Posted on 04/06/2004 10:03:59 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Where does Ted Kennedy get off saying that "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam"?
The Iraq War is about as similar to the Vietnam War as desert is to jungle, but there was Senator Teddy over at the Brookings Institution Tuesday making that statement in a speech at the prestigious think-tank which, if I may quote "is consistently at the forefront of debate on the great issues in both foreign and domestic policy."
That quote comes from the first paragraph of Kennedy's speech, but if you (or his audience) supposed it would be followed by a serious contribution to the debate on any great issues of either foreign or domestic policy, you were wrong.
Kennedy chose instead to deliver a raw meat campaign speech suitable perhaps for a Democrat Party precinct captains' rally, but hardly for a classy place like Brookings. Heck, if you want partisan political caterwauling, you don't have to get all dressed up and catch a cab downtown, you can just read this space in the privacy of your own web hookup.
But anyway, let's take a look at this "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam" thing. In the first place, one notes in perusing Kennedy's text that the comment is entirely gratuitous. There is no discussion of similarities between the two conflicts. The words are preceded by an assertion that there is today a crisis in foreign policy, along with the assertion that President Bush is "the problem, not the solution."
Further charging that in the Bush administration, "truth is the casualty of policy," Kennedy then blames the whole thing on Newt Gingrich, who, following 1994 "frightened the electorate" with "raw extremism."
Kennedy does not explain why it would be that the frightened electorate has kept the House in the hands of the raw neo-Gingrich extremists ever since. Nor does he close the loop between Gingrich and Bush. So what you wind up with is a series of unassociated pejorative words, phrases and images, strung up like miscellaneous laundry on a clothesline: a black dress sock, a child's onesie, a ladies' blouse. Nothing relates to anything else, save that they are all laundry. This is bad speechwriting, made worse because it is written for presentation to a sophisticated audience whose standards are, and of right ought to be, much higher.
Let me then attempt to fill in some of the empty space in Kennedy's speech. As an old Senatorial speechwriter myself, I know how this works. You have a line, which, for whatever reason, you want to be the focal point of your remarks: Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam. Okay, what will we do with that? Well, here's a reasonable question to start with: whose Vietnam was Vietnam?
The President whose policies first led to American combat action there was one John F. Kennedy. By 1963, there were tens of thousands of U.S. military advisors in South Vietnam, and they had begun dispensing blood along with the advice. The first combat deaths took place in 1961, the year Kennedy took office, proclaiming that America would "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend and oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty."
Republicans have taken to quoting John Kennedy in recent years, which drives Ted and the rest of the family bonkers; they seem to want a copyright on Jack's entire corpus of comments, but so far it's all been to no avail. President Kennedy's defense of tax cuts for the rich, made in a speech to the Economic Club of New York in December 1962 is eloquent and perceptive; that speech is the sort of intellectually solid statement the Brookings audience had a right to expect from the Senator this week, but didn't get. The famous "bear any burden" remark, too, sounds ever so much more like George W. Bush than any modern Democrat who bears the Kennedy name or initials.
But please don't take all this as an encomium from me to John Kennedy. If he were alive today (he'd be 87), he might have moved as far to the left as the rest of the family. I didn't know John Kennedy and he wasn't a friend of mine, but I am old enough to well remember his time in office, and I didn't think much of the job he was doing.
Let's take just one teensy, weensy little thing, which bears directly on Teddy's claim that Iraq is Bush's Vietnam. Under Bush, American forces overthrew and captured the leader of Iraq – the bad guy, Saddam Hussein.
Under Kennedy, American advisors provoked their advisees to overthrow and murder the leader of South Vietnam – but that was the guy on OUR side, Ngo Dinh Diem. As Max Boot puts it, "…the Saigon government was left rudderless. One president succeeded another with dizzying rapidity, each worried more about holding onto power than about stopping the Communists. It took three long years before Nguyen Van Theiu finally emerged…."
Ted Kennedy didn't choose to discuss any such interesting contrast between the two wars, or in any other way justify his charge. He just ranted about Bush, one ad hominem attack after another, each one an affront to the intellectual respectability of the distinguished, albeit liberal, organization known as the Brookings Institution.
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