The Vietnam War wasn't really about Vietnam, and it wasn't
really a war. It was a violent exercise in hubris and self-delusion done
in the name of American honour.
The U.S. did not fight an army; it fought a people. The
Vietcong, did not wear uniforms, march in formation or fight on a
battlefield. They waged a popular insurgency, supported by the North
Vietnamese Army, to rid South Vietnam of American colonial overlordship
and corrupt U.S. puppet governments like that of Ngo Dinh Diem.
At no time did the U.S. follow a coherent political or
military strategy to deal with the Vietcong. It didn't need to, because
South Vietnam, per se, did not matter.
The U.S. treated a threat to South Vietnam as an attack on its own
reputation as guarantor of South Vietnam's security. Thus, the Vietnam
conflict was an exercise in public relations damage control.
On Nov. 6, 1961, Asst. Secretary of Defense John T.
McNaughton summarized U.S. aims for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara
in this sobering report:
"(a) 70 percent--To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to
our reputation as a counter-subversion guarantor).
(b) 20 percent--To keep SVN (and then adjacent territory)
from Chinese hands.
(c) 10 percent--To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a
better, freer way of life. Also--to emerge from
crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.
NOT to 'help a friend,' although it would be hard to stay out if
asked." (The Pentagon Papers, pp. 255,
365.)
Without a defensible strategy, the conflict generated its
own perverse self-defeating dynamic. The longer the conflict went on, the
greater the insult to America's ego; the greater the insult, the deeper
the military commitment; the deeper the commitment, the greater the
insult; and so on.
This brings me to President George W. Bush and his insane
lust to commit the U.S. to another Vietnam-style fiasco. The prosecutors
of that conflict were said to be "the
best and the brightest"--brilliant technocrats and crisis managers who
nevertheless persisted in a policy contrary to the national interest.
In contrast, the irresponsibly belligerent pronouncements
by Bush and other administration officials regarding "the war on
terrorism" are so devoid of reason and intelligence that one could rightly
dub this government "the worst and the dimmest."
In fact, the much vaunted "war on terrorism" qualifies as
a folly according to the three criteria set out by Barbara Tuchman in her
great work The March of Folly from Troy to Vietnam.
€ "[a policy] must be perceived to be counter-productive
in its own time, not merely by hindsight";
€ "a feasible alternative course of action must have been
available"; and
€ "it should be that of a group, not an individual ruler,
and should persist beyond any one political lifetime." (P. 5)
Bush is in serious danger of repeating the ego-maniacal
folly of Vietnam. The evidence is all around, for those who care to look.
The rhetorical bogeyman
In Vietnam, the U.S. declared that the "enemy" was
communism and its potential spread throughout Indochina and beyond--at
least, that was the official version for public consumption. Of course, it
conveniently hid the fact that the "war on communism" served the higher
purpose of propping up America's reputation. However, so long as the
American public bought into the Grand Crusade of "good versus evil" the
government could justify the deaths of tens of thousands of servicemen in
a wasteful public relations exercise.
Now, "terrorism" has become the rhetorical bogeyman to
justify yet another ego-driven military misadventure. For it to be
effective, the public must believe that terrorism presents a general
danger, not just a one-time threat. Once this is achieved, the public will
willingly accept infringements on civil liberties and personal freedoms.
Already, Congress has given the CIA wider latitude to conduct covert
operations, and California Senator Dianne Feinstein, a major recipient of
Pro-Israeli PAC money, wants a six-month moratorium imposed on student
visas for those coming from "terrorist" [read: Muslim] countries.
In a act of gratuitous scaremongering, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld raised the spectre that America's enemies might
now help terrorist groups obtain chemical, biological and possibly even
nuclear weapons.
The official mythology of the NYC/DC attacks deems them to
be vicious, evil assaults on the American way of life. This claim,
propagated by the Bush administration and its media sycophants, is so
baseless and transparently manipulative, that no reasonable person could
take it seriously. How many of us guffawed, or cringed, when Marshall
"Tex" Bush uttered his ridiculous exhortation for Saudi dissident-in-exile
Osama bin Laden to be captured "dead or alive"?
The conscious attempt to foment unease among the American
public is designed to keep the country in a state of agitated ignorance to
ensure support for the crusade. In other words, the Bush administration
merely expects the public to hate, not understand.
Any dispassionate observer knows that the attack was not
directed against the U.S., but rather against its foreign policy, but that
point of view is officially anathematized and anyone who champions it is
slandered and shouted down.
