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Commentary No. 216, September 1, 2007
"The Vietnam Analogy"
George W. Bush is showing both desperation and malignity by invoking the Vietnam analogy to justify the continuing presence of the United States in Iraq. For a very long time, the Bush administration has denied the analogy. They did this for obvious reasons. For most people, what they remember of Vietnam is that the United States was defeated, and this defeat resulted in a weakening of American power in the world.
There is however a significant group of people in the United States who believe that the United States could have won that war had the politicians not lost their nerve. The audience that George W. Bush used for his August 22 speech in which he made this argument was the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It is safe to say that this particular audience was composed largely of people who share the view that Vietnam was a war that could have been won, and that therefore Iraq is a war that can be won. It is worthwhile reviewing the validity of Bush's arguments, and then the reasons why now, and only now, he has invoked the Vietnam analogy.
The argument is a strange one. Bush offered no evidence whatsoever about the military situation in Vietnam and why, had the United States persisted, the war could have been won. Instead, he concentrated entirely on the alleged consequences of withdrawal. He made his argument by using three slogans: boat people, re-education camps, and killing fields. Boat people refers to the fact that very many Vietnamese who had been supporters of the United States in the war sought to flee the country in boats and many of them died in the South China Sea. Re-education camps refers to the fact that the government of Vietnam, after the end of the war, sent many persons who had been opposed to their coming to power to so-called re-education camps. And killing fields refers to the fact that - in Cambodia not Vietnam - the Khmer Rouge government that came to power slaughtered a very large number of people in "killing fields." Supposedly, each of these consequences was the result of U.S. withdrawal, and each could have been prevented had the United States not withdrawn. Let us review them one by one.
That many United States supporters would wish to flee Vietnam after the withdrawal was of course both predictable and inevitable. Losers in a war usually seek to flee the group against whom they had been fighting. But the deaths of these boat people was not the responsibility of the Vietnamese government. It was the responsibility of the United States and its allies in refusing to open their borders generously to these persons. One has only to compare the fate of these boat people to that of those other boat people who have left Cuba over the years. The latter, unlike the former, have been welcomed with open arms in the United States.
The re-education camps were harsh. Many people died in them, and still more suffered grievously. The numbers who died were nonetheless far fewer than the number of Vietnamese who died as a result of the war, and probably less than those who might have died had the war gone on much longer. In any case, what is the evidence that, had the United States stayed in the war still longer than they did, it could have actually defeated the Vietcong? And what would have been the likelihood that the opponents of the Vietcong, had they won, would not have established their own re-education camps?
Finally, the killing fields. This is the most fantastic argument of all. The Khmer Rouge would never have been able to come into existence without the Vietnam war. It was the United States that deposed King Sihanouk, who had been the strongest barrier to the Khmer Rouge. Rather than Sihanouk who was critical of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the United States arranged to have Lon Nol, a general without popular support, overthrow Sihanouk, and then Lon Nol's government was in its turn easily toppled by the Khmer Rouge.
The most important thing that Bush left out of his analysis was the things that didn't happen. The main argument at the time for United States involvement in Vietnam had been the domino thesis - that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, the rest of Asia would follow. Not only did this not happen, but quite different things happened. Today, Vietnam and the United States are on very good terms, and Vietnam has a flourishing and growing economy. It may not be "democratic" by U.S. standards, but it is a "friendly" nation, not a hostile one.
So, given all this, why did Bush now for the first time invoke the Vietnam analogy, which he had sedulously avoided before? I said it was part desperation, part malignity. The desperation has to do with the enormous popular pressure to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible. Bush had already created a postponement of any decision by saying that Gen. Petraeus would report to him and to Congress on September 15 about how successful the "surge" in troops has been. He said he would make his decisions about Iraq on the basis of the general's report. However, now it turns out that the report that Gen. Petraeus will deliver to Congress will be written in Bush's office. So Bush is making a decision on Iraq on the basis of a report he will write to himself.
Bush has also been inviting "political tourists" to Iraq to get a guided tour of how well the U.S. armed forces are doing in Anbar province, where they have reached an accord with one set of Sunni insurgents to get them to fight another set. This has impressed a few Democratic politicians, who are now leery of denying the "success." The Bush people do admit that the overall political situation is terrible. The Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, doesn't like at all the deals that the United States has been making in Anbar, nor does he appreciate the pressure to take action against the multiple sectarian militias. Visiting Syria, he pointedly said that Iraq has other political options than the United States. Immediately, rumors have begun that the United States might be encouraging a military coup. Now that is a Vietnam analogy. The U.S. intervention began to go really sour once the United States had arranged a military coup against South Vietnam's Prime Minister, Ngo Dinh Diem. So, the desperation is in the fact that the case for staying in Iraq cannot stand up to the light of day. A recent poll by Foreign Policy magazine of so-called foreign policy experts shows that 80% rate the war in Iraq as having a "very negative impact" on U.S. national security goals. If one breaks this down according to self-labeling of the respondents, even 60% of those who call themselves "conservatives" give the same answer.
But why then malignity? George W. Bush is preparing the future. The president that withdrew from Vietnam was a Republican, Gerald Ford, and he did so after a long drawdown of U.S. troops by another Republican president, Richard Nixon. Bush is not going to withdraw the troops. But he's pretty sure that the next president will be forced to do so. And he's pretty sure that the next president will be a Democrat. So he's laying the groundwork for the "stab in the back" accusation. We shall be hearing a lot about this accusation
in the decade to come.
by Immanuel Wallerstein
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