Now that the Decider has officially declared Iraq Vietnam, who will tell Alexander Downer?

“Well it’s a completely separate scenario from Vietnam,” explained Downer, a year or so ago.

“I mean, without going into the whole history of Vietnam, but I mean anybody who understands the history – how the country become divided, the colonial background to Vietnam will know that its circumstances were entirely different from modern day Iraq. It doesn’t bear comparison really.”

With their last hopes pinned on a Lyndon Johnson-style surge, you can see why Downer and co. have avoided the “V” word for so long. For the reality-based community, though, the comparison has long been unavoidable.

And it’s about more than just the daily butcher-bill (most recently coming in at 34 US soldiers dead in a single day). Politically, for instance, Washington’s relationship with Baghdad increasingly resembles its relationship with Saigon in the early 1960s.

“The Americans are maintaining substantial forces in the country and are pouring something like a million dollars a day into its coffers. In return they hope to see an effective war effort by a democratic and popular government.”

It’s only the reference to millions (rather than billions) of dollars that identifies the above lines as from a 1963 Age piece about South Vietnam’s President Diem rather than a 2007 article about Iraq’s President Maliki. Shortly afterwards, Washington replaced Diem with a coup; Maliki seems understandably worried about a similar fate.

Within the US military, Vietnamisation has been taking place for a long time.

“When they originally get in country,” explained one Marine, “[Americans] feel very friendly toward the Vietnamese and they like to toss candy at the kids. But as they become hardened to it and kind of embittered against the war, as you drive through the village you take the cans of C-rats and the cases and you peg ‘em at the kids; you try to belt them over the head.”

Wanna see how the Youtube generation does it? But why is Bush suddenly making Vietnam comparisons?

Grasping the real meaning of W.’s speech requires a look at the First World War, one of the few conflicts it doesn’t mention. In the wake of defeat in that war, German militarists developed a theory that they’d been betrayed by the “November criminals” who signed the peace treaties. This “stab-in-the-back” thesis allowed those who launched the war to hand-pass responsibility for the debacle to the liberals who followed them.

Bush is now channelling not the Vietnam War itself but the revisionism the American Right has developed about that conflict in the years since it ended.
Historically, the Right-wing fantasy that week-kneed liberals prevented the army doing its job in Vietnam is obscene nonsense.

The US dropped 8 million tons of explosives on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, killing perhaps 3 million people. Yet, as early as 1971, the America army was in a state of complete disarray.

That year, the US Armed Forces Journal wrote:

By every conceivable indicator, our Army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near mutinous.

Nonetheless, with the Republican ascendancy, stab-in-the-back rhetoric has moved from the wingnut blogs into the mainstream. Which is why, on his last throw of the dice, Bush is suddenly talking Vietnam.

Of course, in Germany, the real beneficiaries of the “November criminals” rhetoric were not the Right but the far-Right. Today’s version has the same dynamic – if you read it closely, Bush’s speech comes very close to claiming bin Laden is behind the peace movement.

Blaming defeat in Iraq on the enemy within will not change the outcome but it will embolden the craziest elements of the Republican Party. Still, what does Bush care?

He’s not going to be around. Après moi, le deluge, as they say.