Dominoes

March 29, 2008

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, wrote about the differences between the Democratic and Republican arguments on Iraq in the Washington Post.

The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for “staying the course” draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush’s and Sen. John McCain’s forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of “falling dominoes” that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier.

Matthew Yglesias added on his own thoughts about the Domino Theory that enveloped U.S. foreign policy after the fall of China to the communists, and coaxed American strategic thinking into full scale war with Vietnam.

The right has made a lot of hay out of the fact that some anti-war types to some extent understated the extent to which a North Vietnamese victory would be a humanitarian problem for many South Vietnamese people. Much less hay has been made out of the fact that the hawks had been quite literally arguing that there was a straight line between the Communistification of Vietnam and then the inevitable spread of Communism to Malaysia, Indonesia, all of Asia, and soon enough the United States itself. The argument really was that we had to fact them over there or else we’d be fending them off from our very shores.

Ironically, March 29 marks the 35th anniversary of the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces from South Vietnam, and any discussion of Domino Theory and the Vietnam War compels me to refer readers to the incredible 2003 documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76wv2ybJelQ

Watch the full documentary by Errol Morris, complete with the stellar original scores by Philip Glass, online here.