Ghosts (Or: Does History Repeat?)

By Charles Krauthammer

It is not easy to draw a straight line between Lebanon and Grenada. Yet both President Reagan and his critics have managed the feat. For the President, what connects the two points is a malevolent Soviet presence that seeks to turn trouble into opportunity. For the critics it is a trigger-happy, blustering President who turns diplomatic problems into snooting wars.

It is easier to draw a line between the President and his critics. They are joined by a common fear: that history will repeat itself. They disagree as to precisely what history is about to be repeated, but everyone is quick to raise the specter of the return of some dreaded "another." The critics see another Viet Nam here, another round of gunboat diplomacy (carried out by another Teddy Roosevelt) there. Administration officials are quoted as explaining that the Grenada invasion was meant variously to prevent "another Iran," "another Beirut"(!), "another Nicaragua" or "another Suriname." (There is irony here. Suriname had fallen under Cuban influence after a recent military takeover. The day after the Grenada invasion, Suriname expelled the Cuban ambassador and practically every Cuban adviser in the country--out of fear of becoming "another Grenada.") Perhaps it was the enormity of the loss in Beirut or the suddenness of the invasion of Grenada. For whatever reason, the past several weeks have seen the worst outbreak in memory of the "another" syndrome.

When Psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan saw this kind of repetition neurosis, he called it parataxic distortion. We call it learning from history. With a dutiful invocation of Santayana's banality about those doomed to repeat the past, we have permitted the ghosts of history to enter our debates and to control them.

American servicemen are dying abroad, and the air is filled with metaphors. Like all the code words of ideological warfare, such metaphors are more than mere shorthand. They are used to prevent thought. They do so by instantly conjuring up a whole complex of circumstances and feelings to be drawn automatically from one situation and plugged into another. For "another Iran," read: hostages, helplessness, humiliation. For "another Cuba," read: adventurism, revolution, proxy mischief. For "another Afghanistan," read: imperialism, superpower bullying, disrespect for the rule of law. (For "another Nicaragua," see "another Cuba," above.)

Grenada, now the metaphorical capital of the world, has been compared by one side or the other with all of these and more. The real Grenada is none of the above. The upheaval there was not, as it was in Iran, a xenophobic religious revolution that saw in every American an agent of Satan and a spy. Grenada was not, like Cuba or Nicaragua, a regional power that could project real force against its neighbors (though it would still be valuable to a great power as a staging point; in this respect it resembled, if anything, other useful dots on the map like Iwo Jima in 1945 or Diego Garcia today). And the only parallel to Afghanistan is that there too a superpower threw out a bloody and brutal dictatorship. In Afghanistan, however, the Soviets installed an equally bloody and brutal substitute, and have spent the past four years killing Afghans to keep it in power.

Grenadian reality is far less exotic. It takes a citizen of the Caribbean, more in control of his historical imagination and more in command of the facts on the ground, to see Grenada for what it is. Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga, no Teddy Roosevelt he, contributed troops to the Grenadian invasion force. His concern was not that Grenada was recapitulating any past disaster; on the contrary, it was creating for the islands of the English-speaking Caribbean a wholly new one. Military juntas and large armies are alien to the region, he explained. The largest army in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States is 200; Grenada's was nearly 2,000. Nor does the region have a history of bloody coups or the placing of an entire population under house arrest. Jamaica and its allied democracies were reacting not to a paradigm but to an anomaly.

Anomaly is the stuff of history. Aristotle taught that while poetry speaks in universals, history speaks in particulars. But those who deal in historical metaphor have no interest in particulars.

Their interest is political combat, and their purpose is not description but prediction and, ultimately, prescription. To say that situation A is really a reprise of B is to say that A will end up like B--unless one follows certain advice. The advice is invariably and immediately forthcoming.

For example, what do you do if you would like to see the immediate withdrawal of American troops from A, any A, but do not want to be bothered with arguing the merits of the case? You do what Congressman Sam Gibbons did shortly after the Marine massacre in Beirut. He stood on the floor of the House and declared: "I only have three words to say: Lebanon--Reagan's Viet Nam." He then sat down. He was sure he had said enough. And in a way he had. Viet Nam is the ultimate buzz word in the American political lexicon, a form of telegraphic speech so laden with ominous meaning that it is assumed to speak volumes. Gibbons' declaration was as revealing as it was brief. For weeks Viet Nam has haunted the debate over Lebanon. But it was not until after the bombing of the Marine barracks that the full weight of the Viet Nam analogy fell on Lebanon.

And not by accident. Those who sent the suicide bomber crashing into Marine headquarters were staging an attack, a kind of one-man Tet offensive designed to revive the feelings of demoralization that precede withdrawal. For the power of the Viet Nam memory is well known, even among those not steeped in American history. Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt, for one, has no trouble recalling and manipulating it. Jumblatt, who can be best described as a minor local chieftan, has found that he can puff himself up on American television, warn Americans to remember Viet Nam before daring to challenge him--and be taken seriously.

It is not a serious comparison. Jumblatt has perhaps 30,000 tribesmen under his command. General Giap had half a million. Two decades ago we may have mistaken Hanoi for a fifth-rate power. Now we recognize that its talent for militarizing society, a talent it shares with other Leninist states, enabled it to achieve the status of a regional superpower. (Today it has the fifth largest armed force in the world.) Jumblatt is at most a small counter on a much larger board.

This is not to say that American policy in Lebanon might not fail. It is to say that if it does, it will fail on its own terms. There will be no decade-long war of attrition in a tropical jungle against a unified enemy with a long history of successful anticolonial warfare. That was the last war, though the politicians (not the generals this time) are busy preparing for it still. In Lebanon everything is different: the terrain, the players, the tactics, the goals and the intentions of American leaders. But we disdain mundane details like history, geography and strategy. Viet Nam is everywhere. Every exercise in what used to be called containment--55 advisers in El Salvador, for example--is now called "another Viet Nam." If the Grenada operation had lasted more than a week, one can be sure the dreaded memory would have been hauled out yet again. Che Guevara once promised two, three (American radicals added "many") Viet Nams. He went to Bolivia to get things started, but got himself killed instead. And yet our haunted imaginations have produced more Viet Nams than Che could have dreamed of.

Past may be prologue but it is not destiny. The central fallacy of the metaphor mongers is to assume--against history--that history repeats itself; to assume that superficially similar conditions produce identical development. Consider Iran. Ever since the fall of the Shah we have been waiting for other Irans to happen (for the other Shah to drop, as it were). There have been a variety of candidates, from Saudi Arabia to Mexico, none of which has panned out. The Great White Hope of the theory was Sadat's Egypt. Here was another autocratic, modernizing, pro-Western leader, arrogantly inattentive to the stirrings of his Muslim countrymen. Indeed Sadat was assassinated. Yet after him, no deluge.

No matter: new Irans will keep popping up (in our minds) regardless. The empirical world can do little to dampen the appeal of metaphor, since it deals in what Historian Michael Oakeshott calls "practical" or "didactic history," a species of pseudo history in which what passes for analysis is the waving of icons.

The fact is that Egypt is not Iran, the West is not Rome, Israel is not a crusader state, and KAL 007--despite the public fretting of Professor Stanley Hoffmann--was not Sarajevo. Nor was Saigon, as we once thought, Munich. The real "lesson" of Viet Nam is not, as we are so often told, that everything from Central America to the Middle East is Viet Nam (or some other convenient fiasco). It is that facile historical analogies can prove fatal.

"What experience and history teach is this," said Hegel, "that people and governments never have learned anything from history." At times like these, amid the din of clanging metaphors, one almost wishes he were right. --By Charles Krauthammer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.