Home > The Vietnam parallel
In both Vietnam and Iraq, the U.S.’ practice has not
matched its claims about the spread of democracy. And
to exit Iraq without victory would be a severe blow to
its attempt at global primacy and to the illusory
self-respect of its people.
ON April 23, 1975, President Gerald Ford announced at
Tulane University (New Orleans, Louisiana) that nothing
would be gained by any discussion of a war "that is
finished as far as America is concerned". Move on, he
said, so that the U.S. can "restore its health and its
optimistic self-confidence".
The only optimism in that sentence was the hope that
the trauma of that war would vanish and leave America’s
sense of exceptional greatness unblemished. Far from
that, 30 years later, we are still enthralled by the
Vietnam War. America cannot bear to consider the
implications of that defeat. The scars from the war are
fresh and the defeat has been undigested. The U.S.
government, led by Senators John McCain and John Kerry,
has been unrelenting in its search for those who have
been Missing in Action (MIA), and MIA flags can be
found flying in unlikely places (even in fast food
restaurants). There is no discussion of a Vietnamese
victory. Indeed, the silence on this belittles the
accomplishment of the Vietnamese, and provides further
evidence of American denial.
When the troops of a warlord brought down a Black Hawk
helicopter in Somalia (1993), or when the resistance in
Iraq holds fast, there is an immense shock from the
media and the public. In 2001, Sony Pictures released a
blockbuster, Black Hawk Down, based on journalist Mark
Bowden’s book, with the slogan, "Leave No Man Behind".
The only "men" of consequence are American, and the
movie puts the onus on those who sent them to an
unwieldy mission which they could only win by killing
as many "skinnies" (as they call the Somalis) as
possible. It is American firepower that wins in the
end, and that is indeed what the public has come to
believe. No one can defeat the U.S. Armed Forces
because of its overwhelming firepower. Whether they
love us or hate us, they fear us and can be taken down
by us.
America loathes the admission of defeat, because to do
so is to accept that its historical destiny has been
compromised. Few speak of the retreat from Vietnam as a
military failure. What we have instead is a solipsistic
conversation about whether the war was right, whether
there are still any troops in Vietnamese hands, and
whether the war could have been ended earlier. The
Vietnamese rarely figure in the discussion. Few
Americans would be able to name one Vietnamese leader
apart from Ho Chi Minh, and they might only know him
because he had been either reviled by the press or else
revered by the protestors.
When President Clinton travelled to Vietnam in November
2000, he echoed a familiar slogan, "Vietnam is not a
war. It’s a country." Nevertheless, Clinton could not
start a speech in his three-day visit without invoking
the MIAs. Leave No Man Behind.
Clinton came with magnanimity as if he were from the
side of the victor now back to offer trade as a gesture
of friendship. Phan Thuy Thanh of the Vietnamese
Foreign Ministry pointed out gingerly that the U.S.
should pay "war reparations", and that it "should
fulfil its responsibilities spiritually and ethically,
thus making specific contributions to solving the
consequences of war". Nothing of the sort came from
Clinton, whose major contribution had been to end the
U.S. trade embargo of Vietnam in 1994, and to open the
doors to U.S.-based transnational corporations to begin
operations there.
Last July, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the
"Vietnam Human Rights Act". This bill, which has to go
before the U.S. Senate before it goes to the President
for his signature, seeks to limit non-humanitarian aid
to Vietnam, and provides funds for groups opposing the
regime. The Vietnamese government reacted sharply to
this assault, not because the U.S. provides much aid to
the country, but because it would affect Vietnam’s
ability to trade with the U.S. and elsewhere.
U.S.-Vietnamese trade increased from $1.2 billion
(2000) to $6 billion (2003). It should be mentioned
that most of the benefit for this is garnered by an
emergent capitalist class rather than by the people of
the country. The Vietnamese government fears, however,
that if such a bill passes or if the U.S.
administration begins to focus on Vietnam, then it
might provide a chilling effect on the ability of the
country to find credit from international lenders to
cover debt-service payments and short-term loans. The
Vietnam War continues by other means.
BUT "Vietnam" is now simply a metaphor for an
intensified conversation about the U.S. involvement in
Iraq. Whereas in the case of the Vietnam War it took a
decade or more to create a powerful anti-war movement
in the U.S., as well as to break the government’s
silence on its mendacity, it has only taken months in
the case of Iraq. A host of books has already flooded
the bestseller lists with news of the evasions and
exaggerations of the administration regarding the Iraq
war. They have come from administration exiles (such as
former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and former
counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clark), disgruntled
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents (Michael
Scheuer, who wrote Imperial Hubris as Anonymous) and
angry Democrats who travel in the stratosphere of
Washington’s political elite (including former
Ambassador Joe Wilson, whose report on the Niger-Iraq
connection had been suppressed, and whose wife had been
publicly revealed by the government as a CIA agent).
