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Notes
1. President George W. Bush, Remarks on the Fourth Anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 19 March 2007.
2. George F. Will, ‘America's Moral Duty in Iraq’, Washington Post , 4 December 2006, p. A19; Glenn Frankel, ‘The McCain Makeover’, Washington Post Magazine , 27 August 2006, p. W12; John McCain, ‘The War You're Not Reading About’, Washington Post , 8 April 2007, p. B07.
3. On the enhanced threat perceptions of the United States, see John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (New York: Free Press, 2006); Robert H. Johnson, Improbable Dangers: U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After (New York: St Martin's Press, 1994); and Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There In the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Touchstone, 2001).
4. Prospect theory is usually said to have been developed by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the late 1970s. See their ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’, Econometrica , vol. 47, no. 2, March 1979, pp. 263–91.
5. Both the speech and the transcript of the press conference are available at http://www.whitehouse.gov.
6. Some of the most useful observations from this growing cottage industry can be found in the essays in Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn B. Young (eds), Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from History (New York: New Press, 2007). See also Bush's 22 August 2007 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Kansas City, MO, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/08/20070822-3.html.
7. See Robert J. McMahon, ‘Credibility and World Power: Exploring the Psychological Dimension in Postwar American Diplomacy’, Diplomatic History , vol. 15, no. 4, Autumn 1991, pp. 455–71.
8. Quoted by Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 375.
9. Ted Hopf, Peripheral Visions: Deterrence Theory and American Foreign Policy in the Third World, 1965–1990 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994); and Robert H. Johnson, Improbable Dangers: U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After (New York: St Martin's Press, 1994).
10. See Christopher J. Fettweis, ‘America's Dangerous Obsession: Credibility and the War on Terror’, Political Science Quarterly , Winter 2007/08, forthcoming.
11. Melvin Laird, ‘Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam’, Foreign Affairs , vol. 84, no. 6, November–December 2005, p. 36, emphasis added.
12. Henry Kissinger, ‘How to Exit Iraq’, Washington Post , 19 December 2005.
13. Thomas L. Friedman, ‘Restoring Our Honor’, New York Times , 6 May 2004, p. 35.
14. For more on this, see John Mueller, ‘What if We Leave?’, American Conservative , 26 February 2007.
15. Quoted by Will, ‘America's Moral Duty In Iraq’.
16. Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus, ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq may not be Threat Here’, Washington Post , 18 March 2007, p. A20. See also David Froomkin, ‘They Won't Follow Us Home’, Washington Post , 19 March 2007, online edition.
17. See Steven Simon, ‘America and Iraq: The Case for Disengagement’, Survival , vol. 49, no. 1, Spring 2007, esp. pp. 66–8.
18. Former Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith has led the charge to beatify the Kurds. See his The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
19. See C.J. Campbell, ‘Running Out of Gas: The Time of the Wolf is Coming’, The National Interest , no. 51, Spring 1998, p. 48.
20. Shibley Telhami, Power and Leadership in International Bargaining: The Path to the Camp David Accords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 72–3.
21. For an explanation of oil-market dynamics and their relation to political manipulation, see Eugene Gholz and Daryl G. Press, ‘Energy Alarmism: The Myths that Make Americans Worry about Oil’, Policy Analysis , no. 589, 5 April 2007.
22. Stephen Biddle, ‘Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon’, Foreign Affairs , vol. 85, no. 2, March–April 2006, p. 5.
23. Apparently Rwanda was writ fairly small; its 800,000 deaths would pale in comparison with the bloodbath that would overwhelm Iraq. James Carafano, ‘What's Next in Iraq? Leaving Too Early Would Help Terrorists’, Des Moines Register , 16 March 2006.
24. William R. Corson, The Consequences of Failure (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), p. 51.
25. See Tom Wicker, ‘Instead of a Bloodbath’, New York Times , 8 July 1979, and Scott Laderman, ‘Iraq, Vietnam, and the Bloodbath Theory’, History News Network, 10 April 2006.
26. For example, Victor David Hanson wrote that the communist victory ‘brought more death and even greater dislocation to the Vietnamese than did decades of war’. Hanson's claims are offered without citation, and seemed to be based on nothing in particular. Victor David Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001), p. 425.
27. Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 198; Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1979); US Department of State, 1982 Human Rights Report (Washington DC: Bureau of Public Affairs, 1983); Elizabeth Becker, ‘Vietnam: The Faltering Revolution’, Washington Post , 23 September 1979; Tom Wicker, ‘Instead of a Bloodbath’, 8 July 1979.
28. In 1985, two academics at Berkeley claimed that 65,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed between 1975 and 1982. Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson, ‘Vietnam 1975–1982: The Cruel Peace’, Washington Quarterly , vol. 8, no. 4, Autumn 1985, pp. 169–82. Their results were called into serious question, to put it mildly, by Gareth Porter and James Roberts in ‘Creating a Bloodbath by Statistical Manipulation’, Pacific Affairs , vol. 61, no. 2, Summer 1988, pp. 303–10.