McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Throughout the Iraq war, the White House has repeatedly dismissed anti-war partisans for describing the situation there as a Vietnam-like “quagmire.” But Wednesday, it was President Bush who was invoking Vietnam; in this case, as part of an effort to rally support for his flagging Iraq policy.

Bush reminded a veterans’ audience that the U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1975 was followed by mass slaughter in the region and a grievous loss of American prestige and confidence worldwide that took years to rebuild. That is all true.

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But by invoking the emotional touchstone of the Vietnam denouement absent its broader context, Bush engaged in a selective reading of history that can only serve to confuse and mislead the public as it tries to think clearly about the way forward in Iraq.

No American looks back on the ugly aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam with pride. But what choice did the United States have? We had battled communist Viet Cong guerrillas and the North Vietnamese for 15 years. More than one million Vietnamese on both sides had died, as had 58,000 American soldiers. In terms of tonnage, the United States had dropped three times the number of explosives it dropped in World War II. And yet, the enemy fought on.

Moreover, as humiliating as the U.S. withdrawal was, leaving Vietnam wasn’t the main cause of a loss of American prestige. That drained away long before we headed for the exits.

President Bush’s remarks reflect a common narrative among conservatives who believe that the defeat in Vietnam came from a loss of American will. That is not the case. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman, in her classic “The March of Folly,” said the more credible cause was Washington’s “failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill.”

In the end, if Iraq, too, is lost to civil war, mass killing and persecution of the vanquished, it will not be because the American military fought poorly or because the American public prematurely lost heart. It will be because American leaders, however noble their intentions, failed to remember the recent past and condemned their country to repeat it.

The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Friday, Aug. 24