The revelations are astounding, and they multiply each
day.
Slowly the leaks begin to come as well from within the
loyal cadre of the Bush administration. Military
leaders now publicly complain of a lack of troops to
secure more than the Oil Ministry in the aftermath of
the Baath regime. On October 5, Paul Bremer, former
U.S. Viceroy in Iraq, told an insurance companies
conference, "We never had enough troops on the ground".
If there had been more troops and better plans, he
suggested, the U.S. military could have prevented the
widespread plunder. A few days before Bremer broadcast
his views, the well-regarded Institute for Policy
Studies released a comprehensive report entitled Iraq:
A Failed Transition'. The report shows that the U.S.
has "paid a very high price for this war and
[Americans] have become less secure at home and in the
world. The destabilisation of Iraq since the U.S.
invasion has created a terrorist haven that did not
previously exist in Iraq, while anti-American sentiment
worldwide has sharply increased."
In addition, administration officials have now had to
concede that the several rationale used to invade Iraq
were false. The Iraq Survey Group reported (October 6)
that Saddam Hussein's regime had been substantially
disarmed, that there were no stockpiles of chemical,
biological or nuclear weapons, and that the Iraqis did
not have an active programme to build such weapons.
Based on interviews with Saddam Hussein and others,
they found that while he understood that the only way
to prevent a U.S. invasion would be to have
catastrophic weapons, he had not been able to restart
his programmes.
If Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, then
the Bush administration had banked on the relations
between Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda. During the
presidential and vice-presidential debates, both Bush
and Cheney reiterated that theme. However, the day
before Cheney's debate with contender John Edwards, the
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced, "I have
not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two,"
that is Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The following day,
senior officials disclosed that the CIA had done a
study of the relationship between Saddam Hussein and
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Islamist radical with Al
Qaeda ties. That report showed "no collaborative
relationship" between al-Zarqawi and Hussein, a fact
that moved Rumsfeld to declare: "I have just read an
intelligence report recently about one person who's
connected to Al Qaeda who was in and out of Iraq, and
there's the most tortured description of why he might
have had a relationship and why he might not have had a
relationship". Rumsfeld's style of speech apart, he
negated one of the major reasons for war offered by the
Bush administration.
All this handwringing came as Kerry stepped up his
attack on the Bush administration for the way it
prosecuted the war on terror. Since the Iraq War had
nothing to do with 9/11, Kerry told a campaign rally in
New York City that the Bush administration has made the
world "a more dangerous place for America and
Americans". Kerry's critique came days after United
Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the BBC's
Owen Bennett Jones that the war on Iraq had been
"illegal". These harsh words came with no official
sanction from the U.N.
The corporate media has become perfunctory in its
reports on Iraq. The papers simply note another attack,
another casualty. The war appears in the news like
domestic crime - we now have a blotter of deaths, but
no analysis of how the conflict is going and what this
means for the Iraqi people. "Iraq" has already come to
mean the war, and not the 24 million people who live in
that nation in search of a state.Iraq: A Failed Transition’ proposes that the current
size of the resistance is between 20,000 and 40,000 -
this in addition to the 24,000 that the U.S. Army
claims to have killed or detained between May 2003 and
August 2004. Canadian journalist Patrick Graham spent a
year in Falluja, where he met the resistance fighters.
One of them told him: "When we see the U.S. soldiers in
our cities with guns, it is a challenge to us. America
wants to show its power, to be a cowboy. Bush wants to
win the next election - that is why he is lying to the
American people saying that the resistance is Al Qaeda.
I don’t know a lot about political relations in the
world, but if you look at history - Vietnam, Iraq
itself, Egypt, and Algeria - countries always rebel
against occupation. The world must know that this is an
honourable resistance and has nothing to do with the
old regime. Even if Saddam Hussein dies we will
continue to fight to throw out the American forces. We
take our power from our history, not from one person."
The resistance has already won, even as the Iraqis have
suffered casualties that number over 10,000. They have
begun to set the agenda. No longer is the White House
able to dictate the pace of reconstruction of the
country to its own ends, or even to control the most
basic element of power: security.
KERRY quite rightly says that Bush took the U.S. into
an unnecessary, unjust war. At a July 2004 anti-war
event, anti-Vietnam War activist and former politician
from California Tom Hayden noted: "The November
election will be a referendum on the war on Iraq". This
is what Kerry hopes will happen, and as far as the
presidential debates indicate, this is what the
Democrats have emphasised. But Kerry and Bush are in
agreement on one crucial point: that the U.S. cannot
withdraw from Iraq without victory. There will be no
more Vietnams, no more Somalias, the U.S. will not
withdraw after its troops have spilled blood without
victory. No blood will be spilt in vain. Their exit
strategy is tepid. Train more Iraqis. Withdraw the U.S.
troops to the four bases strategically built around
Iraq.
