Refighting Vietnam

Americans, it seems, will never stop arguing over Vietnam. FP entered this debate, in a way, by publishing a recently declassified CIA memo that eerily foreshadows the United States’ strategic dilemmas in Iraq. And yesterday, Bush broached an informal code among U.S. presidents—don’t refight the Vietnam war—by strongly implying that the United States should not have withdrawn from that conflict. It was a risky political move on Bush’s part, but it accords with the views of people like Peter Rodman, who until recently was an assistant secretary defense. Rodman, who is now at Brookings, wrote this back in July:     

[M]ilitary historians are coming to a consensus that by the end of 1972, there was a much-improved balance of forces in Vietnam, reflected in the 1973 Paris agreement, and that Congress subsequently pulled the props out from under that balance of forces—dooming Indochina to a bloodbath. This is now a widely accepted narrative of the endgame in Vietnam, and it has haunted the Democrats for a generation.   

Rodman doesn’t back these assertions with evidence, so it’s hard to judge whether this is indeed the consensus of military historians. It’s definitely the view of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who warned in May that, just as he saw in Vietnam, “American disunity” could doom Iraq. And today, Thom Shanker of the New York Times cobbled together a quick story headlined, “Historians Question Bush’s Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq,” but the piece quotes only one military historian, plus one political scientist and one senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. So, any military historians out there? Is the Bush/Rodman narrative the consensus of your peers? Email Passport with your answers.