Invoking the Vietnam War these days mostly serves politics, and did even back when Iraq was simply a foreign country to which American troops might go. Because the memory of that campaign in southeast Asia is domiciled in reductionism and plain ignorance, it is rather easy to persuade that anything claimed about Vietnam presages what happens in Iraq; when in fact very little does, except the inhumanity and stifling that will follow American retreat, though that has occurred everywhere, from the Philippines in 1942 to Somalia in 1993.
President John Kennedy, almost fifty years ago, chose the former French colony — then ruled by the strongman Ngo Dinh Diem — as a rampart against Communist advance. Military participation, at first secret, increased gradually and was to preserve a state that wasn't totalitarian, be it despotic or otherwise, before its intended withdrawal. President George W. Bush formally and publicly sent the armed forces into Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein with a democrat after the dictator spent a decade boasting to have what wasn't allowed by his own signature, and began to show all signs of associating with those with whom he shouldn't have. But come on — on topic, the one name connotes the other.
Meanwhile, a kind of Ngo Dinh Diem is going white-knuckled over sovereignty that isn't legitimate but which he wants to keep very badly; who is a circumstantial and irksome ally of the United States; and whose northwest frontier is being swallowed up by fascist paramilitaries who lack popular support yet face no patriotic resistance, either. Therein we have Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.
In March, General Musharraf defamed and ejected the chief magistrate on grounds that Musharraf is in charge of Pakistan because he says he is. An uproar followed, and protests have flecked the country in the months since, one in particular dissolving into bloody riots. If the citizenry's demands and Washington's urges prevail, there will be an executive referendum soon — an authentic one that could attract liberals from exile.
Since late 2001 Pakistan has been, for certain pragmatists, a good model for "fighting terror" without entanglement in the "distractions" that are civil society and the election of democratists. Why not do business with whomever is answering? That question was taken by the Kennedy administration to be rhetorical, though its implicit meaning would change within two years, as Henry Cabot Lodge, John Kennedy's legate, sent cable after cable elaborating on his damnation in August 1963, stating that "there is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration."
A misbegotten regime is weakening under Musharraf, leaving a nation to be taken advantage of by the enemy, and all without the supposedly upsetting and occluding impositions of democracy. Forty-four years ago, Washington turned to the soldiers who had Ngo Dinh Diem and his adjutant brother executed. It cannot be argued that this careful reliance on the native idiom was prudent.
Trouble is ahead, of course. Islamabad has flirted with parliaments but the Pakistanis are encumbered by the inter-services intelligence, or ISI — which, not unlike the intra-war German army, is apart from the state and a reservoir for the will to govern by clandestinity and repression. Several political parties look and sound like al Qaeda and the Taliban, fit for Western cynics who will say that elections must include the inimical, too. Musharraf's decline nevertheless stimulates the conversation on the origins of tyranny: where exactly, violent ideologies come from and how the men who live by them can be beaten.