President George W. Bush is not generally known for his firm grasp of history. But this has not stopped him from using history to justify his policies. In a recent speech to American war veterans in Kansas City, he defended his aim to “stay the course in Iraq by pointing out the consequences of the American withdrawal from the war in Vietnam. He also mentioned the post-1945 occupation of Japan and the Korean War as success stories in America’s efforts to bring freedom to Asia, and by extension, the world.
Historians, Democrats, and other Bush critics were quick to denounce his speech, particularly his reference to Vietnam, as self-serving, dishonest, and inaccurate.
Yet, for once, Bush actually hit upon a historical analogy that was true. Of course, the Vietnam War was different in almost every respect from the war in Iraq. Ho Chi Minh was not Saddam Hussein. In Vietnam, the United States was not invading a country, but defending a corrupt authoritarian ally against an aggressive Communist regime. But what Bush actually said was that the US withdrawal from Indochina was followed by a bloodbath in Cambodia, and brutal oppression in Vietnam. A withdrawal from Iraq, he implied, would result in similar bloodshed, or worse.
That is almost certainly true. However, what Bush did not say is that neither the mass murders in Southeast Asia, nor the potential mass murders in Iraq, would have occurred without the chaos caused by US intervention.
But what about the Asian success stories, in Japan, Korea, and other places under American protection? Was Bush right to boast of America’s role in giving these countries their freedom? As he put it to the Kansas City veterans: “Will today’s generation of Americans resist the allure of retreat, and will we do in the Middle East what the veterans in this room did in Asia?
What exactly did the US do in Asia? The first few years of the occupation of Japan were indeed a remarkable success for democracy. Instead of helping Japanese of the old school restore an authoritarian system, General Douglas MacArthur’s administration helped Japanese liberals restore and improve their prewar democratic institutions.
Trade unions were given more clout. Women got the vote. Civil liberties were boosted. And the semi-divine Japanese Emperor was brought down to earth. Much of the credit for this goes to the Japanese themselves and to the idealistic, left-leaning New Dealers in MacArthur’s government who supported them.
When China fell to Mao’s Communists, however, and North Korea got Chinese and Soviet backing for an invasion of the south, democratic idealism was stopped in its tracks. In Japan, former war criminals were released from prison, “reds were purged, and right-wing governments led by some of those same former war criminals got enthusiastic American backing. Democracy, instead of being nurtured, was distorted, with active American encouragement, to make sure the right stayed in power and the left was kept at bay.
South Koreans certainly have much to thank the Americans for. Without UN intervention in the Korean War, led by the US, the South would have been taken over by Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader, and their current freedom and prosperity would never have been possible.
But South Korean democracy was not something the US gave to the Koreans, or even always encouraged. From the late 1940’s to the late 1980’s, the US played along with, and sometimes actively backed, anti-Communist authoritarian rulers, who grabbed and consolidated their powers through violent coups and the suppression of dissent.
The same was true in the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Thailand, and, indeed, in the Middle East, where democracy is yet to take root. As long as the Cold War lasted, US administrations consistently favored military strongmen and civilian dictators in the name of fighting Communism – anything to keep the left down, even the kind of left that would have been regarded as simply liberal in the democratic West.
True, for most people, life under right-wing Asian strongmen was, on the whole, preferable to life under Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, or even Ho Chi Minh. But to call the citizens under Park Chung Hee, Ferdinand Marcos, or General Suharto “free is an abomination. The happy fact that Koreans, Filipinos, Thais and Taiwanese did eventually become free, or at least freer, is not so much to the credit of the US as it is to the people who fought for their freedoms themselves.
It was only in the late 1980s, when the Communist empire was crumbling, that US governments actively backed democratic politicians and demonstrators in Seoul, Taipei, or Manila. But the heroes of democracy were Asian, not American.
Bush is right to claim that people in the Middle East would like to be as prosperous and free as the South Koreans, but his notion that the war in Iraq is simply a continuation of US policies in Asia could not be more mistaken. In Asia, as in the Middle East, US strategy was to prop up dictators against Communism until their own people toppled them. In the Middle East today, it is reckless and radical: invading a country, wrecking its institutions, and expecting that freedom will grow in the ensuing state of anarchy.
To confuse these different enterprises and pretend that they are the same is not only wrong, but dangerous, and deeply disappointing to those of us who still regard the US as a force for good.
Ian Buruma smost recent book is Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. He is a professor of democracy, human rights and journalism at Bard College. This commentary is published by Daily News Egypt in collaboration with Project Syndicate (www.projectsyndicate.org).
