Fool me twice, shame on whom?

With next week's marking of the 32^nd anniversary of the American pullout of Vietnam—which precipitated the Fall of Saigon—we have a very opportune moment to reflect on the recent (and ongoing) calls to pull American troops our of Iraq. This question is made particularly apropos by the current showdown between President Bush and congress over the inclusion of a troop-withdraw time line in the new war-funding bill. The President has threatened a veto, and Democrats in neither chamber have the votes to override such a move.

Though this opinion will be very unpopular among readers (and among the general US population more broadly), I do not think troop withdraw anytime in the imminent future is a feasible or moral plan. I listen to the news, which is filled with daily reports of our soldiers being slaughtered for a very unpopular war. I imagine that the grief felt by their family and friends is unimaginable. I am saddened and angered by the loss of life in young men and women who carried so much promise for their cities, for their nation, and for the world.

But I also understand that as a nation we entered this war unbidden by the people of Iraq, and our tearing down of their old political and social system uninvited and leaving before a new stable system is in place is shameful and selfish. This moment appears to be a moment ripe for gloating for those who opposed the war from its inception. It's appears to be a wonderful "I told you so," moment. But that sentiment is neither helpful nor appropriate: as a people living under a democracy, we are all responsible for the decisions of government. When a new law is passed, the majority in favor and the minority opposed to it are both equally obligated to abide by it. So now the evil, cumbrous burden of funding the war falls on all our shoulders, but the burden of actually fighting the war falls to only a few.

Which teaches all of us the lesson that we must be very, very certain about the reasons for and nature and likely duration of a conflict before asking those few to take up arms and imperil their lives for the rest of us.

The cliché goes, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." The American public was (arguably) duped into the Vietnam War by the fear of Communism's steady march across the globe, which, in truth, was a reasonable threat at the time to American-style democracy. Eventually the toll exacted in American casualties proved too great to justify a battle that seemed largely ideological, and mounting political pressure forced the Washington bureaucrats to bring home the troops.

A rough (but certainly imperfect) parallel can be drawn to the situation in Iraq. Which leads me to ask: was the American public duped again into another fruitless and ideologically driven war? And likewise:"who is to blame for the mess in Iraq?" But the American public who lived through the Vietnam era is not the same American public of today. My generation, in particular, was not alive during the days of Nixon and LBJ, let alone Eisenhower or Kennedy. The lessons of Vietnam are from history books, not historical memory.

I am not trying to shirk our responsibility in this mess, but rather using this opportunity to ask whether we were poor students of our fathers' lessons, or whether they were bad teachers. Said one friend recently, "we were poor students. And one person in particular is at fault for not listening to his father—or his father's advisers."

I can only hope this will not only strengthen our own resolve to prevent the scourge of war in this lifetime, but to redouble our efforts to impart that lesson onto our children and grandchildren to guide them in their lifetimes as well.