How America's right bears the longest grudge [View All]

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1157360,00.html

America's historic reluctance to be satisfied with anything less than complete victory is now being tested in Iraq, where it seems inevitable that the full conservative programme will not be pushed through, although how far it will fall short of the ambitions of men like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz has yet to be seen. If, for instance, America does not get the right to base substantial forces in that country indefinitely, and Iraq wobbles off on a more or less independent path, the scene may well be set for another of those "Who lost the war?" dramas that have punctuated American political life since the Chinese communists ousted their nationalist foes in the late 40s. That will be especially so if by that time President Kerry rather than President Bush is in charge.

These arguments have always circled around two propositions. On the right, which at times has included the Democratic right, the proposition has been that if only the United States had exerted its full strength, it would have prevailed. On the left, which has sometimes included Republican realists, the proposition has been that there are objectives that are not morally defensible and others that may be desirable but are not practically possible, and that it behoves a great power to recognise when either of these situations arises.

The real importance of the Vietnam war in the presidential campaign does not lie in the contrast between the service records of Bush and Kerry. That contrast may not, anyway, be as great as some would like to make it, given that Kerry's exposure in action was brief, and that Bush, like all trainee pilots, was taking some risks in flying combustible, inherently dangerous military jets. But it is not what the two men put into the Vietnam war but what they and their supporters took from it that matters most.

For old-fashioned conservatives such as Cheney and Rumsfeld, Democratic hawks such as the late Senator Henry Jackson or neoconservatives such as Wolfowitz, Vietnam was a failure of American will. It was of a piece with that earlier failure in Korea, with accommodation with China (even though that was the work of Nixon) and with the error of detente with the Soviet Union. Under Ronald Reagan they tried to put steel back into American policy, and flatter themselves to this day that the USSR would not have collapsed as it did if they had not done so. Clinton, as they see it, steered the US back toward the path of temporisation and appeasement, including appeasement of forces hostile to Israel. But Kerry was one of the young veterans who saw how the Vietnam war had its origins in a kind of absolutist anti-communism, and that it was not only the war but the attitude behind it that should be repudiated. The question is with America again in a new form today.