Iraq and Gaza: History in combat

It was an important and fascinating speech. An American president was declaring himself a heretic in public by announcing that the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was not necessarily the wisest move. Just a year before, in June 2006, he was asked whether he saw a similarity between Vietnam and Iraq and he said, "No." Last week, at a national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he gave a detailed "Yes." "The question now before us comes down to this: 'Will today's generation of Americans resist the deceptive allure of retreat, and will we do in the Middle East what the veterans in this room did in Asia?"

President George W. Bush was talking about the allure of retreating from Iraq, but his question is relevant to other arenas as well. Israel's leaders were lured, twice within a decade, to retreat from Lebanon and from Gaza, and the debate over the implications of their actions is far from over.

It's been more than 30 years since the helicopters took off from the infamous roof in Saigon, taking with them the last of the evacuees, the refugees, from the collapsing South, and even if it sometimes seems as if the argument was decided long ago, it is continuing nonetheless, to the chagrin of those believe that they wrote the only possible version of history.

A week before Bush revealed his position, another senior Republican figure, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, did the same thing. "America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War," he wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. No, he is not talking about the standard lesson, a la "America must not get caught up in occupying remote countries." Giuliani has one message: It is precisely when the American public stopped supporting the war and imposed withdrawal on its leaders that "the consequences were dire."

Bush, in his speech, presented these horrific consequences to the American people. "...the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 'reeducation camps,' and 'killing fields.'" They faced the terrors of the vengeful regime of North Vietnam and the terrors of the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In any event, the president apparently thinks highly of his constituents. He thinks they really care about the groaning masses of these remote countries.

The truth, however, is that the American concern for the welfare of the Vietnamese then, or of the Iraqis today, was not and is not the main consideration determining the public's support for or opposition to a pullout. In Israel, too, the country's policy was not determined by consideration for the welfare of our neighbors. The withdrawal from Lebanon, like the withdrawal from Vietnam, was imposed by the public. No one has yet formulated a credible explanation for Ariel Sharon's decision to withdraw from Gaza. He certainly didn't do it for the good of the Palestinians.

Bush's speech attracted a great deal of flak. It quickly became clear that his position had its supporters, and that the responses usually divided along party lines. This is history in active combat service. The exact same thing will happen in Israel when the next withdrawal from occupied territory takes place. The starting point is what will dictate the retroactive interpretation of the consequences of previous withdrawals.

There is also a fundamental difference between the American and the Israeli "allure of retreat." America is geographically distant from Iraq and chronologically distant from Vietnam. For that reason, the public tends to support withdrawal while its leaders try to buy time. In Israel, where the echoes of previous withdrawals still reverberate in city street from Sderot to Kiryat Shmona, it is the public, with its bitter experience, that will impede its leaders from withdrawing too hastily the next time around.

After all, at least according to the current version of history, the withdrawal from Lebanon led to the Palestinian intifada and bolstered Hezbollah, while the disengagement from Gaza brought about the Hamas government and drew Qassam rockets to Ashkelon's door. On the face of it, it is hard to think of a better argument against another withdrawal, but this argument has a critical flaw: No one has any way of knowing what would have happened had Israel decided not to withdraw.

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