Is Iraq a Vietnam style "quagmire" to escape from --- as the advocates of speedy withdrawal often claim?Or is it -- like Vietnam --- a place where defeatists undermine a war effort by trying to cut funds when perseverance could bring victory?
We live in the "post Vietnam era" where we often look at the world through the searing prism of the last big war.
Yet Iraq must be understood in its own terms, illuminated by experience of the past but never forced into rigid molds of other times and other places.
For that could blur the lens of clear perception and boost the power of emotional propaganda.
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It is nothing new -- this tendency to view a current war through the lens of a war in the past.
Civil War officers often saw that conflict through the lens of the Mexican and Napoleonic Wars. So they sent forth their men in frontal charges to be cut down by long range artillery and rifled muskets.
World War I commanders were late to see that machine guns and barbed wire made the tactics of earlier wars of movement even more obsolete -- at least for a time.
After World War I, France's defense planners relied upon a defensive Maginot Line which failed to see that tanks and aircraft would restore a war of movement and make barbed wire and trenches obsolete.
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The challenge, I have learned, is never to be transfixed by one limited historical experience -- but to keep the mind and heart open to "all things under the sun."
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I faced it as a journalist with The Christian Science Monitor -- when my reporting was sometimes partly influenced by how I was raised.
The dim echoes of World War I still sounded in my ears. My father was a convert to Quakerism who was born in 1897 and raised in a socialist/pacifist tradition. For him the "Great War" seemed not a triumph of right over wrong -- but a collapse of civilized reality before an uncontrollable man made plague.
Military power coupled to secret alliances seemed an agent of irrationality in the service of special, often blind interests. So my father joined the merchant marine to escape the draft.
Many after World War I felt the need to limit military power and overseas involvements to prevent a repeat of World War I.
in the post WWII era I was raised in a family which stressed the lessons of WWI. Indeed I cut my teeth in the 1950's studying the diplomatic and military lessons of WWI by studying on my own the classic 1928 historical analysis "The Origins of the World War" by Sidney Bradshaw Fay.
This volume placed responsibility for the war on all powers, but especially Austria, Russia, and Serbia whose local conflicts were allowed to escalate into world war by a system of alliances.
Yet by the 1950's the broader world I grew up in was dominated by residues of World War II, not World War I.
I was a bit out of sync.
My view was shaped as much by the poetry of those who fought in World War I trenches as by the "Double H's" of World War II (Holocaust and Hiroshima), "Double H's" which still color our view of terrorist threats.
The World War II generation often saw war as a means of saving the world from Nazi barbarism ---- a desperate, necessary thing to do at great cost, partly because leaders and peoples in the Thirties had failed to build the military power that would contain, inhibit, or destroy genocidal despots.
Hence many after WWII saw the need to build military power in the service of a moral crusade to prevent a repeat of World War II, to contain an evil totalitarian Soviet Union.
President Johnson's Secretary of State Dean Rusk defended American involvement in Vietnam by the need to avoid 1930's style appeasement, "another Munich."
Indeed some defenders of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein see today's Iraq war as an extension of the World War II's historic mission to destroy totalitarian despots who rule by terror.
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So from the mid 1950's onward I was an earnest student of just how wars did and could begin and grow.
And that is what I reported on from Beijing. In the back of my mind was that old post World War I concern that small wars could escalate into big wars if big powers feel compelled to intervene on behalf of their allies.
In 1979 the Chinese, the Americans and the Russians were smart enough to keep this from happening. Yet the 29 day Chinese attack on Vietnam which cost some 20,000 Chinese lives was a small initial stage in the resumed Cold War that replaced the Nixon Brezhnev detente -- and turned hot from Indochina to Afghanistan and Central America.
So each generation can have a flawed, limited view of the present -- blinkered by the lens of the past.
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The challenge, I have learned, is never to be transfixed by one limited historical experience -- but to keep the mind and heart open to "all things under the sun."
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