My fellow admirers of The Candy Bombers seem genuinely puzzled by my opposition to using historical analogies as anything more than an auxiliary to the empirical record. Can analogies be useful as heuristic tools? Sure. As explanatory tools? Sure. As narrative embellishments? Why not (and, again, Andrei barely hints at Iraq and all the rest in The Candy Bombers)?

My complaint was two-fold. First, Andrei writes in his initial post that he set out to write The Candy Bombers, in part, "to excavate a 'usable past' for progressives." Well, to me, that sounds like he set out to write a historical analogy, rather than the careful and meticulous history that he actually did write. (His discussion of Henry Wallace, I suspect, won't be so usable). My concern here is that the search for a "usable past" may end up distorting the actual past. The author in search of a usable past does not ask a question; he makes a declaration. But my harping on the subject responds to Andrei's provocative post, not his wonderful volume.

As to my second gripe, which James precisely identifies, it concerns the use and abuse of historical analogies, which seems to be fairly widespread these days. We're awfully susceptible to historical analogies, and often to insidious historical analogies. Employing nothing but Munich and Vietnam analogies--and I've employed my share--one could easily write the entire history of the last forty years of American foreign policy. Can we honestly say that their use has furthered the cause of rational policymaking? Did it when Bill Clinton looked at Bosnia and saw Vietnam, or when he looked at Rwanda and saw Somalia, or when George W. Bush looked at Saddam and saw Hitler, or when LBJ looked at Vietnam and saw Munich, and on and on?

Which brings us to the question on the table: "whether the residents of Baghdad will--sixty years from now--be campaigning to keep an American army base open because of their gratitude for the American occupation." For me at least, Germany and Iraq will always be bound together for the simple reason that, when I reported from Iraq for The New Republic, I would always fly to Kuwait or Jordan via Frankfurt, occasionally making a detour to Berlin (and Tempelhof) or to the 1st Armored Division outside Frankfurt. In any case, never mind sixty years from now: the residents of Baghdad, at least the Sunnis that haven't been cleansed from Western Baghdad, are already campaigning for the U.S. outposts in their neighborhoods to stay open (though mostly out of fear, not gratitude). If they're still campaigning in sixty years, we're in more trouble than we think.