What qualifies as international criminal conduct is not up
for debate. "War crimes" are associated with events in places peripheral
to U.S. interests, such as Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Perversely, "war crime" is not generally associated with the Vietnam War,
U.S./Israeli terrorism of the Palestinians, or the U.S.-led destruction of
Iraq. That's because applying a common standard of conduct upsets
comfortable delusions of own superior morality: "The U.S. is the linch-pin
of the democratic world. It could never
commit a war crime! Only the 'enemies of democracy' commit war crimes."
Yet, in 1984, the World Court declared the U.S. government
to be a war criminal for mining Nicaragua's harbours and causing the
deaths of 30,000 civilians. The same could be said of U.S. responsibility
for the deaths of 1,000,000 Iraqis, including more than 500,000 children;
120,000 Guatemalan peasants since 1954; and the 1975 slaughter of more
than 250,000 East Timorese by Indonesia.
In the grand ledger of atrocities, the NYC/DC attack
amounts to little more than a bloody nose, yet we are made to feel that an
attack on America is automatically an attack on civilization itself--UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan said as much. How valuable one American life
must be if the deaths of a few thousand from this one terror attack merit
so much concern, while the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
non-Americans from chronic terror merit so little.
The great bogeyman of "terrorism against America" is a
lie, but so long as it is propagated loudly and constantly, few will
challenged jingoistic claptrap like "The U.S. is a beacon of freedom" and
its attackers are "evil doers."
The "war on terrorism" seems like an ideal strategy for
Bush because bin Laden, the Taliban and radical Islam are already
demonized in the minds of revenge-minded Americans. With one stroke, Bush
not only addresses Americans' need for bloodlust, but co-opts the
credulous and unchallenging media, and targets Israel's enemies. (The
demographically doomed Zionist entity would love to watch the U.S. lead a
prolonged, futile war against the Arab world. After all, the U.S. is
Israel's protector just as it was South Vietnam's.)
From all appearances, the Bush administration is only too
willing to comply, and in so doing it will validate the famous paraphrase
of Karl Marx: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
Casus belli
During the Vietnam War, and throughout the cold War
generally, the official bogeyman threatening to destroy "the American way
of life" was communism. The containment of communism was integral to U.S.
foreign policy, even if those condemned as communists were more often than
not nationalists who wanted a better deal for their own people--at the
expense of U.S. corporate self-interest, of course.
Though these bogeymen were fictions, they played a real
role in the pursuit of folly. In election year 1964, Johnson faced a
dilemma: he had to ensure financial and political support for his Great
Society social reforms, yet not appear to be "soft on communism" in
Vietnam. Even though he knew the war was going badly, he could
not risk
pulling out, so instead he went in deeper.
American involvement reached the point of no return on
Aug. 4 when Congress passed a dirty bit of chicanery called the Gulf of
Tonkin Resolution, giving Johnson a fraudulent
casus belli to expand the war to North
Vietnam.
The official government line was that the destroyer USS
Maddox was "deliberately attacked" in the
Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 2, 1964, thus creating an act of war that needed to
be avenged. Of course, no such attacked happened. Ironically, the
government's deceit was well known, even among journalists; nevertheless,
the press dutifully parroted the party line:
The Los Angeles Times
urged Americans to "face the fact that the Communists, by their
attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves
escalated the hostilities."
The Gulf of Tonkin Deception.
With the conspicuous exceptions of the likes of Pat
Buchanan, Robert Novak, Jude Wanniski, Joe Sobran, Robert Fisk in Britain,
and Rick Salutin and Neil MacDonald in Canada, the media have shamelessly
hopped aboard the "Texecutioner's Middle East Tour" like so many besotted
rock groupies. Some "journalists," like Ann Coulter, have even sunk to the
level of passing off unadulterated anti-Arab bigotry as informed
commentary. Future widows of America: write your congressman
In contrast to the Gulf of Tonkin
incident, the NYC/DC casus
belli did happen, but Congress has behaved just as stupidly. On Sept.
15, it passed a joint resolution giving Bush unprecedented executive
authority: "The president is authorized to use all necessary and
appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he
determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks
that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. The Lessons of Blowback
At no time has Bush articulated a risk/benefit analysis,
or definable military objectives, or shown any respect for international
law. Warmongers, including former administration officials William Bennett
and Jeane Kirkpatrick, are openly calling for attacks on Hezbollah, Syria,
Sudan, Libya and Algeria, and perhaps even parts of Egypt. Whose war is
it?
