Sunday, April 11, 2004
The gullible and confused should take note: Iraq is not Vietnam:
"The anti-coalition insurgencies by parts of the Sunni and Shia communities in Iraq have led to a renewed outbreak of the V-word in the Western media. V for Vietnam, that is...
"With one exception, these comparisons do not stand up to serious analysis. They signify either wishful thinking by an obsessively anti-American faction of politicians, journalists and academics, or an abysmal ignorance of history.
(The exception is thus-)
"Like the Vietcong before them, the Iraqi insurgents are hoping to convert their military losses into a political victory, courtesy of reporting and commentary that is at times emotive, confused and gullible."
On the subject of Vietnam, there is an interesting treatment in Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", a tome that would be more aptly titled "A Socialist's Cataloging of Negative Excerpts from the History of the United States" and is tiresome and juvenile in its focus on protest movements and in is presumption throughout of the following formula:
Capitalism = Evil
Rich People = Evil
Poor People = Good
'60s = Yeah Baby
Black people = Good if poor and downtrodden
So you might imagine how the author would wax lyrical in describing an event like the Vietnam War. The reminder of the insidious role of America's erstwhile ally France is what really catches attention here though. Zinn reproduces the following Vietnamese description of the French occupation of their country:-
"They have enforced inhuman laws...They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slain our patriots, they have drowned uprisings in rivers of blood. They have fettered public opinion...They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials...They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes... (in a period of about 6 months) more than two million of our fellow citizens died of starvation..."
The last point is emphasized by Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh in one of eight (ignored and unanswered) letters he wrote to President Truman in 1945-46:
"Two million Vietnamese died of starvation during winter of 1944 and Spring 1945 because of (the) starvation policy of (the) French who seized and stored until it rotted all available rice...Unless (the) great world powers and international relief organizations bring us immediate assistance we face imminent catastrophe..."
What a tragedy it was that the United States approached the Vietnamese conundrum through the paradigm of its anti-Communism and its WW2-forged alliance with France. When Japan was forced to leave Vietnam (known then as Indochina) in 1945, a million Vietnamese celebrated joyously in the streets of Hanoi and issued a Declaration of Independence that began like it's American predecessor:
"All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; amongst these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
Behind the Vietnamese was the French occupation and the Japanese wartime occupation that supplanted it. But instead of achieving the independence they yearned for, they found the French finagling their way back into Vietnam, bombing and warring on the place to enforce their rule, and ultimately embroiling the United States in the conflict when they were booted out.
Arnaud de Borchgrave, who covered Tet as Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent and had seven tours in Vietnam, says in The Washington Times:
"...Tet was an unmitigated military disaster for Hanoi and its Viet Cong troops in South Vietnam. Yet that was not the way it was reported in U.S. and other media around the world.
"It was television's first war. And some 50 million Americans at home saw the carnage of dead bodies in the rubble, and dazed Americans running around. ...a military disaster for the United States. By the time the facts emerged a week or two later ...the damage had been done...
"As South Vietnamese troops fought Viet Cong remnants in Cholon... reporters, sipping drinks in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel, watched the fireworks 2 miles away. America's most trusted newsman, CBS' Walter Cronkite, appeared for a standup piece with distant fires as a backdrop.
"Donning helmet, Mr. Cronkite declared the war lost...
"It was this now famous television news piece that persuaded President Lyndon Johnson six weeks later, on March 31, not to run for re-election...
"Hanoi thus turned military defeat into a priceless geopolitical victory...
"Even Giap admitted in his memoirs that news media reporting of the war and the antiwar demonstrations that ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called a conditional surrender, Giap said they would now go the limit because America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory was within Hanoi's grasp...
"That is the real lesson for the U.S. commitment to Iraq. Whatever one thought about the advisability of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United States is there with 100,000 troops and a solid commitment to endow Iraq with a democratic system of government. While failure is not an option for Mr. Bush, it clearly is for Sen. Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, who called Iraq the president's Vietnam...
"It is, of course, no such animal. But it could become so if congressional resolve dissolves...
"Kennedy should remember that Vietnam was the war of his brother who saw the conflict in the larger framework of the Cold War and Nikita Khrushchev's threats against West Berlin. It would behoove Kennedy to see Iraq in the larger context of the struggle to bring democracy, not only to Iraq, but the entire Middle East."
Democracies cannot be built overnight, Barbara Amiel
