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Today's
Stories
April
13, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
The Real Lessons of Vietnam
April 10
/ 12, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Greatest Radical Journalist of His Age
Patrick
Cockburn
Ambush, Kidnap, Murder: Another Day in "Post War" Iraq
Ellen Cantarow
Health Under Siege on the West Bank
Tariq Ali
Iraqi
Resistance: a New Phase
Werther
Pseudoconservatism Revisited: When God is Pro War & Other Delicacies
Robert
Fisk
Bush's War Lords to Their Critics: "Just Shut Up"
Gary Leupp
Indian Wars, Vietnam and Orientalist Fantasy
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Cont.
Jorge Mariscal
Perils of the Bootstrap
Phil Gasper
Defying Stereotypes About Death Row
Dave Zirin
Bringing the Black Freedom Struggle Into Sports: an Interview with Lee
Evans
Brandy
Baker
The Revolution is Playing at a Theater Near You
Mickey Z.
Underground Music is Free Media: an Interview with Twiin
Ali Tonak
Get Ready for the Million Worker March
Harry Browne
Asking the Wrong Question About Richard Clarke & 9/11
Gideon
Samet
The Sharonizing of America
Conn Hallinan
Remote Control Warriors
Website
of the Weekend
Taboo
Tunes
April 9,
2004
Robert
Fisk
This
War's Simple Truth: Iraqis Do Not Want Us
John L.
Hess
The
Non-Confessions of a Warrior Princess: Condi on the Stand
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Condoleezza's Condescensions
Christopher Brauchli
Holes in the Sky: Bush's Crazed Missile Defense Plan
Don Santina
Forget the Alamo!: Glorifying the Fight for Slavery in Texas
William S. Lind
The 4G Warfare Seminar, Cont.
Bill Christison
9/11
Commission is Bush's New Lapdog
Website of the Day
What We've Done to Fallujah
April 8, 2004
Wayne Madsen
Rice
(and the Record) Proves It: Bush Knew, But Failed to Act
Kurt Nimmo
Will
Bush Flatten Fallajuh?
Patrick
Cockburn
Guided
Missile; Misguided War
Laura Flanders
Steamed
Rice
Larry Everest
What Condi Rice is Hiding
Adam Federman
Sacred Capitalism Hits Russia
M. Junaid
Alam
The Iraqi Intifada Begins
Norman Solomon
The Quest for a Monopoly on Violence
Douglas
Valentine
Echoes
of Vietnam: Phoenix, Assassination and Blowback in Iraq
Website of the Day
Xispas: Chicano Art, Culture and Politics
April 7,
2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Those
Pulitzers!
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Deeper
into the Mouth of Hell: We Must Find the Exit from Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Tet
in Iraq: Closer to the Cosmic Disaster?
Patrick
Cockburn
Battles
Across Iraq: US Death Toll Mounts
Kathy Kelly
Pacification: Worth the Price?
Sonali
Kolhatkar
What Are You Doing About Afghanistan?
Rahul Mahajan
Report from Baghdad: Opening the Gates of Hell
Robert
Fisk
US Airlifts Saddam to Qatar
Mike Whitney
America Out of Iraq, Now!
Sam Hamod
Bush, Pandora's Box and the Tiger
April 6, 2004
C.G. Estabrook
Mercenaries
and Occupiers
William
Blum
The
Anti-Empire Report: the Israel Lobby
Col. Dan
Smith
The
Language of Disbelief: 1.3 Billion Still Live in War Zones
Dr. Bulent Gokay
The Coming Islamic Republic of Iraq?
Lynn Landes
Faking Democracy: Americans Don't Vote; Machines Do
Sheila Samples
What Would Royko Write?
Jason Leopold
Condi's Blind Spot: Rice Never Mentioned al-Qaeda
Mickey Z.
A Reality Show with No End in Sight
Robert
Fisk
Iraq on the Brink of Anarchy
|
April
13, 2004
How Many Must Die to Achieve an Exit
with Honor?
The
Real Lessons of Vietnam
By DAVE LINDORFF
No
one could ever accuse our elected leaders, whether in the White House
or in Congress, of being scholars and intellectuals, but when such people
start prattling on about the “lessons of Vietnam,” it becomes
even clearer that we’re talking here about people who would have
flunked their high school history tests.
Take
Pennsylvania’s junior Republican Senator Rick Santorum. One lesson
of Vietnam which he says we should be applying now to the mounting crisis
in Iraq is that “we shouldn’t let politicians decide how
to fight a war; we should let the war fighters fight the war.”
Santorum,
who like many a right-wing militarist, ducked military service himself
as a young draft-age man during the Indochina conflict, clearly doesn’t
know or has conveniently forgotten that the top brass during the Vietnam
War, like Gen. Westmoreland and Gen. Abrams, consistently and intentionally
misled the civilian leadership in Washington about the progress of the
war. Unwilling to admit that they were losing, they lied about enemy
“body counts” (as they are doing again now in Iraq by never
separating civilian deaths from deaths of Iraqi combatants and by continuing
to pretend that the U.S. in Iraq is fighting Baathist “die-hards”
and “terrorists,” not Iraqi nationalists), kept claiming
that they could win if they just had more troops, and argued for widening
the war, first to the North and then into Cambodia and Laos. Heck, if
the military had had its way in Indochina, the whole place would have
been nuked.
