Holiday in Cambodia

"This is like Bush insisting that he flew an intercept mission with the Texas Air National Guard to repel Soviet bombers based in Cuba, and later stating that this event was “seared in his memory – seared” because it taught him the necessity of standing up against evil governments, such as the ones we face today." James Lileks in today's Bleat. The argument's Kerry has drawn from this incident are the core of his porfessed anxieties about such interventions as Iraq. Indeed, when you ask Kerry about Iraq he talks about Vietnam. Matthew Yglesias, on the Hugh Hewitt Show, argued that Kerry has embelished a story which continues to have a general truth about the folly of such conflicts. Hewitt makes the lawyers' mistake of assuming that dishonest once, dishonest always. As a historian I remind him that every factual claim has to be evaluated on its own merits. Hewitt goes too far trying to make this story do much work.

I go back to Lilek's read on the story. Kerry wants to tell a story about foriegn adventures. When that story turns out to be fabricated, not just embelished, one wonders not about Kerry's other statements, one wonders about the central message of foriegn adventures. This is a species of the worst case fallacy. In the worst case fallacy you present the most radical professor as a characterization of all of the professoriate, or you pick the most dogmatic Christian. Neither is a sound characterization because they are examples of the worst case. Kerry has taken the worst case scenario and juiced it up a bit. By doing this he not only presents a fallacious argument, but he builds it on factual errors. When both your premices and your inferences are unsound the argument can only be right by accident.

Mark Steyn, in the link I posted previous to this one, writes, "Look, I would rather talk about the war. The current one, I mean — not the one that ended three decades ago." Steyn is on to the core problem with Kerry's claims. Kerry is fighting the last war, and by the evidence, its a fantastic account of the last war too boot. There is a powerful irony here. Vietnam went as poorly as it did because the US Army fought the war in Vietnam they way they fought the Germans in WWII, not the way the Marines had defended allies around the globe from insurgent forces for decades. They drew on the wrong experiences taken from a previous war in order to form a template to fight the current war. Kerry wants to repeat that process now.

Given the important role given to the Marines, given the emphasis put on a transition to light units and small war operations, the person or people who seem to have the best understanding of things would be Rumsfeld and his people.