Kennedy and “Bush’s Vietnam”:

What did Sen. Kennedy mean when he said Iraq is “Bush’s Vietnam”? Various people have suggested that he meant that Iraq will go as badly for the U.S. as Vietnam did. InstaPundit writes that a blog named “USEFUL FOOLS says that Ted Kennedy is trying for a Tet rerun, with help from the media and Iraqi extremists. Or maybe it’s the other way around.” I assume that “trying for a Tet rerun” here means trying to persuade Americans that things are going so badly (even when, in InstaPundit’s view, they’re not) that we should pull out. He also goes on to say that “Kennedy’s remark is certainly getting a lot of play around the world, and it can only embolden our enemies and imperil our friends. And as an old Washington hand, Kennedy must have known that it would get that kind of attention, and have that kind of an effect.”

     Mark Kleiman disagrees, saying that Kennedy is being “slime[d]” and “misrepresent[ed].” Mark points out that Kennedy was arguing that Bush had misled the people, and that “Vietnam” in this context means “a war about which the government misled the American public,” rather than “a war that the U.S. is likely to lose.” Here are some relevant excerpts (go to Mark’s post for longer excerpts, or to the speech itself):

The most important principle in any representative democracy is for the people to trust their government. If our leaders violate that trust, then all our words of hope and opportunity and progress and justice ring false in the ears of our people and the wider world, and our goals will never be achieved.

Sadly, this Administration has failed to live up to basic standards of open and candid debate. . . .

In recent months, it has become increasingly clear that the Bush Administration misled the American people about the threat to the nation posed by the Iraqi regime. . . .

Tragically, in making the decision to go to war, the Bush Administration allowed its own stubborn ideology to trump the cold hard evidence that Iraq posed no immediate threat. . . .

The result is a massive and very dangerous crisis in our foreign policy. We have lost the respect of other nations in the world. Where do we go to get our respect back? How do we re-establish the working relationships we need with other countries to win the war on terrorism and advance the ideals we share? How can we possibly expect President Bush to do that. He’s the problem, not the solution. Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam, and this country needs a new President. . . .

     My thoughts: I can’t read Kennedy’s mind — but I do think that the metaphor “Vietnam” has a pretty well-established dominant meaning in America, and that is an unexpectedly long war against a seemingly weaker enemy that America ultimately loses, at great cost. It’s actually quite common for such terms to have a well-established dominant meaning, which is what makes them especially useful; consider, for instance, “Armageddon” and “Waterloo.”

     It’s true that Kennedy’s speech focuses on a less commonly stressed aspect of Vietnam, which is that the U.S. government wasn’t candid with Americans about the subject. But even in that context, invoking Vietnam — not just as an explicit analogy, e.g., “George Bush is deceiving us about Iraq like Lyndon Johnson deceived us about Vietnam,” but as an unqualified metaphor, “Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam” — is likely to bring to many listeners’ minds the dominant meaning.

     Even reading the statement in context, the reference to Vietnam thus suggests something more ominous than just that Bush is being dishonest: It suggests, because of the force of the dominant meaning, that Bush’s actions will lead us to defeat. Say that I’m talking about how someone came back from political defeat, and is now fighting a key battle of his second political ascendancy against several enemies at once; and after a detailed discussion of this, I say “this is [the person’s] Waterloo.” It’s very likely that “Waterloo” will convey to people the image of a defeat — the dominant meaning of the metaphor — even though the context might simply point to a narrower meaning of a key battle after a comeback, fought against several people.

     Likewise, say that I’m talking about a battle in the Middle East, and refer to it as an “Armageddon.” It’s very likely that “Armageddon” will convey to people the image of a massive, ruinous fight that may implicate the whole world — the dominant meaning of the metaphor — even though the context might simply point to a narrower meaning of a battle in the Middle East. The same, I think, is true for saying “Iraq is Bush’s Vietnam”: The dominant conventional meaning of the metaphor is, I think, going to seep in even if the context would otherwise suggest a narrower meaning.

     And this is just to people who see the whole context. Most people don’t see the whole context, and that’s not the pro-Bush forces’ fault — it’s the natural process of editing that happens whenever the media covers a long speech that has a juicy, quotable line. Consider this CNN story, for instance:

[HEADLINE:] Kennedy: ‘Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam’
[SUBHEAD:] Bush official, GOP respond sharply to senator’s criticism

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Edward Kennedy launched a blistering election-year attack on the Bush administration’s candor and honesty Monday, saying President Bush has created “the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon.”

The Massachusetts Democrat said that Iraq was never a threat to the United States and that Bush took the country to war under false pretenses, giving al Qaeda two years to regroup and plant terrorist cells throughout the world.

“Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam,” Kennedy said at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. . . .

The story does refer to Kennedy’s complaints about the Administration’s lack of candor, as well as to Kennedy’s assertions that the Iraq war will indeed hurt the war on terror. But this quite abbreviated context isn’t enough, I think, to lead most readers to say “Oh, he just means Vietnam in the narrow sense of a war that wasn’t honestly pitched.” I’ll bet that most readers would understand Kennedy as conveying the dominant meaning of the metaphor “Vietnam” — a war that is likely to drag on for a long time, and ultimately be lost at great cost. And that’s in print; consider how truncated the context is likely to be in radio or TV broadcasts:

For the president, these are some of the worst days of the occupation–the most gruesome violence against Americans to date, a new Shiite uprising and fresh doubts about whether the deadline for a transfer of power is realistic. At home, Democrats are now ratcheting up the pressure. Frequent critic and John Kerry ally Senator Ted Kennedy has called Iraq ‘Bush’s Vietnam.’ Today Kerry himself questioned the motives behind the president’s June 30th deadline to hand over political power to Iraqis.

That’s from the NBC Nightly News transcript, April 6, 6:30 pm. Other broadcasts might provide some more context — but, again, I think not enough to dislodge the primary meaning of the metaphor.

     So, as I said, I can’t read Kennedy’s mind. Nor would I say that he wants to see the U.S. defeated, though it doesn’t seem implausible that
he wants to see the U.S. withdraw as soon as possible, and hopes that the perceived problems in Iraq will help build pressure for such a withdrawal.

     But when one uses a metaphor that’s so closely tied in people’s minds not just to deceit but to defeat, and when one is an experienced politician who knows how much of the surrounding context is likely to be vastly compressed by the media, one ought to expect the metaphor to indeed be seen as a prediction of defeat. And that suggests that this was indeed likely (though of course not certain) that Kennedy intended the metaphor to be understood precisely that way, as predicting defeat as well as condemning what he sees as the Administration’s deception.