Robert Scheer
Truthdig
Monday 21 November 2006
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This past week found the president sitting before a bust of the victorious Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, seemingly unaware that the United States lost its war with the Communist-led country. Having long and vehemently denied parallels between the invasions of Vietnam and Iraq, he nevertheless admitted now to seeing one.
"Yes," Bush said. "One lesson is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is ... just going to take a long period of time to - for the ideology that is hopeful, and that's an ideology of freedom, to overcome an ideology of hate.... We'll succeed, unless we quit."
Bush seems not to have noticed that we succeeded in Vietnam precisely because we did quit the military occupation of that nation, permitting an ideology of freedom to overcome one of hate. Bush's rhetoric is frighteningly reminiscent of Richard Nixon's escalation and expansion of the Vietnam War in an attempt to buy an "honorable" exit with the blood of millions of Southeast Asians and thousands of American soldiers. In the end, a decade of bitter fighting did not prevent an ignominious U.S. departure from Saigon.
Now, however, Vietnam is at peace with its neighbors and poses no security threat to the United States. Many of the "boat people" have returned as investors, and successive American presidents have made visits to the second fastest-growing economy in Asia. While Vietnam is still run by its Communist Party, eventually postwar leaders on both sides have accepted that peace is practical.
The lesson of Vietnam is not to keep pouring lives and treasure down a dark and poisonous well, but to patiently use a pragmatic mix of diplomacy and trade with even our ideological competitors.
The United States dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than it unloaded on all of Europe in World War II, only hardening Vietnamese nationalist resolve. Hundreds of thousands of troops, massive defoliation of the countryside, "free fire zones," South Vietnamese allies, bombing the harbors ... none of it worked. Yet, never admitting that our blundering military presence fueled the native nationalist militancy we supposedly sought to eradicate, three U.S. presidents - two of them Democratic - lied themselves into believing victory was around some mythical corner.
While difficult for inveterate hawks to admit, the victory for normalcy in Vietnam, celebrated by Bush last week, came about not despite the U.S. withdrawal but because of it.
Iraq and Vietnam are not the same country, yet both have long experience with imperial meddling and fiercely resist it. Bush has said Iraq "is in many ways, religious in nature, and I don't see the parallels" to Vietnam, but that is just another sign that he probably cut most of his history classes at Yale.
He - and apparently the mass media, as well - seems to have forgotten that the United States tried to stoke a religious war in Vietnam by intervening to install a Roman Catholic exile in power in this primarily Buddhist country. The struggle to overthrow that U.S. puppet dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, began with Buddhist monks immolating themselves on the streets of Saigon.
To be sure, there followed a decade of constant talk about bringing democracy to the country we had occupied and a never-ending series of elections and new power arrangements that followed the U.S.-engineered murder of Diem, who like Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi had been deemed by U.S. officials as "the George Washington" of his country. At least Chalabi is still alive to complain, as he did to The New York Times this month, "that the Americans sold us out."
But the final collapse of our puppet regime in Vietnam did not produce the domino effect of other nations surrendering to communism any more than a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will inevitably lead to the spread of terrorism. This is why the wiser voices in the Bush dynastic circle - Daddy Bush's clean-up crew, led by James Baker - are calling for involving Syria and Iran in the effort to stabilize Iraq. Iran is to host a summit with Iraq and other nations in the area, while on Monday Syria and Iraq resumed long-broken diplomatic relations.
The lesson of the Vietnam debacle is that yesterday's enemy is more likely to become today's trading partner if we remove the specter of U.S. imperialism and leave the fate of Iraq to the Iraqis.
Bush's Strange Vietnam Visit
By Joe Conason
Truthdig
Wednesday 22 November 2006
What may be remembered someday as one of the strangest moments of George W. Bush's presidency took place last week in Vietnam, when he chose to
mention the American defeat there in the same breath as our failing occupation of Iraq. That comparison is often made by his critics, and often elicits irritated rebuttals from the White House.
Yet now the president himself was explicitly drawing a connection between those misadventures - and drawing a lesson that could only dismay anyone who remembers what really happened during that war in which he so famously avoided serving.
Not long after he landed in the capital of Hanoi, the president explained that the American departure from Vietnam, more than 30 years ago, should teach perseverance in Iraq. "We'll succeed," he said, "unless we quit."
Set aside the witless irony of that remark, coming from a man who quit Vietnam before he ever got there. Instead let us consider the implications of what he said, and the price that he evidently believes Americans and Iraqis ought to be willing to pay for his geopolitical folly. For what he seems to be suggesting, particularly at a time when he has supposedly been chastened by his party's midterm losses, is beyond belief - not only as policy but as historical judgment.
By the time the United States "quit" Vietnam, the human costs of the war were staggering. More than 58,000 Americans had been killed, or roughly 20 times as many as we have lost so far in Iraq. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese military and civilian deaths range upward from 2 million, including hundreds of thousands poisoned by the deliberate dropping of defoliants or killed by cluster bombs and napalm. Nobody knows how many Iraqis have been killed so far, but the most careful estimates range from 30,000 to 250,000.
By war's end, the financial cost of Vietnam to the United States treasury, updated for inflation, reached nearly $600 billion. The average monthly expense of fighting the war in Iraq, which was supposed to cost us nothing, is considerably higher than the monthly cost of the Vietnam War. The final bill will be more than a trillion dollars.
Even Henry Kissinger, who was willing to dispatch Vietnamese civilians by the thousands, now admits that the president's stated objectives in Iraq are beyond reach by military means. But according to the president, what we have to learn from Vietnam is that we must not "quit."
To understand why that attitude is so demented, it might help to picture Mr. Bush in Hanoi. There he sat, talking with Vietnam's government officials and Communist Party chiefs, beneath a gigantic bronze bust of Ho Chi Minh, the late revolutionary who drove the French and then the Americans out of his country. Now we know that all of the reasons why we spent so much blood and treasure fighting Ho were completely mistaken. The domino theory of communist expansion throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific was wrong, and so was the idea that communism could best be resisted by military action.
But he still thinks we shouldn't have "quit."
While Vietnam is far from free, as Bush might have learned if he had strayed from his controlled tour, its economy is rapidly changing, and political reform may be on the horizon as well. Our longstanding policy is to encourage freedom with trade and aid.
The question that hawks (and chicken hawks) should answer is whether they truly continue to believe we should have stayed in Vietnam. If they answer affirmatively, then the next question is how long, and at what cost, and until how many were dead. It is a question that ought to be posed not only to President Bush but also to his would-be successor, John McCain, who still insists that we could have won the Vietnam War - if only we had been willing to accept and inflict many more casualties. Paradoxically, the Arizona senator, who suffered torture as a prisoner of war, spent years promoting normalized relations with Vietnam, where he too hopes for peaceful reform.
Both Bush and McCain still believe that we should be willing to accept and inflict more casualties in Iraq - so perhaps they should also be asked how long that war should continue, and what price in lives and dollars would still be consistent with "victory." If 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese were not enough, then how many do they think should die in Iraq before we seek a negotiated conclusion?
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