Even neutron bomb inventor Sam Cohen advocates the use of
thermonuclear devices on Afghanistan to kill bin Laden and wipe out the
Taliban. What was a war crime in Vietnam is now being actively promoted as
official U.S. policy. Bush is clearly committing the same delusional
arrogance that led Johnson to disgrace in Vietnam.
Regional destabilization
The Vietnam conflict spilled over into neighbouring
Cambodia, a direct result of which was the rise of the sadistic Pol Pot
and the Killing Fields. Christopher Hitchens makes a persuasive case in
his book Regarding Henry (excerpted in Harper's) that former Nixon
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal for
the way he sabotaged the 1968 Paris Peace negotiations and later
consciously expanded the war into Cambodia.
Hitchens said the war could have ended in 1968 instead of
1975, had Kissinger, then a functionary in the Johnson government, not
leaked the government's negotiating position to Nixon's election team.
Now Bush is prepared to risk another regional
conflagration to defend America's image. In Afghanistan, 1 million
refugees are already heading to Pakistan. On Sept. 27, the United Nations
launched an emergency appeal for $875 million worth of aid. For this
upheaval Bush is 100 percent to blame. Instead of threatening Afghanistan
with massive reprisals, he should have offered food, shelter and medical
aid as incentives to turn over bin Laden, who is no more than a suspect.
But then, who wants to be seen to be kind to the Taliban?
Pakistan, Afghanistan's neighbour, is a nuclear power, and
the effect of a prolonged conflict and having to tend to millions of
refugees is unknown. If Pakistan undergoes upheaval, what would its
arch-enemy India do? In the 1980s, the U.S.-supported Saddam Hussein began
the long, bloody and inconclusive Iran/Iraq war by attacking Iran, which
he thought to be exhausted and distracted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's
Islamic revolution. Could a peripheral war between two nuclear-capable
states break out?
Egypt, with 60 million people, has a restive militant
Islamic community that would assuredly launch uprisings if the pro-Western
government of Hosni Mubarak sided with the U.S. Does Bush really want to
destabilize Egypt and give rise to yet another anti-Western Arab
government?
The assault on Afghanistan is as arrogant, self-defeating
and counter-productive as was the carpet-bombing of North Vietnam. Like
Johnson, Bush is committing his folly in full knowledge of the possibly
disastrous consequences.
Waging War in Afghanistan Could Rattle Region.
However, Bush may have an ulterior motive for wanting to
destroy the Afghan government. Until Dec. 4, 1998, Unocal of El Segundo,
Calif., was involved in the multinational Central Asia Gas Consortium to
build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to
Pakistan and possibly India. On that date it announced that it was
officially pulling out, citing deteriorating political conditions and the
conduct of the Taliban government, especially toward women. However,
Unocal is not entirely out of the picture:
"[We] consistently emphasized that the project could not
and would not proceed until there was an internationally recognized
government in place in Afghanistan that fairly represented all its people.
Our hope was that the project could help bring peace, stability and
economic development to the Afghans, as well as develop important energy
resources for the region." Unocal's withdrawal from CentGas
Consortium.
Bush might well want to destabilize Afghanistan chiefly to
put in place a government more amenable to Unocal. Maybe yes, maybe no,
but all the world hears is the endless mantra of "return bin Laden," as if
it were consciously designed to distract the world from Bush's
real motive.
Columnist Robert Fisk eloquently captured the absurdity of
Bush's "war on terrorism": "We are witnessing...one of the most epic
events since the Second World War, certainly since Vietnam. I am not
talking about the ruins of the World Trade Centre in New York and the
grotesque physical scenes which we watched on 11 September... No, I am
referring to the extraordinary, almost unbelievable preparations now under
way for the most powerful nation ever to have existed on God's Earth to
bomb the most devastated, ravaged, starvation-haunted and tragic country
in the world. Afghanistan, raped and eviscerated by the Russian army for
10 years, abandoned by its friends--us, of course--once the Russians had
fled, is about to be attacked by the surviving superpower." ("How can the
U.S. bomb this tragic people?" The
Independent, Sept. 23, 1001).
The slide into genocide
However satisfying it may be, "terrorism" cannot be the
enemy, at least not in a military sense. To wage war against an "ism," any
"ism," means waging war against a whole population. Millions of people
throughout history have been slaughtered because they believed in the
wrong "ism" at the wrong time. That's why war against believers of an
"ism"--Judaism, Christism, Mohammedism, etc. --is known as persecution.
