Rutgers historian Gardner (Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam
) makes a convincing case for the parallel between the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The cold war American policy of containment, rather than military force, to discourage Soviet aggression seemed cowardly to early neoconservatives convinced that America should actively seek to defeat communism and replace it with free-market democracy. Gardner names Walt Rostow, Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, as father of this theory of “creative destruction,” which he believed justified America’s war against Communist forces in Vietnam. Rostow’s eloquent exhortations to persist in a failing war foreshadow those of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on “staying the course” in Iraq. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, neocons turned to the Middle East, although Iran was initially the major villain. The first President Bush refused to occupy Iraq after the Gulf War, but Gardner points out that by demonizing Saddam Hussein as a Hitlerian monster secretly building nuclear weapons, he provided justification for the second President Bush’s 2003 invasion. This well-argued study gives a sharp historical and intellectual framework for understanding the current Iraq war. (Oct.)
