Can History Decide? Bush on Asia

Every once in a while I see an essay about why we should study history. Here's a very good one, by a hubber who happens to be a history teacher.

But there's a practical reason to study history, too. We need to know when people are telling the truth or snowing us.

On August 22, 2007, President Bush said:

"The lesson from Asia's development is that the heart's desire for liberty will not be denied. Once people even get a small taste of liberty, they're not going to rest until they're free. Today's dynamic and hopeful Asia -- a region that brings us countless benefits -- would not have been possible without America's presence and perseverance. . . "

[About South Korea] "Without Americans' intervention during the war and our willingness to stick with the South Koreans after the war, millions of South Koreans would now be living under a brutal and repressive regime. . . ."

[About Viet Nam] "Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end. . . ."

This is all part of a very long speech, with much detail and plenty of quotes. You can read the entire thing at the White House website; it's much more comprehensive than the evening news clips indicated.

Whether you're Democrat or Republican, how do you judge the accuracy of this speech if you don't know anything about history?

In a pre-Nixon world, we trusted what our leaders said, period. But now, we need to chew on the words and weigh them. A knowledge of history also helps us navigate the turbulent whirlpools created by extremists on all sides, from "Bush lies!" to "Yo! that's my man!"

Here are some interesting editorials on the President's view of Asian history:

• An editorial by author and professor Ian Burruma titled "Who Freed Asia?"
• The Pew Research Center displays two graphs, showing public support for both the Iraq War and the Viet Nam War
• Clay Waters in NewsBusters laments that the media found historians to criticize Bush's view of history. Waters targets a NY Times article which quoted historians sniping at Bush. But Waters presents no historians of his own, no counter-punching experts. So I went googling, looking for quotes for historians (like Ian Buruma, above).

From the Chicago Tribune:

• "This was history written by speechwriters without regard to history," said military analyst Anthony Cordesman. "And I think most military historians will find it painful ... because in basic historical terms, the president misstated what happened in Vietnam." (Cordesman was a professor of National Security Studies at Georgetown University and has written 50 books)
• On Vietnam: ". . . if you are going to try to sell this concept that the blood is on the American people's hands because we left and were weak-kneed in Asia, that is a very tenuous and inane historical argument," said historian Douglas Brinkley. (Brinkley specialiazes in US Presidentail history at Tulane University. He also critiqued Bush's words about Korea.)

From the New York Times:

• "It is undoubtedly true that America's failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia," said David C. Hendrickson, a specialist on the history of American foreign policy at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. "But there are a couple of further points that need weighing," he added. "One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam - this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred."
• On Vietnam:. "It was not a precipitous withdrawal, it was a very deliberate disengagement," said Andrew J. Bacevich, a platoon leader in Vietnam who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University.

An AFP News story run by Yahoo and many other outlets reports:

• "My understanding of the history of the Vietnam war and the lessons of that differs rather dramatically from Mr Bush's," Robert Hathaway, an Asian expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. . . . South Vietnam collapsed in 1975 not because American forces had withdrawn, but because the South Vietnamese and their army simply did not care enough about their government to fight in its defense, he said.
• Retired US Brigadier General John Johns, an expert on counter-insurgency who served in Vietnam, said Bush was "cherry-picking" history to support his case for staying the course in Iraq.
• Steven Simon of the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, says Bush "emphasized the violence in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early," he said. "It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The longer you stay the worse it gets." [Simon has been a fellow at Oxford and Brown University.]

Finally, in Time Magazine, author and history professor Robert Dallek says:

"It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president. . . . We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn't work our will," he said.

"What is Bush suggesting? That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion," he continued. "We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out."

Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal (who is a military historian as well as a columnist) critiques Bush's speech from the right, rather than the left.

He terms critics of Bush's speeh as "antiwar advocates." In Boot's article, he claims Bush's assessment "actually understates the terrible repercussions from the American defeat, whose ripples spread around the world. In the late 1970s, America's enemies seized power in countries from Mozambique to Iran to Nicaragua. American hostages were seized aboard the SS Mayaguez (off Cambodia) and in Tehran. The Red Army invaded Afghanistan."

A NY Times editorial, "Defeat's Killing Fields," written months before Bush's speech, says; "The 1975 Communist victory in Indochina led to horrors that engulfed the region. The victorious Khmer Rouge killed one to two million of their fellow Cambodians in a genocidal, ideological rampage. In Vietnam and Laos, cruel gulags and "re-education" camps enforced repression. Millions of people fled, mostly by boat, with thousands dying in the attempt."

One author, Peter Rodman, is a former Defense Dept. official, a lawyer, and a scholar with the Brookings Institute. The other author, WIlliam Shawcross, is a British journalist; his many books include a bio of Rupert Murdoch.

There are voices on both sides of the argument. Who do you listen to?

If you know nothing about history, and aren't willing to do any research yourself, then you probably listen to the voice that reinforces your own thoughts. Is that wise?