Web reboots Vietnam debate

It’s curious, but with tens of thousands of Americans still fighting and dying in Iraq, the only surefire fighting words in American politics are “Vietnam War.”

Jostle the commenting classes’ collective psyche, and the wounds inflicted by that three-syllable trauma gape open. People who couldn’t find Fallouja on the map with a searchlight or tell Shiites from Sheetrock will leap to apply “the lessons of Vietnam” -- as they understand them, of course.

For that reason, it would be easy to dismiss a great deal of the reaction to President Bush’s speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Much of the traditional news media initially did just that, treating the president’s invocation of Vietnam and its aftermath as if the memories it aroused were a kind of phantom pain. But stop there and you miss the truly significant response to the speech, most of which initially occurred in the serious reaches of the blogosphere. It wasn’t until Friday, in fact, that the print media’s op-ed pages began to systematically analyze the implications of Bush’s remarks.

It all made for a particularly instructive lesson on the well-established but rapidly evolving interplay between old and new media and on their respective strengths and shortcomings.

Most of what was most interesting turned on commentators’ reaction to this section of Bush’s address to the veterans: “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps’ and ‘killing fields.’ ”

In other words, if we precipitously pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, chaos, suffering and mass murder will follow.

Hugh Hewitt, the conservative Republican activist, blogger and talk show host, agreed quickly and sharply: “When I heard a radio interview with octogenarian Stanley Karnow (author of a Vietnam War history) last night . . . ,” he wrote, “I knew the president had not just touched a nerve, he’d touched the nerve in American history: Complicity in foreseeable genocide is, after all, a big deal.

“This is the ghost haunting the anti-war left, and the left shudders and screams whenever it floats into the room. All those millions of Cambodians didn’t have to die, and all those boat people didn’t have to sail into death or exile . . . And the Democratic Congress elected in 1974 didn’t have to abandon South Vietnam to North Vietnam. America’s Vietnam policy of intervention, manipulation, and then withdrawal represented a series of choices. The Democrats of those years, urged on by a hard left anti-war front, finally made a choice to leave, a choice with awful consequences.

“This is the crucial point: The Democratic Party and their supporters made that choice, cheered on by the anti-war left. They own the consequences.”

Bare-knuckle stuff, but serious. So too was the mirror-image commentary that just as quickly appeared on the blogosphere’s left flank. Here’s one of the bloggers on the liberal site, whizbangblue.com:

“[Bush’s] argument is a popular one among neoconservatives embittered by the disaster in Iraq and seeking to shame the American people into supporting a continuation of this debacle until a Democrat occupies the White House and can be blamed for losing the war. But it is historically inaccurate . . . We all know who eventually toppled the Khmer Rouge and put an end to the killing fields. Not the Americans. Not the French. Not the British. That’s right, it was the Vietnamese Communists who invaded Cambodia and toppled the Khmer Rouge putting an end to that genocidal regime.

“President Bush, because of his ignorance of the actual history of Vietnam, has clearly drawn the wrong conclusions with respect to Iraq. The conclusion we should draw is that civil wars in foreign countries are best settled by the people in those countries themselves. In Vietnam, our meddling greatly extended the conflict and increased the number of casualties on both sides . . . By perpetuating our involvement in Iraq, we are only increasing the final death toll of this misguided and unnecessary war that didn’t have to happen.”

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A serious discussion

There was more of the same to be had in much greater detail across the Web. But if it seems as if the argument is less about an impending tsunami of Iraqi blood than it is about who should be blamed for it, it’s because one of the things this week’s exchange demonstrates is how divided politically engaged Americans remain by competing historical memories of Vietnam. On the right, Vietnam remains an example of defeat snatched from the jaws of military victory by an ideologically motivated defeatist fifth column on the home front. On the left, Vietnam is a morality play involving the horrific consequences of imperial hubris and political mendacity.

About the only thing on which the red and blue agree is that the Southeast Asian war was a historic tragedy compounded by bad American decisions. The Web -- even when it is serious and knowledgeable, as it was in this instance -- remains an intensely politicized medium. People talk past rather than to each other.

By Friday, the traditional print medium had begun to play catch-up. Rosa Brooks took biting issue with Bush’s historical causality on The Times’ op-ed page; Max Boot explored a series of nuanced cautions in the Wall Street Journal. He urged the Senate Democrats to take a look at what followed the overthrow of Diem before urging Nouri Maliki’s ouster and warned the administration to prepare for the worst by issuing more visas to Iraqis who have cooperated with the United States.

The online edition of Britain’s Financial Times posted an analysis by Kenneth Luce quoting Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Americans have accepted that the war in Iraq is unwinnable,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they want to see images of helicopters taking off from the Green Zone and troops abandoning tanks and equipment as they retreat. Bush was appealing to America’s desire to avoid another Vietnam-style humiliation, however wrong-headed his underlying analysis.”

The controversy over how to parse Bush’s speech wasn’t the week’s only striking example of how our serious political discussion now involves an interplay between traditional and new media. Last Sunday, the New York Times published an extraordinary op-ed piece by seven soldiers and noncommissioned officers currently serving in Iraq with one of the army’s premier fighting units, the 82nd Airborne. Their conclusion: “In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are -- an army of occupation -- and force our withdrawal.”

Seven Army and Marine Corps veterans of the Iraq war drafted a reply and submitted it to the New York Times, which declined to publish it. Friday, the vets’ piece was posted on the Weekly Standard’s website. In their view, “General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker understand the principles of counterinsurgency and are applying them up and down the chain of command. It’s unfortunate that soldiers in the 82nd Airborne have not yet benefited from the new strategy, but it will ensure that their actions, and those of their fallen brethren, will not have been in vain.”

This new world in which online and print commentary complement each other already is deepening our civic conversation in ways that clearly matter. Will it help us move from cacophony to consensus? In a democracy, is that ever attainable -- or even desirable?

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com