My first political memory, from sometime in the early to mid-1970s, was of the big painted signs the Partido Revolucionario Institucional splashed across boulders and cliffs along Mexican roadways. My second political memory dates to 1977, when I was watching a Mexican TV show and realized that women were treated differently than men.
Later, in New York, my sister's best friend in elementary school was an Iranian Sikh boy named Arash, whose parents had fled Iran in the wake of the shah's fall. Because of him, and the hostage crisis with his home country, the conflict with Iran (and within Iran) was the first international conflict of which I became aware. Looming over everything for the next decade was the Soviet threat of nuclear annihilation, and the economic threat of being outstripped by the Japanese.
I don't bring any of this up because I think my youthful memories are of any particular importance. But at a moment when attention to the mess in Iraq is high and comparisons of the situation there to Vietnam are increasingly common, it is worth recognizing that this metaphor means much less to many Americans than you might think.
"Senator [Edward] Kennedy's crisp assertion -- 'Iraq is George [W.] Bush's Vietnam' -- crystallizes emotions in the United States and stirs powerful memories," the great historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recently said in a speech. Perhaps. Schlesinger was born in 1917, and has an octogenarian's formidable grasp of the sweep of American history, having lived through so much of it.
But few Americans born since 1968 have any truly meaningful memories of the turbulent Vietnam era. And no American under 30 has any memory of the Vietnam War at all (though many doubtless have fond memories of former Vietnam warriors, i.e., their fathers). "To a whole new generation of Americans today, it seems a story from the olden times," historian David McCullough wrote in an introduction to Vietnam: A Television History. And it does.
The political vocabulary of those under around 35 has been shaped by an entirely different set of experiences than those that shaped the dominant baby-boomer discourse. For example, we have been at war or in some kind of conflict with Iraq my entire adult life. And Islamic terrorism has been part of the background noise of the American experience for even longer than that, from the Marine-barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983, when I was still learning long division, to the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, which blew out the kitchen window in a friend's place across the street from it. We used to sit in his kitchen drinking coffee and making fun of how long he'd had cardboard in his window while waiting for the landlord to install a new plane of glass. It seemed like part of the normal craziness of New York, where nutcases of the world united to re-enact their national dramas before you in a grand spectacle that involved you yet had nothing to do with you.
All of that changed on September 11, which very much involved every American personally (and which displaced my friend from his apartment for two long years). For my generation, 9-11 is the defining experience of our times. For years it seemed like the defining experience would be the war in the Balkans and the ever-tantalizing, always slightly out of reach possibility of America acting as a benign giant to quell humanitarian disasters and genocides. But then it turned out to be the experience not of helping others but of being attacked that united us.
By leaking 1971 tapes of John Kerry speaking about his Vietnam War medals to the press, the Republican National Committee and the Bush administration are not simply trying to create a fake "character controversy" about the preciseness of Kerry's speech; they are seeking to link him with a bygone world and the losing side of the debates of 30 years ago.
By dredging up this video, the Republicans are making Kerry look old, forcing him to discuss the past instead of the future, and reminding all of America how much hair people used to have back in the 1970s. This is significant, because while history has recorded that the Vietnam War was a costly mistake, it has also ruled -- propelled by a mighty shove from the contemporary right -- that the anti-war protesters represent the wrong side of the culture war. And to the extent that our current culture wars are fought along aesthetic as well as political lines, it helps the Republicans to paint Kerry as a member of the 1970s counterculture.
They are trying to turn him into George McGovern, another Democratic combat veteran who opposed the Vietnam War, done in by his associations with the longhairs, based on stereotypes that were doubtless false, even then.
Further, reminding the public of Kerry's youthful anti-war activism is helpful to the Republican project to distort and undermine Kerry's current position with regard to Iraq. The alternative to staying the course in Iraq, as discussed by the president, is never bringing in the United Nations or more U.S. troops, as Kerry has proposed, but "cutting and running," which is a position not even Carol Moseley Braun or Howard Dean advocated. If Bush can paint Kerry as an anti-war activist, a "peacenik" in the dated parlance of that day, it helps make the cutting-and-running position seem, to people who don't know any better, like one Kerry might take.
Why might people make this mistake? Partly because of the way human analogical reasoning works. Yuen Foong Khong, in his 1992 book, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965, looked at the way political and military decision-makers used analogies to formulate foreign-policy decisions, finding some very serious flaws in the process. "People tend to access analogies on the basis of surface similarities," he noted, and "once the analogy or schema is accessed, it (1) allows the perceiver to go beyond the information given, (2) processes information 'top down,' and (3) can lead to the phenomenon of perseverance." Because it's hard to undo what the analogy has done, "[T]he process of analogical reasoning involves cognitive mechanisms and inferential steps that may lead to simplistic and mistaken interpretations of incoming stimuli." In short, by conflating the present and the past, reasoning by analogy encourages people to draw sweeping, often incorrect conclusions from superficial similarities. Worse, in foreign-policy situations, it can literally lead to trying to fight the last war.
Others who study the processes of human thought have found that analogies that assist people with learning new information also tend to keep them from learning anything that does not fit into the analogical framework. Rand Spiro, an education scholar who has studied mental flexibility, and his colleagues found that "simple analogies that help novices gain a preliminary grasp of difficult, complex concepts may later become serious impediments to fuller and more correct understandings." Medical students given simple analogies to understand the vascular system, for example, grasped what they were studying more easily at first, but later had difficulty learning information that fell outside what the analogy taught them to expect. In short, using a Vietnam analogy now may make it harder for people to actually understand what Kerry's position on Iraq is.
Bush says that Iraq is a front in the global war on terrorism, a gathering threat that needed to be preempted. Some Kerry surrogates say Iraq is like Vietnam, a quagmire that can't be won. Neither is describing the specific reality we face, nor the full range of options at our disposal for handling the situation, nor Kerry's actual positions.
When I hear politicians talking about Vietnam, I hear men of a certain generation recalling their glory days or hoping to refight the battles of their youth. It makes me think they are talking not about America but about themselves -- and usually, I conclude, they are. I have tremendous respect for those who, like Kerry, served and were injured. But hearing about Vietnam nonstop when the contemporary world has so many specific and different crises to face makes me want to, as I hear people used to say, tune out.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor. Her column appears each week in the online edition.