Arizona’s
Sen. John McCain, who unlike Santorum, did fight in Vietnam, and who
spent five years in a North Vietnamese prison of war camp, also misstates
the “lesson” of Vietnam. In his case, he says Iraq is not
like Vietnam because in Iraq “we have the capability militarily
and politically to prevail.”
First
of all, McCain is forgetting that this is exactly what the hawks—civilian
and military—always said about Vietnam! One version popular back
in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and still dredged up by die-hard
defenders of that war, had it that we had the military ability to prevail
but the damned politicians kept making the military fight with one hand
tied behind its back (a ludicrous claim, given that the U.S. poured
more weaponry into Vietnam than it used in the entire Second World War,
and that with one hand behind its back it killed over two million Indochinese
and turned much of the country into a moonscape of craters and defoliated
lands). The other version was that we could have won militarily, but
our host, the South Vietnamese government, was just too weak and corrupt
to allow us to win.
The
truth, of course, is that the “host government” as in Iraq,
was a sham creation of the U.S., and that the U.S. was simply whipped
in Vietnam, militarily and politically. The reason the Vietnamese won
was not, as McCain suggests, because they had “big power”
backing from the Soviet Union and China (backing that was always in
fact half-hearted at best and never crucial), but because the Vietnamese
people were fighting for their country and had been for half a century.
McCain’s
argument that somehow Iraq is different—that because it has no
superpower backing, and no neighboring country sanctuary, America can
win this one--actually sounds lifted right out of a 1970 political debate.
Iraq’s
resisistance may not have superpower backing, but it has much of the
Arab and Islamic world supporting it, which may actually be more substantive
backing than Vietnam ever got from its Communist “friends.”
And as for sanctuary, how different are the porous borders of Saudi
Arabia, Syria, Iran and Jordan from those of Laos and Cambodia?
McCain’s
claim that America can “win” in Iraq actually sounds frighteningly
and depressingly like the claims by cheerleaders of America’s
war in Indochina over the years that America could win there. Increasingly
it is becoming clear that winning in Iraq means the same thing it meant
in Vietnam: killing and cowing the people of the country into submission.
McCain and Santorum also fail to mention another very real “lesson
of Vietnam” which should be relevant to the current war in which
the U.S. military finds itself increasingly mired. That is the lack
of support of the war effort back home. After the Vietnam War, a common
refrain was that never again should America get itself involved in a
conflict without the clear support of the American public. This lesson
was jettisoned by the Bush gang from day one when they began a campaign
of deception to convince Congress to authorize an invasion of Iraq.
By using lies, exaggeration and deception to achieve the goal of an
invasion, they ensured that the American public would never back the
war, especially if and when it began to go badly, as it is now doing.
So
here we are back again to 1968, when the Tet Offensive first made it
apparent to the American public that the war could not be won. The new
Shite offensive in Iraq is making the same point to a new generation
of Americans. It doesn’t matter if the U.S. military, by sheer
power of its 21st Century weaponry, can defeat the 19th Century fighters
of Iraq’s insurgency. This current uprising across much of Iraq
has made it clear that the U.S. has already lost the war.
While
we’re talking about similarities between 1968 and 2004, we should
also recall the unfortunate parallelism of the dispiriting presidential
campaigns and the similar lack of any real anti-war alternative. In
1968, we had Democratic Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who had knocked
out genuine anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy in the primaries, running
on a platform of support for Lyndon Johnson’s still escalating
war, and Republican Richard Nixon, touting his deceptive “secret
plan” for “peace with honor”—a secret plan that
in fact saw the war and the killing expand dramatically before leading
to an ultimate U.S. defeat. This election year, we have Bush the incumbent
defending his war, and Democrat John Kerry, who won his party’s
nomination by defeating anti-war candidate Howard Dean, also supporting
continued American war against and occupation of Iraq. Kerry, meanwhile,
a Vietnam Veteran who once condemned the U.S. war in Indochina as both
criminal and hopeless, seems now to think that the lesson of Vietnam
is that the U.S. needs to get the U.N. to provide a fig-leaf of international
cover for its indecent imperialist aggression—as if Iraqi’s
and the rest of the world won’t know who’s really firing
off the deadly ordnance.
The
only question left, as in Vietnam in 1968, is how many U.S. and Iraqi
lives will have to be extinguished before President Bush, or perhaps
President Kerry, can sneak off mumbling “peace with honor.”
Of
course, after that finally happens, we can expect to have to endure
people like McCain, Santorum, Bush and Kerry continue to claim that
we “could have won” if only the politicians had let our
brilliant military leaders have their way, if only we’d sent in
more troops, if only those treasonous war critics hadn’t sapped
America’s will, if only we’d brought in the U.N.…etc.,
etc.
The
real lesson of Vietnam: nobody seems to learn anything in Washington.
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