President Ford has rendered one final service to his country and the world, this time in post mortem. In a July 2004 interview with the veteran journalist Bob Woodward, Ford apparently stated that he “very strongly” disagreed with President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Remaining loyal to the gentlemen’s code for former U.S. presidents on not criticizing the incumbent in public (which is the reason why the interview came out right after Ford’s death last week), Ford refrained from questioning Bush in public but thought that going to war in Iraq was “a big mistake.”[1] It seems that Ford was fundamentally troubled with the Bush administration’s objectives in Iraq. “I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,” Ford stated in the interview, but added that “I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.” The White House’s reaction, as can be expected, did not respond to the statements and instead focused on “grieving” and “keeping the [Ford] family in our prayers.”

 

Gerald Ford was one of the most knowledgeable quarters on the issue of a protracted war. Ford was president when North Vietnam overran South Vietnam in April 1975, finally ending the Vietnam War. Wrongly criticized as “the only American president to lose a war,” Ford always had to live with the undeserved stigma and candidly affirmed that the label made him “mad as hell.”

 

Accordingly, it is important to use Vietnam as a lesson for Iraq. At the moment, the Iraq-Vietnam analogy is one that even President Bush does not shy away from. Prior to the midterm elections in November, Bush agreed with the comparison between the two conflicts but voiced the rationale of many of his predecessors who waged the war in Vietnam: “My guts tells me that they have all along been trying to inflict enough damage that we’d leave…And the leaders of al-Qaeda have made that very clear…They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause this government to withdraw.” Just replace al-Qaeda with the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese Army and Iraq with Vietnam, and the similarities between the two conflicts become extremely eerie.[2]

 

Aside from the most important Vietnam lesson that the United States should not go to places where socio-economic conditions are indiscernible to American policy-makers; or equally important ones that protracted foreign wars destroy resources for domestic reform and international development; or that weak means for far-reaching aims are a recipe for disaster; or that lack of allied support actually means that there might be something wrong with the war to begin with; perhaps the most useful lesson from the Vietnam War is to diplomatically engage countries that have vested interests in the conflict. Despite all its faults, the Nixon administration was extremely prudent in its decision to sit down on the negotiating table with the Soviets and the Chinese. The policy of détente continued under President Ford and that decision ultimately enabled the United States to leave Vietnam with a semblance of self-respect and to eventually end the bloody conflict.

 

The Bush administration’s job, should it choose to pursue a similar course, would not be that hard. Nixon was the first American president to reach out to Communist China. Together with his Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon was continuously harangued by opponents. President Bush is still not in a similar fix. Indeed, the Hamilton-Baker report that came out in November pointed out to that direction.

 

So, what sorts of countries is the Bush administration dealing with? Turkey is still a U.S. ally (despite the best efforts of statesmen in Washington and Ankara) and talks are currently underway to improve security in Northern Iraq, a very important item on the list of problems between Washington and Ankara. Given the historical record of American-Turkish relations, the two countries will certainly reach an understanding.

 

Diplomatic relations with Syria, though badly strained, are not severed and that is a good point to start. President Beshar al-Asad’s government has just as many stakes as the Bush administration (if not more) in restoring peace and quiet and keeping Iraq from being destroyed. Working in tandem with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait would be much easier.

 

Given the events on the ground right now, however, the prospect of American officials talking to their Iranian counterparts is highly unlikely, to say the least. The myriad problems between Tehran and Washington make it preposterous to even visualize some form of contact between President Bush and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When the Americans look at Iran, they see the hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy of 1979 as well as Tehran’s support for Lebanese Shia groups, which are believed to be responsible for the death of hundreds of U.S. diplomats and armed forces personnel in suicide bombings in Beirut in 1983. The Iranians view the American support for the regime of the Shah (epitomized in the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq by the CIA in 1953 and the CIA’s subsequent support for the monarchy’s secret service, SAVAK) and America’s close relations with Israel as a continuation of Western imperialism by other means.

 

The differences between the two parties only help to exacerbate their (mis)conceptions. The U.S. side identifies Mr. Ahmadinejad’s not-so-well-crafted rhetoric against Israel as a direct threat to a valuable ally and considers the Iranian nuclear program as a course that would lead to the destruction of Israel. The Americans also criticize the Iranians for the deterioration of the situation in Iraq, blaming Tehran for providing Shia groups with arms and finances.

 

Not only do the Iranians refute all of these allegations, they defend their position by mobilizing a religious discourse against the United States, saying that the “war on terror” is an ill-disguised resurrection of the Crusades, war of the Christian West against Muslim countries. Tehran clings to its nuclear program by arguing that it is entitled to peaceful nuclear energy and vehemently censures the United States for using the issue as an excuse to attack Iran. Last week’s UN sanctions have not been helpful in leading the Iranian government to a less caustic position in this regard. The tense relations between the United States and Iran are becoming more disquieting than ever.

 

Hopefully, not all will be lost. There is still ground for some sort of a working arrangement between the United States and Iran. First of all, as former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami mentioned at a lecture last fall, the United States did Iran a huge service by getting rid of its greatest enemies, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Iran’s immediate security situation, notwithstanding the current standoff over the nuclear program, has significantly improved over the last five years. Iranian policy-makers should note that not everything that the Americans do is intended to threaten their country. It might seem counterintuitive to argue that Washington and Tehran have common security interests, but that is precisely the case.

 

For their part, American decision-makers should bear in mind that far from being a direct threat to regional security, Iran has the potential to become (borrowing President Jimmy Carter’s unfortunate statement at the dawn of the Islamic Revolution) “an island of stability.” Iran is undergoing a major (though silent) transformation for quite a while. Although the reformist agenda has been weakened by the seemingly omnipotent conservative clerical caste with the advent of the Ahmedinejad government, there are quite a few Islamic scholars in Iran who hold quite progressive ideas (former President Khatami is one such individual). Last month’s elections demonstrate that the Iranian people expect and demand changes in their lives more loudly than ever. In the greater scheme of things, Iran was never a country that was too easy to rule precisely because of the anti-establishment disposition of the Iranian people (does that sound too American or what?). Iran is not the sort of place that one could easily write off.

 

It is too naïve to expect the sort of dialogue between Washington and Moscow and Washington and Beijing during the Cold War from the Bush and Ahmedinejad governments. But if we are to compare and contrast the current quagmire in Iraq (which has now become much more than merely an American problem) to the Vietnam War, there is only one lesson left to be drawn and applied: sit down with your adversary and bring a peaceful solution to the conflict. That holds true for both the United States and Iran.

 

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Barın Kayaoğlu is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia and a regular contributor to the Journal of Turkish Weekly.

 

E-mail: kayaoglu@virginia.edu

 

January 2,2007

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