An aspect of the human mind is to reach for the past when grappling with the present or peering into the future. We are conditioned by the past, but the past is not simply frozen nor is the present merely fluid and uncertain.
We are told repeatedly that Iraq is another Vietnam—the message being that the U.S. involvement in Iraq is as mistaken as America’s involvement was in Vietnam, and a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in ignominy is as certain as what occurred when the last Americans departed Saigon in April 1975.
The Vietnam analogy for Iraq is made by those who have frozen that history into an incontrovertible “truth” of America, defeated in Vietnam for its folly, arrogance and overreach to shape the lives of a people of whom it knew little.
Vietnam was the first war of the television age. Reports from Vietnam in words and pictures shaped the understanding of a generation not only about war and politics, but about itself.
Marshall McLuhan, Canada’s most celebrated teacher and public intellectual of the last half-century, described best the nature of knowledge and learning in the television age as the “medium is the message.”
The media being the message cast the lesson of America’s involvement and withdrawal from Vietnam as folly and defeat.
This media is a closed loop, somewhat akin to a snake feeding and fattening on its tail. Its consensus is what it has fed itself.
The first drafts of this history—of America’s war in Vietnam—were presented by writers who reported on it for the media, and their words shaped the narrative that became fixed in our minds.
I read the best-selling books on the subject—The Best and the Brightest (1972) by David Halberstam and Vietnam: A History (1983) by Stanley Karnow—in college. Then came Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988).
I was reminded of these books recently on reading Mark Moyar, a historian, who rightly questions the dominant interpretation the media has given to this history.
A contrary view to the Halberstam, Karnow and Sheehan narrative would be that American sacrifice in Vietnam saved the rest of south-east Asia—except for Cambodia and Laos—from being the dominos falling to communists.
The years of American presence in Vietnam provided time and space to countries in the region exposed to communist penetration and insurgencies to prevent what occurred in mainland China and its immediate perimeter.
Indeed, American sacrifices contributed to the south-east Asian countries emergence in the 1970s as the fastest growing economies in the Pacific region, while evolving in their own respective manner into democracies.
In November 2006, Vietnam hosted in its capital, Hanoi, the 14th annual meeting of leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) with U.S. President George W. Bush in attendance.
Vietnamese are desperately seeking to play catch up with their more prosperous neighbours in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia. Hanoi, more importantly, wants Washington’s embrace to ease its passage into the 21st century.
Hence, the lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is threefold. First, freedom and economic prosperity have to be fought and won.
The second lesson is Americans, despite the common human failings they share with everyone else, have been most forthcoming and generous as former President John F. Kennedy mentioned in his January 1961 inaugural address to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
Finally, those who make the past a closed and fixed book have little to teach Iraqis or others seeking success through securing liberty.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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