“Those who can remember the past,” Arthur Schlesinger once wrote, turning George Santayana on his head, “are condemned to repeat it.” Maybe someone should tape that to the computers at The New York Times.
In recent weeks, with Barack Obama rethinking his Afghan policy, the Times has been bursting with Vietnam analogies. The “Afghanistan is Vietnam” stories all share a rather unconventional structure. First, the author tells you that his premise is wrong. “Such historical analogies are overly simplistic and fatally flawed,” acknowledged Peter Baker a few months back, in a story entitled “Could Afghanistan Become Obama’s Vietnam?” (One can only imagine the conversation between Baker and his assignment editor. Baker: “I have this fatally flawed idea for a piece.” Editor: “Get us 1,100 words by Monday.”) Then, having taken confession, the writer proceeds to sin. Many parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam, Times columnist Frank Rich conceded late last month, “are wrong, inexact or speculative”—before calling the parallels “remarkable,” “eerie,” “indisputable,” and “uncannily” exact. Perhaps other pundits should put this kind of warning label on their commentary. Many analogies between Barack Obama and Adolph Hitler “are wrong, inexact and speculative,” Glenn Beck might concede. And then on with the show.
Schlesinger’s point was that we shouldn’t get too excited if the events of our day resemble events of the past. Of course they do. The difficult question is whether they resemble them in ways that really matter. Rich, for instance, declares it “remarkable” that Obama is engaged in a battle of leaks against military leaders who want to force his hand, just as Kennedy’s generals tried to force his on Vietnam. But what’s so remarkable about it? Douglas MacArthur tried to squeeze Harry Truman the same way during Korea, and Colin Powell used similar tactics against Bill Clinton on Bosnia. Sometimes the generals are right; sometimes they are wrong. The fact that they pursue their agendas in the press doesn’t tell us anything about whether those agendas are correct.
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