Is Vietnam the Right Comparison for Iraq?
President Bush took a big chance Wednesday and drew comparisons between the situation in Iraq and the situations that the United States has faced over the years in Asia, such as in Japan in World War II and in Korea and Vietnam.
But are those appropriate analogies? All Things Considered talked to four scholars to find out.
Francis Fukuyama of the School of International Studies at Johns Hopkins University says the analogy to Southeast Asia is more appropriate than the president's previous use of the Cold War. Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations favors comparisons to conflicts in Algeria and Malaysia. In Malaysia, the British were able to overcome an insurrection. In Algeria, the French won militarily but ultimately lost politically.
Ronald Steel of the University of Southern California thinks the U.S. involvement in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century is the best example — an analogy I've always favored as well. The United States overthrew a then-dictatorial power, Spain, but failed to recognize that there was a strong liberation movement among the people, who wanted the U.S. to let them run their own country. When the U.S. didn't leave, a long period of violent insurgency followed, during which U.S. troops committed several atrocities.
Then again, Joseph Nye at Harvard doesn't like any analogy, although he says Vietnam may be appropriate or perhaps Britain's role in Iraq in 1920s. But in the end, he believes, all analogies fall apart on some level.
Maybe it's like the old Shiite saying that host Robert Siegel quotes: "The first to reason by analogy was the devil."
9:41 AM ET | 08-23-2007 | permalink
