This War Is Not Like the Others — or Is It?

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

AS the nations of Europe leapt to arms in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson’s mind turned to President James Madison and the war with England in 1812.

“Madison and I are the only two Princeton men who have become president,” Wilson observed ominously in a letter, noting that tensions with Great Britain over its naval blockage of Germany recalled earlier disputes with England about freedom of the seas. “The circumstances of the War of 1812 and now run parallel. I sincerely hope they will not go further.”

His fears were unfounded. Great Britain became an ally in World War I, Wilson’s alma mater notwithstanding. But his knack for reading — or misreading — historical parallels hardly stands out in the annals of American presidents and public officials.

President Bush sent historians scurrying toward their keyboards last week when he defended the United States occupation of Iraq by arguing that the pullout from Vietnam had led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. His speech was rhetorical jujitsu, an attempt to throw back at his critics their favorite historical analogy — Vietnam — for the Iraq war. His argument aroused considerable skepticism from historians and political scientists, who note that the United States’ military action in Vietnam was among the factors that destabilized Cambodia. But Mr. Bush’s statement also revived a perennial question. Whenever a public officials starts to say “the lesson of,” is that a cue to stop listening?

“It is great for sound bites but it is completely misleading,” said Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the United States Air Force’s Air War College in Montgomery, Ala. He wrote a nine-point rebuttal to the analogies in Mr. Bush’s speech. “Reasoning by historical analogy is inherently dangerous,” Professor Record said. “It is especially dangerous in the hands of policymakers whose command of history is weak and who are pushing specific policy agendas.”

The Central Intelligence Agency has worried enough about the pitfalls of drawing historical analogies that two decades ago it spent $400,000 commissioning a course in the subject for senior analysts from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The Kennedy School ran the program until 2001, when the agency itself took it over.

Its creators told students their aims were akin to those of “a junior high school sex-education class”: preparing decision makers for an activity more inevitable than recommended.

“Since they are bound to do what we talk about, later if not sooner, they ought to profit from a bit of forethought about ways and means,” Professors Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May wrote in “Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers,” a book tied to the course.

“A little knowledge,” they wrote, “holds out the prospect of enhancing not alone safety but also enjoyment.”

Professors Neustadt and May advised policymakers considering past precedents to make lists of similarities, differences and unknowns. As a model, they examined the Cuban missile crisis.

Some in the Kennedy administration argued for bombing Cuba to prevent the Soviets from keeping missiles there. Anything less forceful, the hawks argued, would replicate Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement of Hitler at Munich — the analogy that proponents of military force have always used since World War II, including around the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

President Kennedy, however, was unconvinced by the Munich comparison. He argued that bombing Cuba risked the appearance of “a Pearl Harbor in reverse,” with the United States in the bomber’s role, and his views laid the groundwork for the successful naval blockade.

Such happy outcomes, though, are the exception, Professors Neustadt and May conclude.

They note that Johnson administration officials could have considered Thucydides’ account of the ill-conceived Athenian invasion of Syracuse more than two millennia ago. “Surely they had read ‘The Peloponnesian War’ somewhere, sometime, at least in snippets,” the authors wrote.

But no one in the Johnson administration appears to have brought up its parallels to the Vietnam War.

Public officials, political scientists say, usually turn to history to justify policies they’ve already settled on. In the 1980s, for example, Reagan administration officials compared tolerating the Sandinistas to appeasement at Munich, while opponents called Nicaragua another Vietnam.

“People alight on the likeness with an event in the past, and it helps them to understand something when they can associate it with something familiar,” Professor May said in an interview.

Historical analogies in public statements are especially suspect. Talking about Vietnam during the run-up to the war there, for example, United States government officials most often invoked Korea or — with increasing frequency as the escalation began — the appeasement of Hitler, according to a tally by Yuen Foong Khong, a professor of international relations at Oxford. The French retreat from Vietnam in 1954 — a precedent that augured failure — was almost never mentioned.

In private, however, the French defeat came up much more often — far more often than Munich and nearly as often as Korea, Professor Khong concluded in his 1992 book, “Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965.”

Policymakers also sometimes bat away facts that mar their analogies. Before the Vietnam War, for example, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball repeatedly reminded President Lyndon Johnson and his other aides of Vietnam’s overriding differences from both Munich and Korea. Arguing that Vietnam was “sui generis,” Ball predicted that the United States would suffer the same fate as the French in 1954.

Johnson listened, but he and his advisers dismissed Ball’s case nonetheless. France, generals told Ball, had not won a war since Napoleon.

Finally, Ball, recognizing that argument would never settle the battle of analogies, proposed what he called “a trial period” of “controlled commitment.” In a June 18, 1965, internal memo, Ball proposed increasing the number of American troops in Vietnam to 100,000 for three months to “appraise the costs and possibilities of waging a successful land war in South Vietnam and chart a clear course of action.” The results, he argued, would show which comparison was more apt: the Americans in Korea or the French in Vietnam.

Now, Professor Khong said in an interview, Ball’s proposal may itself be a good analogy for the current situation in Iraq, where President Bush has increased troop levels in a test of the military’s ability to pacify the country.

Next comes a debate over the meaning of the test results, Professor Khong said, which may be why both sides are reaching furiously for analogies to support their positions.