The Importance of Iraq

A good article from Mark Steyn on the implications of "pulling out" of Iraq:

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."

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 Â-- that, pace 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 Â-- 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 Senator John Warner seem peculiarly anxious to confirm the bin Laden characterization.

Depending on which Americans you ask, " Vietnam" can mean entirely different things. To The New York Times and the people it goes to dinner parties with, it had "few negative repercussions." And it's hardly surprising its journalists should think like that when its publisher, Pinch Sulzberger, in a commencement address last year that's almost a parody of parochial boomer narcissism, was still bragging and preening about his generation's role in ending the war three decades later. Joseph Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (which is apparently some sort of elite institution for which people pay many thousands of dollars to receive instruction from authoritative scholars such as Professor Nye), told NPR last week: "After we got out of Vietnam, the people who took over were the North Vietnamese. And that was a government which preserved order." If by "preserved order," you mean "drove a vast human tide to take to the oceans on small rickety rafts and flee for their lives."

But, if you're not a self-absorbed poseur like Mr. Sulzberger, " Vietnam" is not a "tragedy" but a betrayal.