Such a war is unwinnable unless you're prepared to commit wholesale
murder, including the indiscriminate killing of civilians. Look at the
"war on drugism"--a never-ending waste of time, money and lives in pursuit
of the impossible.
In Vietnam, the U.S. was
prepared to commit wholesale murder. The most infamous massacre took place
on March 16, 1968, at My Lai. Approximately 80 men of First Battalion,
20th Infantry, 11th Light Infantry Brigade entered the village on a
"search and destroy" mission to kill Vietcong. By the time the Americans
were finished, 300 apparently unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including
women and children, had been massacred. No Vietcong were found.
(Incidentally, as Hitchens reports, Gen. Colin Powell,
when he was a staff army major in Vietnam, helped suppress the inquiry
into the My Lai massacre and other America-committed civilian atrocities.
Powell is now Bush's Secretary of State, and one of the saner influences.)
The My Lai massacre, and others like
it, is partly why Americans are justifiably ashamed of the Vietnam era,
and why soldiers who served honourably were shunned when they came home.
Yet, despite the profusion of books,
articles, movies and documentaries on the Vietnam era, Americans and their
leaders still cannot, or will not, face up to what their country did. The
temptation to compartmentalize and rationalize one's own immoral conduct
is psychologically irresistible. Unfortunately, the greater the misdeed,
the greater the need to dissemble, and hence the greater the propensity to
commit the same immorality.
So it is that Bush could utter this
inanity with a straight face:
"This will be a different kind of
conflict against a different kind of enemy. This is a conflict without
battlefields or beachheads. A conflict with opponents who believe they are
invisible. Yet, they are mistaken. They will be exposed and they will
discover what others in the past have learned: those who make war against
the United States have chosen their own destruction." (We'll Win War
Against Terrorism, Sept. 17, 2001, AP.)
The Road to Ruin
On Nov. 1, 1961, Gen. Maxwell Taylor
sent two cablegrams to President John Kennedy outlining the dangers of
military overeagerness in a war that was already lost. The first cablegram
reads in part:
"a. ...we can ill afford any detachment
of forces to a peripheral area of the Communist bloc where they will be
pinned down for an uncertain duration.
b. Although U.S. prestige is already
engaged in SVN, it will become more so by the sending of troops.
c. If the first contingent is not
enough to accomplish the necessary results, it will be difficult to resist
the pressure to reinforce. If the ultimate aim of the insurgents within
SVN there is no limit to our possible commitment (unless we attack the
source in Hanoi);
d. The introduction of U.S. forces may
increase tensions and risk escalation into a major war in Asia.
On the other side of the argument,
there can be no action so convincing of U.S. seriousness of purpose and
hence so reassuring to the people and Government of SVN and to our other
friends and allies in SEA as the introduction of U.S. ground troops into
SVN." (The Pentagon Papers, p. 141)
The second cablegram reads in part:
"2. It is concluded that:
a. Communist strategy aims to gain
control of Southeast Asia by methods of subversion and guerrilla war which
by-pass conventional U.S. and indigenous strength on the ground. The
interim Communist goal-- en route to total takeover--appears to be a
neutral Southeast [sic] Asia, detached from U.S. protection. This strategy
is well on its way to success in Vietnam." (The
Pentagon Papers, p. 144)
With a few substitutions--"Afghanistan"
for "South Vietnam," "terrorism" for "subversion and guerrilla war"
etc.--the memo could be rewritten for Bush. It
should be rewritten for Bush, because the
scenarios are almost identical, especially the bit about the benefits to
America's image as a protector.
What the architects of Vietnam sought
to avoid, anti-Arab zealots inside and outside the Bush government
actively advocate. So far, Bush has resisted these voices of unreason
because he knows he needs the support of Arab nations, but for how long
can he resist? Bush's dangerously irresponsible pronouncements could force
him to overplay his hand, because once the U.S.'s reputation is at stake,
all reason goes out the window.
Bush is pursuing a policy contrary to
self-interest for reasons of ego. It will almost assuredly engender more
attacks on the U.S. and feed Arab hatred for America for years, even
decades, to come. What's worse, the whole world knows what Bush could do
to end the threat, but he hasn't the guts. for obvious domestic reasons he
doesn't want to appear "soft on Israel."
America couldn't murder its way to
victory over the Vietcong in Vietnam. Bush will find that the U.S. cannot
murder its way to victory over terrorists in the Middle East. The only
question is how many will have to die for the sake of Bush's folly.
Mr. Greg Felton is a Canadian editorialist on international politics, especially the Middle East. He can be reached at
gfelton@mediamonitors.org
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