Vietnamization II

   In a rare press conference that followed his party’s “thumpin’", George Bush was asked if he saw any parallels between the current situation in Iraq and our policies toward Vietnam in the late 1960’s. “First of all,” he said, “Iraq…voted on a constitution. Secondly…this is a volunteer Army. [And] thirdly, the support for our troops is strong here in the United States. So I see differences, I really do.” 

   But despite a constitution ratified beneath the watchful eyes of an occupying force, the lack of conscription in the U.S., and a support for our troops that in no way diminishes the widespread opposition to the war, parallels between Iraq and Vietnam persist.

    In both cases, support for the war was based on orchestrated sophistry. In Vietnam, Americans were told a nation of pre-industrial farmers could pose a security threat to the United States. In Iraq, we were told Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, though the pilots were Saudi nationals, and that he'd amassed a cache of nuclear weapons. In both cases, support for the war waned as distortions were exposed, casualties mounted, and evidence of U.S. attrocities surfaced in the mainstream press. In Vietnam, it was the massacre at Mai Lai. In Iraq, it was the abuse of prisoners at Abu Graib prison.

   In both cases, chaos gave way to a search for a “decent interval.” In 1969, President Nixon adopted a policy of “Vietnamization.” His policy called on the South Vietnamese to increase their participation in the war, setting the stage for an “honorable” U.S. exit. In 2006, the calls for a U.S. withdrawal and increased Iraqi participation can be heard from every quarter.   

  The nuclear card was also reserved in both cases. In 1968, to ensure North Vietnamese participation in peace talks, Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s right hand man and one of the chief U.S. negotiators for the talks, let it be known that the president was so unstable and staunchly anti-communist that he might, at any time, resort to nuclear weapons―the so-called “Madman Theory.” Today, it’s well known that the U.S., Israel, and Turkey are in the advanced stages of a plan to use nuclear weapons against Iran, widely perceived as a staging area for Iraqi “insurgents.” Whether that plan will be used as a bargaining chip remains to be seen.

  In 1967, Nixon created the Phoenix Program, a secretive CIA program to train South Vietnamese to infiltrate their peasant communities in search of NVA sympathizers. The sympathizers were then murdered by death squads. Today, death squads from Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, dressed as Iraqi police with an uncanny ability to get through U.S. checkpoints, have been killing “insurgent” sympathizers by the hundreds, mostly Sunni. Indeed, a U.N. human rights report released last year claimed the Interior Minsitry forces were responsible for an "organized campaign of detentions, torture and killings" and asserted that special police commando units who carried out these killings were recruited from Shia Badr and Mehdi militias, trained by U.S. forces. 

   In Vietnam, as with Iraq, generals on the ground insisted the country could never hold its own without a continued U.S. presence. It was Henry Kissinger, bowing to political pressure, who proposed withdrawing our troops back then. And as we made our exit from Danang and Saigon, pandemonium gripped the countryside and rockets rained down on the citizens as the NVA made their final sweep. Thousands of South Vietnamese lost their lives or committed suicide.

   It is therefore the similarities to Vietnam rather than its differences, I believe, that drive this president to stay the course in Iraq, as reaffirmed in his comments this morning from Hanoi. “We’ll succeed unless we quit.” But that similarity also infers a similar fate regardless of the president’s tenacity. The deceit that propelled us to war in both cases set the stage for a popular outcry. That outcry implies this president will find it difficult to prevent the inevitable.

                                                   

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net

Comments

[Joan]

I still remember the image of those helicopters lifting about the firestorm and wreckage of Seoul.

Maybe the best we can hope for is that the country heals one day.

What frightens me more is that unlike Vietnam, which is a penninsula, Iraq is surrounded on all sides by hostile powers that would like nothing better than to see Iraq thrown into ruin. It would provide them a rallying point and a proving ground for new "insurgents."