Lessons of Vietnam Revisited
A lot of people think George Bush doesn’t know much about foreign policy. In a speech comparing Vietnam and Iraq, Dubya only cemented that impression further.
When word first broke that Bush would be invoking Vietnam in an upcoming speech to justify continuation of the war in Iraq, I was surprising by the response it got given this isn’t the first time Bush has alluded to that long ago conflict. But after reading through some of the speech and subsequent criticisms, I can now understand why. As one blogger observed “It’s a frontal assault on the rational mind”.
Bush’s basic argument is that the US pulled out of Vietnam too soon and the resultant chaos that followed would surely be paralleled by an “early” withdrawal from Iraq. In the course of making this argument, Bush just shows his lack of any understanding of a war he so adamantly supported yet refused to fight in.
Now I do not to profess to be any sort of expert on Vietnam. As a member of the Y Generation, I was born far too late to have witnessed the conflict first hand. But it is not as if there haven’t been an encyclopedia’s worth of books written about the conflict. After skimming through Bush’s speech, I wonder if he has only read the ones rendered in pop-up form.
Some of the things noticed from Bush’s address:
- We apparently need to stay in Iraq because of the mere chance that at some point in the future, an heretofore unknown “enemy” might cite our withdrawal as a sign of weakness. By that standard, the British would still be fighting to keep us rebelling Americans from gaining any sort of independence.
- Bush played fast and loose with the number of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. According to him, we’ve killed or captured more Al-Qaeda than there were Al-Qaeda to begin with.
- Did he really reference Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American”? Oy.
- What’s this claptrap about “the killing fields”? Is Bush admitting the US is responsible for the massacres in Cambodia? Sure sounds like it. Though to be fair, Bush probably doesn’t get that it wasn’t withdrawal from Vietnam but our bombing campaign that paved the way for the Khmer Rouge to ascend to power.
- Given that context, is Bush’s reference to “killing fields” a dog whistle that he plans to emulate Nixon, something the neocons would giddily approve of?
Follow the various links in this post and you’ll see that I’m not the only one who thinks that George Bush shouldn’t be allowed to manage a Dairy Queen, much less foreign policy.
(X-posted at The Xsociate Files)
At the time of our withdrawal from Vietnam, ninety percent of the territory was in the hands of the other side.
The notion that we were winning there and we were sabotaged by liberal opposition at home is a lie which the right has spent the last thirty years trying to sell.
Vietnam was an immoral act of aggression from the beginning, and it ended in failure. Perhaps people should have learned from this misadventure that the greatest army in the world cannot subdue a country when its people want to be free. But then, they might have learned that lesson from our own revolution.
Well, they didn’t and here we are.
U.S. troops fought in Vietnam from 1967 through 1973. Just how long should we have stayed there?
As for Graham Greene, I can’t believe Bush even read a single word that man wrote. Greene’s unrelenting contempt for Americans (in his books, they’re almost all idiots, and the few who aren’t talk like Englishmen) irritates even me.
I fought in Vietnam 1971-1972.
We won a military victory in Vietnam at the cost of 58,194 American fighting men. We never lost a single battle. No US unit ever surrendered. The North Vietnamese launched two offensives - Tet on 1968 and Eastertide in 1972. Both were major defeats for the communists. Tet destroyed the Viet Cong as a fighting force with fewer than 10,000 of their 84,000 fighters escaping death or capture. Eastertide resulted in the loss half of the 200,000 North Vietnamese invaders.
Nixon had us launch Operation Linebacker in April 1972 - targeting airfields, ports, railways, bridges, power generation and command and control. Linebacker II ordered formations of B52s to carpet bombing Hanoi and Haiphong at 100 to 150 sorties per night. After 11 days, the North Vietnamese returned to the Paris Peace Talks and agreed to our conditions - a military victory by any definition. 1,250,000 people died in the Vietnam War.
The democrat controlled congress could not allow Nixon a victory. They reduced security assistance to the South from $1.4B to $700M, ensuring they would be unable to repel another attack. They also added the Case-Church Amendment to the FY75 Defense Appropriations Bill, prohibiting US forces from intervening in North or South Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia. Some of the supporters of this policy were Teddy Kennedy, Robert Byrd, George McGovern, Eugene MacCarthy, Jack Murtha, Frank Church, Dave Obey and other Liberals. Cheering were John Kerry, Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda. It was their shining hour - liberal politics over national interest.
When the NVA took South Vietnam by force in the Spring of 1975, we sat by and watched. 850,000 South Vietnamese were reeducated to death. Another 1,500,000 fled in boats, with 150,000 dying in the process. Lom Nol was unable to defeat the Khmer Rouge, and Pol Pot killed 2,000,000 of his people - a third of the population. 3,000,000 died in the Vietnam Peace.
Ah, yes, the old “we were stabbed in the back” trope.
Arch, you may be interested in this anecdote: Years after the war, an American general who had fought in Vietnam met a Vietnamese general. The American said, “You never defeated us in a single battle.” The Vietmanese smiled and replied, “That is true, but it is also irrelevant.”
No one “lost” Vietnam because it was never ours to “lose.” We wasted a horrendous amount of human life there because of boneheaded stubbornness and refusal to see that we could not impose our will through sheer military force.