“President George W. Bush is not known as a voracious reader. And yet, in August 2007, almost four and a half years after he launched the invasion of Iraq, Bush used a British novel written more than half a century ago to make a point about the future of US engagement in Iraq. Bush administration rhetoric usually drew analogies between the global war on terror and World War II – a struggle between the forces of democracy and totalitarian ideologies. In his speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, however, Bush made the bold rhetorical move – which some commentators felt was more an act of desperation than incisive analysis – of comparing a premature withdrawal from Iraq with the humiliating US exit from Vietnam in 1975. He took a long view of this process by going back to the 1950s, just before the United States entered Vietnam in an effort to shore up the French campaign against the Viet Minh. Bush’s aim was to excoriate those who believed that the US presence in the region was counterproductive. That is where the British novel came in. As Bush put it, “The argument that America’s presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called the Quiet American. It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism – and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’” “Bush, of course, did not accept the notion that the American presence in Indochina was in any way counterproductive. He held to the conservative Republican view that it was the reluctance of Congress to provide the finances needed to continue the war that proved fatal to the US mission to prevent the Communists from taking over South Vietnam. Graham Greene’s novel has been regarded as an anti-American tract. The character of Alden Pyle embodied the hubris of the American mission in Indochina, not least because Pyle had little understanding of the society that he was attempting to save. The narrator, the world-weary British journalist Thomas Fowler – that Bush mentioned as ‘another character’ – portrayed Pyle as not only willfully naïve but also possessed of a missionary spirit that assumed that Vietnam desired to be like the United States. In his words, Pyle ‘was determined … to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.’ Pyle’s mission of spreading American-style democracy in Indochina in the 1950s is of course eerily reminiscent of Bush’s own twenty-first century global war on terrorism. Ironically, in characterizing the mission of Alden Pyle in Indochina, Bush could just as well have been describing his own mission in Iraq. The failed American mission in Vietnam, in part brought about by the willful ignorance of policymakers, was being repeated in Iraq, but with a twist. The thinking behind the US involvement in Vietnam was that, if the South were to fall to the Communists, the whole of Southeast Asia was in danger of being overrun – the so-called Domino Theory, first touted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bush’s vision of the Middle East could be called the Domino theory in reverse – a free, democratic Iraq would be a beacon in the oppressed Middle East and, one by one, authoritarian regimes in the region would be toppled (it was unclear how this would be achieved) and would join Iraq in creating a free Middle East, closely allied with the United States. That this vision has little prospect of being fulfilled is in part due to the failure of the United States to comprehend the history and culture of the Middle East, precisely what Graham Greene over 50 years ago was citing as the reason why the American mission in Indochina would ultimately fail.” – Carl Pedersen
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 06:20:00 +0000
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