Sunday, April 29, 2007
Opinion

The critical question

'Vietnam, Iraq and David Halberstam’s legacy

Iraqi Army soldiers walk past a man painting the Iraqi national flag on the wall of a bridge, as they patrol an area in central Baghdad.
CREDIT: SABAH ARAR/AFP/Getty Images

By Stephanie Ramage

They say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but when it comes to journalists, I feel that lives spent speaking ill of damn near everyone should be balanced with post mortem critiques. David Halberstam, who passed away last week, has been very nearly canonized for his so-called reporting on the Vietnam War, but most of those doing the praise haven’t even read the book that brought him his fame. If you want a clue about what kind of person Halberstam was, toss out all the sycophantic babbling of the toadies who make up the upper echelons of the “journalistic community” (that’s a gated community, just so you know, one that lets you in with the lavish love of a harem if you hail from an Ivy League school like Halberstam did). Instead, go ahead and drop $16.95 for the paperback 25th anniversary edition of “The Best and the Brightest” and subject yourself to the generous helpings of arrogance and self-approbation Halberstam serves up in the “New Introduction by the Author” trumpeted on the front cover.

Halberstam spent his time hobnobbing with diplomats and military brass and he based his view of what was happening in Vietnam on two things: First, his privileged liberal education in the hallowed halls of Harvard, an education that ensured that he would live his life with a guilt complex about being born in a developed country, a complex evidenced in his recollection of personally suggesting to Ellsworth Bunker, then the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, that “his generals … were like all Western generals before them, starting with the French: not so much in the wrong war, but on the wrong planet”—and, second, on his own very personal likes and dislikes. He told NPR in an interview in the 1980s that he “defined critical players at critical times.” What he really did was decide a priori who to demonize based on his own bias.

He made his personal likes clear with clichéd descriptions like the following from his “Best and Brightest” introduction: “His [Ellworth Bunker’s] was a graceful and courteous presence … with his old-fashioned and almost courtly New England manner … As I spoke, I thought of one of my favorite generals, Bob York, a rugged, craggy-faced ex-boxer whom I had known in my earlier tour … he seemed more like an enlisted man than the West Pointer he was …”

Sadly, that’s as close as Halberstam ever got to an enlisted man—a West Point facsimile. The “tour” to which Halberstam refers was his earlier press tour.

It’s fitting that Halberstam’s obituary shared newspaper pages with stories on Congress’ vote on a timeline for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, because he largely credited himself with putting pressure on Washington to push the pullout of American troops from Vietnam.

With special thanks to George Mason University’s History News Network, let’s review the impact of that congressionally-mandated pullout:

Historians have directly attributed the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the cessation of American aid … Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage compared the American withdrawal to ‘a pregnant lady, abandoned by her lover to face her fate.’ Historian Lewis Fanning went so far as to say that ‘It was not the Hanoi communists who won the war, but rather the American Congress that lost it.’

On June 19, 1973, Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment, which called for a halt to all military activities in Southeast Asia by Aug. 15 ... Congress cut funding to South Vietnam for the upcoming fiscal year from a proposed $1.26 billion to $700 million. These two events prompted Hanoi to make an all-out effort to conquer the South. As the North Vietnamese Communist Party Secretary Le Duan observed in December 1974, ‘The Americans have withdrawn … this is what marks the opportune moment.’

There are Americans who will say, “Who cares what happens to Iraq when we leave? If Iran and Syria take it—so what?” But if we don’t care, we should. The recent bombings in Morocco and Algeria represent an expansion of al-Qaida. When bombings in the usually peaceful and very Westernized Morocco claimed 23 lives in 2003, there was no public mention of al-Qaida. Now that has changed. Last week, in the Moroccan newspaper Aliyaram, an Arab, Muslim, writer stated in a column about the bombings that if the Americans abandon Iraq, the entire region of the Middle East and North Africa “is lost.”

We can go on pretending that al-Qaida is a loose network of extremist Islamists or we can get serious about finding al-Qaida’s support base. We may find the same financiers and enablers who are behind Hezbollah—Iran and Syria. When’s the last time al-Qaida launched attacks on either of those countries?

I will say again what I have said a thousand times: Look at the map. Morocco is nine miles from Spain. Anyone who’s been to Europe lately can tell you that it is saturated with American companies, that those transatlantic flights are loaded with Americans and that we definitely do not want Islamic extremists firing rockets from Morocco.

Some uninformed Americans like to believe that Islamic extremism is what all Arab countries secretly want. Nothing could be further from the truth. The post-colonial Middle East was poised for democracy—but we busied ourselves picking favorites among the royals and juntas, who would do certain favors for our own partisan interests instead of promoting democracy. And now, because we’ve dirtied our hands with despots like Saddam Hussein, we can’t take the guilt and prefer to simply turn away, leaving that part of the world to its fate. But guilt is a waste of time and I don’t believe in fate: The expansion of al-Qaida is directly attributable to our failure to send enough troops to Iraq in the first place and to our continued lack of commitment to securing Iraq.

There is still time to do the right thing—to send adequate troops, to secure for ourselves an ally in Iraq, the buffer country between Syria and Iran, thereby cutting the pipeline of support for militant extremist Islamists in North Africa. Maintaining an inadequate, incrementally downsized force puts our soldiers in even more danger. Completely pulling out of Iraq puts our civilians in danger.

Whatever your political affiliation, ask yourself this: Will our long-term peace policies benefit from pulling out of Iraq? It’s a fair question, and you can bet the mainstream media, chock full of Halberstam acolytes, won’t ask it, because the answer is not one they want to report. SP

Stephanie Ramage is News editor of The Sunday Paper.