Is America's war in Iraq "another Vietnam"?

Democratic presidential hopefuls have invoked the Vietnam War as a metaphor for U.S. ineptitude and failure overseas. As an educator, however, I'm more concerned about a failure here at home: Our public schools haven't taught students enough history to evaluate that metaphor.

Ironically, that gives our children something in common with kids in Iraq. Even before his capture last month, Saddam Hussein had disappeared from Iraq's textbooks. According to The Christian Science Monitor , U.S.-appointed Iraqi educators reviewed the country's textbooks last summer, eliminating every image and passage about Saddam and his Baath Party. Gone are the fawning tributes to him and all other Baathist propaganda.

But modern history is gone, too. By purging the textbooks of any mention of Saddam, Iraqi authorities also blotted out significant events of the recent past.

The Iran-Iraq War? Never happened. Ditto for Saddam's bloody attacks on the Kurds or the 1991 Gulf War. Indeed, The Monitor reported that the new books omit any reference to Americans, Israelis or Kurds. Amid the flux and violence of the U.S. occupation, all three were deemed too controversial for the Iraqi classroom.

Patience advised

American officials have remained mostly in the background during this process. For three-plus decades, the Americans point out, Iraqi textbooks and teachers dished up a non-stop diet of Baathist lies and distortions. You can't expect them to address contemporary controversies overnight.

Fair enough. But most American textbooks don't address controversy, either, as James Loewen illustrated in Lies My Teacher Told Me , his book about bland, inaccurate history texts. So if the U.S. really wants to be a "force for democracy" around the globe, as President Bush suggests, it might start by changing the way it teaches recent history at home.

Consider our approach to the Vietnam War, the most controversial episode in the past half-century of U.S. foreign policy. You'd never realize that, however, by reading most of the textbooks in our own public schools, which present a banal chronology of names and dates: Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 1964; Tet Offensive, 1968; etc.

What's missing? First, any sense of the brutality of the war itself. If you were older than 10 at the time, you remember iconic images of the conflict: a naked little girl fleeing a napalm attack; a police chief executing a suspect at point-blank range; a Buddhist monk immolating himself in protest. But most children today won't recognize those images, because their textbooks generally omit them on the grounds that the pictures could disturb young readers.

War should upset

Of course, we should want our children to be disturbed by that war. About 58,000 Americans and roughly 3 million Vietnamese lost their lives. Our nation was split apart in ways that continue to divide us. Our kids should know that.

Most of all, our textbooks should ask students to enter the Vietnam controversy themselves. Educated Americans must do more than merely identify the war's key names and dates; they should be able to render a judgment about it. Was U.S. involvement in the war a "noble cause," as Ronald Reagan famously declared? An imperialist adventure? A bureaucratic bungling? If you can't formulate an answer, you haven't learned enough about the Vietnam War. And the fault lies squarely with our textbooks and schools, which rarely ask us to make up our own minds.

Instead, we teach "facts" - and our children promptly forget them. A 1999 study by the Asia Society of New York found half of U.S. adults and two-thirds of students think Vietnam is an island. It's reasonable to presume they don't know much about the war that took place there, either.

Let's hope Iraqi textbooks soon address the recent past, including the U.S. occupation and Saddam's capture. Let's also hope, however, that they don't imitate our own texts. Were the Americans liberators or conquerors? Friends or foes? Most of all: Is this "another Vietnam"? Iraq's children should decide. And so should ours.

Contributing: Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches history and education at New York University, is the author of 'Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools'.

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