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Politics and Policy
MSNBC is quoting the following statement by Pres. Bush, in the context of a speech about the need to stand by the current Iraqi goverment:
"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush said. "Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.'"
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20385843/
Now, I've been tempted to write a post about Vietnam for quite some time. My point would be that there are still two "camps" in the U.S. regarding Vietnam:
(a) the right wing still insists that the Vietnam war was a noble crusade by the U.S. to contain worldwide communism, and was "winnable" if only the war protesters, left-wing media, and Democratic Congressman had "allowed" the military to do their jobs.
(b) the left wing, which still insists that the Vietnam War was a civil war, with American soldiers in the middle, protecting the corrupt vestiges of a colonial regime which didn't have the support of the Vietnamese people and which would collapse eventually, no matter how long we stayed.
I'm firmly in the latter camp, and I think the facts and documentary evidence clearly demonstrate the truth of those assertions. Until recently, I was firmly convinced that most Americans accepted the latter view, and with the passage of time the arguments would become moot. The generals of today were mostly young platoon and company commanders in Vietnam, and prior to Iraq were determined not to let their army get bogged down into another unpopular war. For that reason, they re-designed the military so that national guard and reserve componants had essential functions in any overseas deployment, so that the sacrifices would be felt as much in every community as they would be among the professional military. I thought it interesting that Rumsfield sought to reverse that policy a year into the Iraqi occupation, but he was forced to abandon that "reorganziation" because there simply were not enough volunteer regular army troops available to occupy Iraq.
But Iraq has brought forth the ghosts of Vietnam in so many ways. Many of the generals who helped make the U.S. Army into a professional all-volunteer fighting machine were shunted to the side, or forced into retirement, when they dared to question the adequacy of the troop levels and plans for securing Iraq after the war. Over the past four years, anybody in the Pentagon who doesn't publically adhere to the Bush administration's "rosy scenario" have found their careers swiftly coming to an end.
And as Iraq falls deeper and deeper into a civil war, the comparison with Vietnam does indeed appear to be apt.
But the problem is that Bush wasn't in Vietnam in the early 1970's. He wasn't anywhere near it. He wasn't even around to hear the stories from the pilots who returned from Vietnam to join the Texas National Guard - he was off campaigning for Republican candidates in Alabama at the time. So his "knowledge" of the situation in Vietnam in the mid-1970's is confined to what he "learned" at Republican functions, cocktail parties, and at his Dad's Connecticut retreat, all from grousing party stallwarts, who argued that Nixon's "victory" in Vietnam had been squandared by the Democratic Congress and the liberal news media, with tragic consequences for loyal Vietnamese.
So in a few short words, Bush manages to "acknowledge" the controversy about the war, but then twist the facts to support an irrational conclusion in a single sentence. He argues that American withdrawal "led to" adverse consequences for millions. But he lumps the "killing fields" into the mix, confusing Vietnam and Cambodia. He hopes the listener will jump to the conclusion that it could all be prevented if America had continued to stay in Vietnam, a position still held by only the most ostrich-like of the right-wing dimwits.
The fact is that the government of South Vietnam owed its existence solely to the C.I.A., and it never gathered sufficient support from the Vietnamese people to protect its own existence without the substantial involvement of American ground troops. The government of South Vietnam consisted primarily of the Catholic urban elite (many from N. Vietnam) who had served the French colonial system, and were widely hated by the Buddist peasants who bore the brunt of their curruption. The C.I.A. had backed off on promises to hold an open election in Vietnam because it was widely accepted that in a free election, Ho Chi Minh would win. The So. Vietnamese government was going to fall eventually, the U.S. could not stay there with substantial ground troops for the indefinate future. The peace agreement Nixon achieved in 1968 was not significantly better than the one proposed by the N. Vietnamese in 1969, and which was summarily rejected by Nixon at that time. Recent quotes from Kissinger prove that Kissinger and Nixon both understood that the So. Vietnamese government would eventually fall, they just wanted it to happen at least two years later so they could argue it wasn't their fault.
George Bush doesn't seem to understand any of that. And he doesn't understand that those same lessons apply in Iraq, also.
At the beginning of the Iraq war, I said at the time that we needed to get in and get out quickly. We had a chance of achieving respect in the middle east if we defeated Saddam's army, took control quickly, then turned over power back to the Iraqi army (absent Saddam or his sons). But this all had to be done VERY FAST - within ninety days or so, before the Iraqi historical hatred of foreign occupiers turns into violent organized opposition. If we had departed quickly, we would have achieved quite a bit of respect in the world, as a nation which has no territorial or financial ambitions in the subjugation of other nations. But this was all squandered by the Bush administration, and the damage multiplies each day we continue our occupation.
If Bush & Co. are going to learn anything from Vietnam, they should understand that you don't solve a mistake by repeating it over and over again, in the hopes that somehow you might get a different result.
(Posted by RHP6033 on August 22, 2007)
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