On Tuesday November 14, 2006, at 8:00 p.m. in Irvine Auditorium, former Secretary of State and Nobel laureate Henry Kissinger addressed the Penn community as this year’s SPEC Connaissance and Provost’s Spotlight Series Fall Speaker. I was supposed to cover the event, but at 7:00 p.m. that night I realized that I didn’t have a ticket.  I was not deterred and remained determined to write the article. 

Kissinger’s reputation as an influential and controversial American former-politico helped attract a sell-out crowd on Tuesday night.  I knew that Kissinger’s résumé was impressive: he pioneered the Cold War policy of détente; he helped establish American ties with China; he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for helping to end the Vietnam War.  I also knew that he is the subject of political controversy, much of which revolves around accusations that he is a war criminal. Kissinger’s background and America’s current political climate provide more than enough material for a very interesting speech.

I volunteered to write this article the night before Kissinger’s speech.  As a freshman, this is my first article being published in a Penn publication, and I was eager to do a good job.  Unfortunately, I never ended up getting into the lecture. A small setback.  The new plan was to “spin” the article to be about students’ responses to it.  With only one day to write the article, knowing relatively little about Kissinger to start off with, and with few (if any) friends having attended the lecture, let alone having gone myself, I had gotten myself into quite a predicament.  I was beginning to think that I had been rash and over-zealous in signing up to write this.  What to do? 

So I took a walk.  I tried to find out what Henry and I had in common, to decide what I could possibly say about a speech I did not hear. I should have said I could no longer write the article, and perhaps I shouldn’t have signed up for it in the first place.  But what could I do now? I couldn’t back out: I had made an obligation and I was going to fulfill it.  

As I continued to wander, despondent, I picked up a copy of The Daily Pennsylvanian.  The headline read: “Kissinger draws parallels between Iraq and Vietnam.”  I read on to learn that Kissinger had said, “Americans want to compromise, but to our enemies, compromise equals defeat.”  Kissinger (allegedly) continued to say that America struggles with guerilla wars driven by fervent ideology.  But those are not the parallels that I see between Vietnam and Iraq. 

Vietnam was a war fought on the premise of cultural and political supremacy.  It was America’s duty to rid Vietnam of the evils of communism, even if it meant secretly bombing Cambodia or killing over 300,000 Vietnamese civilians.  The United States had lofty ambitions to prove the superiority of “the free world.”  Once the war began, anything less than victory would bring under fire the sanctimonious claims that had been made by our government at the outset.   

It was, similarly, America’s duty to establish democracy in Iraq. Our government defied the UN and many of our allies (many of which are now former allies) by taking military action.  In doing so, we made any possible defeat or concession a matter of national pride and reputation.  Now, even though the plan to establish democracy in Iraq is clearly failing, we are still there. 

In both cases, the longer the fighting went on, the harder it became to pull out.  When Kissinger said that “to our enemies, compromise equals defeat,” he may have been right.  More importantly, though, his statement reflects the United States’s fear of acknowledging defeat.  America’s determination to save face and convince its citizens and the world that these wars were worthwhile is ultimately crippling and destructive.  

It would have been easy to say that I could not write this article, that I should not have signed up to write it without a ticket to the lecture, but who likes admitting defeat? Certainly not Henry Kissinger.  Certainly not George Bush.  I couldn’t even give up writing an article; I imagine it would be much harder to make the decision to pull out of a war, be it Vietnam or Iraq, that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives.  Henry, George, and I all have this in common: we made obligations. Mine, however, didn’t kill anybody.  With the prospect of more dollars and lives being wasted on a failing effort, perhaps it is time the United States gets the backbone to admit that forcefully democratizing Iraq on its own was an ambition beyond its ability to fulfill.