Not surprisingly, the president has sought to use the Vietnam War to further his Iraq War agenda. His misapplication of the lessons of Vietnam, so vividly detailed in the book IRAQ AND VIETNAM – HOW NOT TO LEARN THE LESSONS, is deeply disturbing. I felt that this editorial from the Los Angeles Times, which I came upon in the Las Vegas newspaper en route from the southwest back to Massachusetts, captured the enormous problem of his flawed analogy. What do you think?
Tom Weiner
August 28, 2007
From the Los Angeles Times
The misleading Vietnam analogy
August 23, 2007
With rhetoric that would stir any patriot but logic that should persuade few, President Bush on Wednesday waded into the historical quagmire of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, Bush said, “people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.” He then listed the tragedies that followed the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia — the Khmer Rouge slaughter in Cambodia, the harsh communist rule in Vietnam. “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.’ ” Likewise, he argued, innocents will pay if a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq empowers Al Qaeda.
The president’s Vietnam-Iraq analogy begins with a large kernel of truth, but goes astray. First, no serious Iraq expert believes U.S. withdrawal would end the killing. The debate today centers on whether the civil war that has been only partly suppressed by the surge of 30,000 U.S. troops will inevitably rage until the Sunnis and Shiites reach a rough equilibrium on the battlefield.
It’s true that millions of Iraqi civilians have already paid a terrible price and may suffer even more as fighting may well worsen after a U.S. withdrawal — whenever that occurs. But it seems equally clear that the civil war cannot be suppressed indefinitelyunless the U.S. plans to occupy the country for decades. Killing fields? Iraq’s already got them: A dozen or two corpses are found dumped in the streets each morning, and bombs go off daily. Boat people? Two million Iraqis have already fled the country, and perhaps 50,000 more leave each month. Could it get worse? Absolutely. But can we stop it?
There is one Vietnam analogy that unfortunately does apply. U.S. frustration over Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s failures surely rivals the disdain President Kennedy had for the first South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem. We can only hope the Maliki-Diem analogy proves false, because Diem was ousted in a CIA-approved military coup, then executed. Perhaps Maliki is better compared with the last South Vietnamese leader, Nguyen Van Thieu? The hated Thieu never managed to make “Vietnamization” work — and the U.S. refused to keep 500,000 troops in South Vietnam for another decade or three to help him.
The real lesson of Vietnam is that its civil war was a nationalist struggle that toppled no communist “dominoes” across Asia. Bush’s rhetoric implying an Al Qaeda “domino effect” in the Middle East has the same false ring.
This is very painful – both the talk about Vietnam and Iraq itself. I am not positive what we should be doing in Iraq ~ I felt from the beginning we should not go in. I worked and called and called to try to stop that. But I am very tired of the rhetoric – especially from the President who does not seem to care about the real people – whether US soldiers, the Iraqi people or those at home in the US whose lives are impacted through not enough money to do what needs to happen here with health care, schools, care for the vets from Iraq … and the list goes on!!
~ Diane Clancy
http://www.dianeclancy.com/blog
The list goes on and the rhetoric is endless with never an indication that anyone in the current administration learned anything about why making war against a country that has not threatened us and then occupying it (a la Vietnam) is a prescription for disaster. Now there is a demand for some accountability about the billions that have been wasted in the so-called reconstruction effort with much of the money going to administration cronies and to Cheney’s former company, Halliburton. And rather than ever acknowledge that mistakes were and are being made, that terrible tragedies have befallen countless Iraqi and American families, what we hear is essentially “stay the (totally failed) course” and Vietnam is held up an example of what went wrong when we didn’t rather than providing its true lesson that you cannot impose your will on a people. It would be monumentally absurd and unbelievable were it not horribly affecting so many people…
Thanks for taking the time to reply…
Tom
August 30th