis' dictum would be self-evident: "America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend."
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:28 PM
1 Comments:
Probably the best analagy between Vietnam and Iraq is that while there was one screw up after another, when theUS finally got its act together the public lost hope.
There is no question that results were better during the Abrams/Nixon years than the Kennedy/Johnson era and if not for Watergate South Vietnam might have survived.
Post a Comment
<< Home