Just as in the case of Vietnam, defeat is unthinkable.
When Bush claimed that one of his rationales for the
war was to bring democracy to the Arab lands, the two
parties latched onto this as a possible exit strategy.
Indeed, this had been the dream in the waning days of
the Vietnam War itself. The Kennedy administration
claimed that it had gone to war to stop the spread of
Communism in South-East Asia. For that reason, Kennedy
backed the U.S.-educated Ngo Dinh Diem. When Diem used
strongarm tactics to stay in office because he had no
substantial base in Vietnam, the army ousted him. In
his stead came Nguyen Van Thieu, a military officer who
the U.S. quickly backed, despite the protestations
about democracy, and who had at least one important
social institution behind him: the Army. If Diem-Thieu
ruled with sham elections, they would be anointed as
democrats as long as they kept close ties with the U.S.
When the resistance to the U.S. military enveloped the
Thieu regime, the U.S. had to cut and run, although
without any admission of defeat.
In Iraq, too, the U.S. practice has not matched its
claims about the spread of democracy. Bush and Cheney
both declaim the global desire for freedom and resist
the racist argument that only certain people are
capable of liberty. Their statements are welcome,
mainly because the global elite so often adopts the
cultural relativist view that people in the "darker
nations" have no ability to enjoy full "European"
freedom. However, U.S. policy is far from the
Bush-Cheney claims. The Abu Ghraib scandal, which has
quickly vanished as an issue in the election campaign,
shows us that the U.S. military intelligence, at least,
believed that "Arabs" are deceitful and that they can
only be "broken" through sexual shame. These army
officers used the 1977 book by a Princeton
anthropologist, Raphael Patai, who argued that sexual
segregation made "sex a prime mental preoccupation in
the Arab world". The book, a well-briefed academic told
journalist Seymour Hersh, was "the bible of the neocons
on Arab behavior," and these neoconservatives surmised
two points - "one, that Arabs only understand force
and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame
and humiliation". The actions of the U.S. guards at Abu
Ghraib, then, were the direct result of a policy that
suggests that the Arabs are incapable of rationality
and can only be coerced in this special way.
But this is not all. The U.S. administration, with no
strategy to escape from a burgeoning resistance,
quickly turned to tribal leaders and the ousted Baath
for help. No democracy in the offing, even if there
will be an "election" to cover over the transfer of
power. Ahmed Chalabi played the part of Diem in the
Iraq fiasco. Popular in Washington but not in Baghdad,
his ouster came in rapid time just as everything in
Iraq has happened faster than in Vietnam. To replace
him the U.S. chose the head of the Iraqi National
Accord (INA), Iyad Allawi. When Allawi visited the U.S.
for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly in
September 2004, his right hand was in a sling. A
journalist asked him how he had broken his wrist, "I’ve
been shooting people," he replied, "Didn’t you know".
It turned out that he had slammed his hand into his
desk as he berated his subordinates. He is, as they say
in the U.S., one tough cookie.
Allawi can claim to be a stern leader not because he
had a military background, but because he had something
better: he was a loyal henchman of Saddam Hussein. Head
of the Iraqi Students Union in Europe, Allawi is said
to have been in turn an agent of Saddam’s intelligence,
the British MI6, the CIA and the Saudi regime.
According to a U.S. intelligence official interviewed
by journalist Seymour Hersh, "Allawi helped Saddam get
to power. He was a very effective operator and a true
believer." A former CIA official added, "Two facts
stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of
himself as a man of ideas; and two, his strongest
virtue is that he’s a thug." Allawi’s INA is the home
of former Iraqi generals and military officials who
want a piece of the action denied them by Saddam
Hussein’s clique. The "democracy" to be delivered would
fall short of any textbook definition. The failures of
the ballot box will be forgiven for the fellowship
shown to the U.S.
In an informal radio debate between the
vice-presidential candidates from the non-mainstream
parties (Green, Libertarian, Reform), the host asked if
they had an exit strategy from Iraq. All three answered
in unison, "Get out". For them, that is the only way to
move on. The U.S., they argued, should pay reparations
for the illegal war, something that Minister Thanh
asked for Vietnam. The candidates also demanded that
the U.S. government make no attempt to run the affairs
of Iraq. But to simply get out will be a severe blow to
the U.S. attempt at global primacy and to the
illusionary self-respect of the population. The people
are angry for being taken into this war, but they are
equally worried about a loss of face. Perhaps the
problem is no longer simply the demand for primacy, but
also, as President Ford put it, the nation’s
"optimistic self-confidence". A little humility is not
a bad idea.