S\o7HORTLY\f7 before he was killed in an auto accident earlier this week, David Halberstam and I discussed some points we hoped to cover in an onstage conversation we would have had Thursday evening, at a dinner sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.
Our hosts had been particularly generous concerning the scope of our chat, but David and I quickly agreed that the topic that seemed most urgent to both of us was how the conflicts in Iraq and Vietnam have come to resemble each other in fundamental ways.
Halberstam had made his reputation as one of his generation's greatest reporters by providing the New York Times' readers with coverage of the war in Southeast Asia that recorded the facts on the ground rather than the convenient official fantasies about what was occurring as tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died. His book on the origins of America's enmeshment in Southeast Asia, "The Best and the Brightest," remains not simply the finest account of that process but also -- by implication -- a definitive study of how an elite foreign policy establishment's hubris worked to undercut American altruism and farsightedness in the prosecution of the Cold War.
"Both wars, of course, are quagmires," Halberstam said in that improbable baritone that rumbled over the phone line like the voice of God on steroids. "The facts on the ground are different, but I'm afraid the facts in Washington are not. In both Vietnam and Baghdad, you have American governments constructing their policies out of mendacity and delusion, and young men and women are dying for that lethal combination."
Halberstam's synthesis of the Bush administration's failings in Iraq seemed precisely to the point Friday, in news accounts concerning former Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet's forthcoming book recounting the White House's willful distortion of the facts in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. According to the New York Times on Friday, Tenet alleges that President Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, not only were resolved to invade Iraq no matter what intelligence reports actually showed but also that Cheney in particular was determined to assert that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, when none ever existed.
In other words, "mendacity and delusion" -- and people dying as a consequence.
