This should be required reading for anyone involved in Iraq—its lessons about the problems of idealism and nation-building continue to go unheeded, as does its larger message about what most people really value. Here’s a clue: it isn’t abstract ideals, but rather the self, perhaps the family, and maybe the tribe. Everything else is at best of secondary importance, except as it relates to and affects those concentric circles.

But let’s back up some: Fowler, a cynical journalist—is there any other kind?—covers the disintegrating country of Vietnam with one hand on the bottle and another on a native girl, whose hands are occupied with the obvious, his wallet, and his opium pipe. Contrasted with him is Pyle, an American convinced he’s found the solution to intractable political and historical problems through the worship of an idea. Implementing the idea and hence solution is the hard part, but with enough fortitude and adherence to the greater good while allowing gritty compromises, Pyle believes he can arrive at the solution. History gives us the answer as to whether Pyle’s beliefs are accurate.

Despite their apparent positions, Fowler’s cynicism prevents him from being co-opted and morally compromised, while Pyle’s idealism and his desire to do good by choosing the right side ultimately makes him complicit in a crime far worse than anything Fowler could have imagined. And yet, like many writers, I fall into the same trap as Pyle in the first sentence of this entry by prescribing solutions based on books of ideas that may or may not have any relevance to the situation I’m trying to apply them to. For me to hold The Quiet Ameican up as an example of what we should be doing isn’t so different from Pyle’s zealous adherence to the fictional York Harding.

The plot itself has its own turns, and combines aspects of hopeless love stories, political thrillers, and buddy novels. Although not explicitly about spy novels, The Quiet American also has all the elements Jerome Weeks identified in his post I Spy: The story of betrayal, of brutalization, and of sacrifice. In a later post he adds the persistence of history. The Quiet American doesn’t explicitly have much of the latter, however much it hangs in the subtext, but I’m sure its about successors about the direct American experience do, and I’m sure whatever literature emerges from Iraq will too.

I’m not the only one who noticed the importance of The Quiet American. Roger Cohen uses it for his lead in “Some Lessons for U.S. in Vietnam and Iraq Parallels”, a Dec. 2, 2006 article only available to subscribers. Frank Rich mentioned it in his September 24, 2006 column. The book is remembered—but evidently not by current decision makers. Too bad. The Quiet American is “about” Vietnam, but it might as well be about Iraq, or any number of other well-meaning failed efforts.