No Lessons from Vietnam After All
I was reading something else when it hit me: there had been a rumor that the current president would be making a new, know-your-socks-off, back-in-the-saddle speech about his nice little war in Iraq — and evidently, that speech he gave early last week in which he said that his war in Iraq was, after careful consideration, actually like the Vietnam, um, conflict after all was to have been that speech. And to think I hadn't even noticed.
I do feel vindicated. Some time ago in this space, probably even more than once, I posited the notion that W's little war in Iraq was to be the liberal-commies' comeuppance, at the hands of the ever-so-practical reactionaries, for forcing America to withdraw prematurely from the war in Vietnam, thus "losing" it for us. They denied it, of course, but now it's clear that it was their intent.
And, of course, they're being just as idiotic about now as they were then. In Vietnam, we were told, we had to "fight communism over there" so — wait for it! — we didn't have to fight it over here. Those prosecuting the war with such football-fan fervor never did quite seem to realize that "communism" was an idea, not an enemy, and they could never quite enunciate what "victory in Vietnam" might mean, no matter how long they searched for the answer, nor how many soldiers died in the search. How would we know when we'd won? How was "communism" supposed to surrender? I was happy to read Avedon Carol say it ("As if no blood were spilled") with such precision:
It would be nice if we could somehow force them [reactionary supporters of Bush's new "Theory of Vietnam"] into a real debate in which we get to ask them just what exactly it is they think we lost in 'Nam, and what we would have won if we'd stayed. What prize would have been worth thousands more names added to that wall?
And then there's Iraq where, among other specious justifications, we have to prosecute a war on "terror", yet another idea with neither an enemy to defeat nor a territory to invade, which wasn't going to stop us! Also like last time, there is no strategy for victory because "victory" is not a possible end-point when there is no enemy to defeat, only an idea to thrash at in true Quixotic fashion.
I'll leave it to Robert Reich to sum it up for me:
But most Americans know the truth. Not only did we have no strategy once we got to Vietnam but we had no good reason to be in Vietnam in the first place. Tens of thousands of American lives and countless Vietnamese lives were lost because we wrongly assumed that communism in Southeast Asia was a contagion that would spread unless eradicated by force. Yet for the last four years we have heard the same words we heard from Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara forty years ago – that we are “winning” in Iraq, that we must “stay the course” there, that “leaving would be tantamount to defeat,” that “America’s credibility” is at stake, that a “pullout would be disastrous.” And today, seemingly without comprehending the close parallels between the bloodbath America caused by entering Vietnam more than four decades ago and the bloodbath he caused by entering Iraq, our president has the audacity to tell us that our withdrawal from Iraq would result in a bloodbath similar to that caused by our withdrawal from Vietnam. The apparent stupidity of this man — or his assumption of the stupidity of the American people — is unfathomable.
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on Monday, 27 August 2007 at 22.42
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Reich is a favorite of mine, a man who would make a fine president. However, in one aspect of this, he misses an important historical point.
Cold War momentum caused the escalation of our Vietnam misadventure to the decade-plus quagmire it became. Lyndon Johnson had been front and center in Congress when Republicans demagogued China's fall to communism and made political hay out of all the supposed commies our State Department was infested with. They savaged President Truman and his people over both. Johnson decided he wasn't going to stand by and have that happen again because the dominoes of Southeast Asia had been allowed to tip over on his watch.
Johnson felt that way for political reasons, in part, it's true. He and other Democrats had been tarred by far-right Republicans since early in Roosevelt's administration as being soft-core commies or at least soft on communism. But it's also true Johnson was an anticommunist hawk. He also exhibited the now too-familiar Texas politician's "bring it on and let's get it over with" attitude.
What irony, then, that Democrats have been tarred ever since Vietnam for shaking off fear of political branding in order to militate for doing the right thing about an all-wrong war. An all-wrong war we got into because of one of their own, yet.
In fact, the ironies abound. I recall decades ago people forswearing voting for a Demcorat because, they would say, every time we elect a Democrat president, we get another big war. They cited WW II — as though FDR had started it — Korea and Vietnam.
Funny, that although I haven't heard that meme about Democrats in a long time, I haven't heard it about Republicans, either.
on Wednesday, 29 August 2007 at 07.58
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Communism was a stated enemy, with exportable plans. It was not necessarily a bad thing to confront them in Vietnam. It gave Thailand a chance to develop with less pressure from those pushing a worker's paradise.
Vietnam and Iraq were/are both partly exercises in nation building. It is always fraught with peril, but in an interdependent world one can't always sit around doing nothing.
on Friday, 31 August 2007 at 01.53
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History has made perfectly clear that the price of sitting around and doing nothing in Vietnam would've been negligible. Certainly, it would've been far, far less than the astronomical cost in lives, money, grief and divisiveness at home that America paid, only to have the weak, wobbly South Vietnamese government collapse like a house of cards when the North Vietnamese made a final push.
Fifty-thousand-plus American lives sacrificed stupidly and needlessly, rightsaidfred. Forgive me for being blunt, but how anyone with the sense God gave a peanut can find justification for that horrendous cost in the fact the Thais were spared having a communist government next door for a few years is beyond me.