My Senator

Having at last unraveled the pneumatics of the internet, Sen. Ted Stevens — whose full psychotic break I anticipate will occur sometime in 2007 — offers us all an important history lesson. In Bob Woodward’s State of Denial there is evidently an account of a 2005 meeting in which Stevens allegedly agreed with Sen. John Warner that “eerie parallels” exist between the American wars in Iraq and Vietnam. Stevens now boldly insists that “Iraq is not Vietnam.” The President pro tempore explains:

He noted that President Lyndon Johnson sent military advisers to Vietnam without congressional authority to use force while Congress gave Bush authority before the Iraq war.
Just eight nations allied themselves with the United States in Vietnam and in Iraq, 30 have, he said.
Saddam Hussein violated 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions and the president of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, violated none, Stevens said.
The United States sent 2 million draftees went to Vietnam and the military today is all volunteer, he said.
Also, Ho Chi Minh used no chemical or biological weapons against his countrymen and Saddam Hussein killed thousands with such weapons, Stevens said.
Stevens also quoted from an article by former diplomat Anthony Cordesman, who said Iraq’s insurgents have no “massive external” countries backing them. North Vietnam had backing from Russia and China.

I’m sure Ted Stevens, like Grampa Simpson, could piece together information from the backs of sugar packets and matchbooks to produce a convincing historical narrative. But I’m equally sure that facile comparisons between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam are unproductive. Analogy, as Charles Darwin once told us, can be a “deceitful guide.” Comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, or between the GWOT and World War II fail, for example, to tell us anything about what the war might look like to the people closest to the destruction. Indeed, when we make these comparisons, we tend to erase the very presence (and historical agency) of ordinary, non-American civilians. We might compare the duplicity or nobility of American leaders (or the generations they lead); we might fret about or celebrate the effect of the war on the American homefront; or we might draw cartoonish resemblances between the United States and the demonic leaders who presume to oppose us. But we rarely consider the possibility that our historical frameworks might offer little clarity to the people on whose behalf these wars are supposedly being waged. (I’d offer the side note that yes, historical analogies are an inherent luxury for people whose neighborhoods aren’t being littered with cluster munitions and whose morgues aren’t cotted by sectarian reprisal killings.) However empathetic Vietnamese citizens might be to the plight of ordinary Iraqis, it seems to me that they would be justifiably skeptical of any analogy that ignored the costs of the American War to their own country — and any analogy that originated from the question of what previous American ordeal the war most closely resembled.

I suppose what I’m arguing here is that however useful it might be to draw analogies between this war and others — and if we’re being honest here, I should concede that my preferred (and deeply flawed) analogy for all this is the Mexican War — we might take a moment and consider the historical experiences and perspectives that we automatically liquidate by drawing such analogies in the first place.

Ted Stevens is still a buffoon, though.