Bush misreads Graham Greene.

In a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention on August 22, President Bush unveiled his administration's latest Iraq war marketing strategy. After the New Coke of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Crystal Pepsi of Middle East Democracy, we are now faced with the Classic Coke of Historical Precedent; the president's speech hinged upon a topic that many of his supporters had spent the last four years desperately avoiding any stated connection with: the war in Vietnam.Recognizing that this was a "painful subject ... too large to be contained in one speech," Bush decided to "limit myself to one argument," namely, the widely held belief that "the real problem" in Vietnam was "America's presence and that, if we would just withdraw, the killing would end." Just like, Bush said, Iraq today. Bush rejected such sentiment. He dismissed the "long pedigree" of anti-interventionism, suggesting that it had grown out of the American experience in Vietnam and attributing it to Graham Greene's 1955 novel, The Quiet American. The president's catchpenny reading habits have sent commentators reaching either for tea leaves (such as when he read Albert Camus's The Stranger) or vomit sacks (such as when he boasted of having finished "three Shakespeares"). But Graham Greene? The Quiet American's story is a love triangle whose corners are inhabited by a dyspeptic British journalist named Thomas Fowler, a clandestine CIA officer named Alden Pyle, and a young Vietnamese woman named Phuong. Pyle steals Phuong from Fowler, all the while attempting to forge a "third way" in Vietnamese politics: anti-French, antiCommunist, pro-American. Pyle is given no pause by his shallow understanding of Vietnam or by the fact that his "third way" appears impossible to achieve without deception. By novel's end, he is stabbed to death in an alley; Phuong returns to Fowler; and Vietnam's "third way" dies stillborn. Bush quoted Fowler's estimation of Pyle, which is perhaps the novel's most famous line: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." Bush's look backward at The Quiet American is curious in a number of ways. For one, Bush credited what he called "the Graham Greene argument" as having "gathered some steam" when the United States escalated the Vietnam war. Here was a clever piece of rhetorical misdirection: Bush attributed to a novel an argument it did not make about a war that began ten years after the book itself was written. Greene's argument was not one of the necessity of quitting Vietnam; it was an argument against the foolishness of getting involved in the first place. But far stranger than this intentional conflation was Bush's unintended one. He referred to Pyle, with telling fraternity, as "Alden," citing him as a "symbol of American purpose and patriotism--and dangerous naivete." Even with this caveat, it seemed as though the president was actually encouraging his audience to confuse one of modern literature's most benighted characters with himself. The emotionally Catholic and sympathetically Communist Greene had views of the United States that make Noam Chomsky's seem downright celebrational. His lifelong tolerance of both celestial and earthly despotism ("Thought's a luxury, " Fowler tells Pyle) is not attractive. What is attractive is the work. To read The Quiet American today is to be stunned that such a devastatingly prescient book was available to the Vietnam war's architects. Greene's early diagnosis of our South Vietnamese allies' lack of enthusiasm for the fight against Communism is today difficult to counter. From 1950 to 1975, nearly 30 percent of U.S. arms aid went to South Vietnam. Virtually all knowledgeable historians of the war estimate that a dismayingly large percentage of the U.S. aid received by South Vietnam was either stolen outright or grievously misappropriated by Saigon's power structure. While right-wing bloggers and columnists condemn the 1974 antiwar Congress for cutting aid to South Vietnam, the truth is that funds were not completely cut until June 1975--two months after the South Vietnamese Army fell apart against an attacking North Vietnamese force that, only two years earlier, had been less than a third its total size. Yes, by the time it fell, the South Vietnamese government was receiving far less aid than it was accustomed to. But would more aid have forestalled victory for the North Vietnamese, who already received from their Chinese and Soviet sponsors less than half of what the U.S. provided South Vietnam? This is unlikely. The major point of Bush's speech was what happened in Vietnam after the U.S. withdrawal and what could happen in Iraq. It is true that hundreds of thousands of non-Communist Vietnamese suffered great torment after North Vietnam's victory. While this was nothing like the at least one million dead promised by the headline of the last issue of Stars and Stripes delivered to South Vietnam, the abandonment of average South Vietnamese to the bamboo gulag was unquestionably immoral. The question was whether the greater immorality was to continue to fight a failed war on their behalf. As a South Vietnamese journalist who later died in Communist custody acknowledged, "No one, in psychological terms or any other terms, can continue forever to retain the affection and assistance of the person next to them, be that a single person, a friendly country, or an ally in a desperate situation." As for Cambodia, where, in Bush's words, "the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution," the president neglected to point out which nation had marched into Phnom Penh to put an end to the slaughter: the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. No one of any intellectual honesty believes a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be painless for either nation. History, however, provides suggestions, not guarantees, and literature, at its best, provides warnings. President Bush, having launched a preemptive war that failed to achieve virtually all its stated goals, is now attempting to sell what might best be called a retroemptive war. We are now, apparently, in the strange position of fighting one war to avoid replicating the example of another. "You have to fight for liberty," Pyle argues to Fowler. "Don't go on in the East with that parrot cry about a threat to the individual soul," Fowler responds. "Here you'd find yourself on the wrong side. ... [W]e just stand for Private 23987, unit in the global strategy." The Quiet American ends with the deeply compromised Fowler wishing "there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry." If the same thought has ever crossed the newly reflective mind of the president, we will never know--he seems to notice everything about books and historical examples but their point.

By Tom Bissell; Tom Bissell's latest book, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, was published in March.