This War Is Not Like the Others - or Is It?

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: August 26, 2007
AS the nations of Europe leapt to arms in 1914, President Woodrow
Wilson's mind turned to President James Madison and the war with
England in 1812.

"Madison and I are the only two Princeton men who have become
president," Wilson observed ominously in a letter, noting that
tensions with Great Britain over its naval blockage of Germany
recalled earlier disputes with England about freedom of the seas. "The
circumstances of the War of 1812 and now run parallel. I sincerely
hope they will not go further."

His fears were unfounded. Great Britain became an ally in World War I,
Wilson's alma mater notwithstanding. But his knack for reading - or
misreading - historical parallels hardly stands out in the annals of
American presidents and public officials.

President Bush sent historians scurrying toward their keyboards last
week when he defended the United States occupation of Iraq by arguing
that the pullout from Vietnam had led to the rise of the genocidal
Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. His speech was rhetorical
jujitsu, an attempt to throw back at his critics their favorite
historical analogy - Vietnam - for the Iraq war. His argument aroused
considerable skepticism from historians and political scientists, who
note that the United States' military action in Vietnam was among the
factors that destabilized Cambodia. But Mr. Bush's statement also
revived a perennial question. Whenever a public officials starts to
say "the lesson of," is that a cue to stop listening?

"It is great for sound bites but it is completely misleading," said
Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the United States Air
Force's Air War College in Montgomery, Ala. He wrote a nine-point
rebuttal to the analogies in Mr. Bush's speech. "Reasoning by
historical analogy is inherently dangerous," Professor Record said.
"It is especially dangerous in the hands of policymakers whose command
of history is weak and who are pushing specific policy agendas."

The Central Intelligence Agency has worried enough about the pitfalls
of drawing historical analogies that two decades ago it spent $400,000
commissioning a course in the subject for senior analysts from Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government. The Kennedy School ran the
program until 2001, when the agency itself took it over.

Its creators told students their aims were akin to those of "a junior
high school sex-education class": preparing decision makers for an
activity more inevitable than recommended.

"Since they are bound to do what we talk about, later if not sooner,
they ought to profit from a bit of forethought about ways and means,"
Professors Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May wrote in "Thinking in
Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers," a book tied to the
course.

"A little knowledge," they wrote, "holds out the prospect of enhancing
not alone safety but also enjoyment."

Professors Neustadt and May advised policymakers considering past
precedents to make lists of similarities, differences and unknowns. As
a model, they examined the Cuban missile crisis.

Some in the Kennedy administration argued for bombing Cuba to prevent
the Soviets from keeping missiles there. Anything less forceful, the
hawks argued, would replicate Neville Chamberlain's 1938 appeasement
of Hitler at Munich - the analogy that proponents of military force
have always used since World War II, including around the 2003
invasion of Iraq.

President Kennedy, however, was unconvinced by the Munich comparison.
He argued that bombing Cuba risked the appearance of "a Pearl Harbor
in reverse," with the United States in the bomber's role, and his
views laid the groundwork for the successful naval blockade.

Such happy outcomes, though, are the exception, Professors Neustadt
and May conclude.

They note that Johnson administration officials could have considered
Thucydides' account of the ill-conceived Athenian invasion of Syracuse
more than two millennia ago. "Surely they had read 'The Peloponnesian
War' somewhere, sometime, at least in snippets," the authors wrote.

But no one in the Johnson administration appears to have brought up
its parallels to the Vietnam War.

Public officials, political scientists say, usually turn to history to
justify policies they've already settled on. In the 1980s, for
example, Reagan administration officials compared tolerating the
Sandinistas to appeasement at Munich, while opponents called Nicaragua
another Vietnam.

"People alight on the likeness with an event in the past, and it helps
them to understand something when they can associate it with something
familiar," Professor May said in an interview.

Historical analogies in public statements are especially suspect.
Talking about Vietnam during the run-up to the war there, for example,
United States government officials most often invoked Korea or - with
increasing frequency as the escalation began - the appeasement of
Hitler, according to a tally by Yuen Foong Khong, a professor of
international relations at Oxford. The French retreat from Vietnam in
1954 - a precedent that augured failure - was almost never mentioned.

In private, however, the French defeat came up much more often - far
more often than Munich and nearly as often as Korea, Professor Khong
concluded in his 1992 book, "Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien
Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965."

Policymakers also sometimes bat away facts that mar their analogies.
Before the Vietnam War, for example, Under Secretary of State George
W. Ball repeatedly reminded President Lyndon Johnson and his other
aides of Vietnam's overriding differences from both Munich and Korea.
Arguing that Vietnam was "sui generis," Ball predicted that the United
States would suffer the same fate as the French in 1954.

Johnson listened, but he and his advisers dismissed Ball's case
nonetheless. France, generals told Ball, had not won a war since
Napoleon.

Finally, Ball, recognizing that argument would never settle the battle
of analogies, proposed what he called "a trial period" of "controlled
commitment." In a June 18, 1965, internal memo, Ball proposed
increasing the number of American troops in Vietnam to 100,000 for
three months to "appraise the costs and possibilities of waging a
successful land war in South Vietnam and chart a clear course of
action." The results, he argued, would show which comparison was more
apt: the Americans in Korea or the French in Vietnam.

Now, Professor Khong said in an interview, Ball's proposal may itself
be a good analogy for the current situation in Iraq, where President
Bush has increased troop levels in a test of the military's ability to
pacify the country.

Next comes a debate over the meaning of the test results, Professor
Khong said, which may be why both sides are reaching furiously for
analogies to support their positions.

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