Vietnamization redux? Deja vu all over again?

[Tansy_Gold]

I don't have all the relevant details at my fingertips, but between watching Hardball tonight and then Countdown and reading Woodward's State of Denial a few pages each evening, I'm struck repeatedly with the abject, almost incomprehensible blind stupidity of the current administration.

Gen. Batiste on Hardball says we have to train more Iraqi troops to take over their own security. Isn't that what Vietnamization was supposed to do in the 1970s? And didn't it fail miserably, because the Vietnamese weren't even interested in stopping the civil war that the U.S. was essentially caught in the middle of? And isn't that exactly what's going on in Iraq? Or am I just stupid myself?

There was the fear propagated by the Johnson administration that if Vietnam fell into (communist) chaos, the whole southeast Asian region would follow -- and isn't that exactly the wholesale terror-terror-terror mantra that's repeated eight hundred thousand times a day by the Bush administration? We have to stop it "there" -- regardless where "there" is -- so it doesn't happen "here." Even if there's no reason to really believe it ever would.

Back in 2004 I wrote a little essay here, apropos of the Swift Boat controversy and why John Kerry's service in Vietnam mattered. And I wonder now, two years and an election later, how different the visit to Vietnam last week would have been had Kerry been president, and not that little ratbastard boooosh. How different, too, would the prosecution of the "war" in Iraq be if the commander in chief were a man who understood the difference between war for the sake of war and war as a reality.

I wrote back then, in 2004, "The men who are waging the war in Iraq right now are the same ones who avoided the war in Vietnam, not for the reasons Bill Clinton did because he thought the war was wrong. They avoided it because they had other priorities. They thought they were too good to fight. They thought they were entitled to the sacrifice of others, others less fortunate than they, others less affluent than they, others with less access to education than they. Vietnam was a class war, just as the tax cuts, the outsourcing, the privatization of social security, and the Iraq war are class wars. Vietnam was also a war of racism, often neglected because it contrasted to the civil rights movement in the U.S. Have we moved beyond that yet? Have we guaranteed that every eligible person will be able to vote? Have we eliminated the racist element of poverty? Have we finally overcome the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow apartheid?"

In other words, they -- the members of the current administration who continue to tout this war in Iraq as necessary -- are waging war for the sake of war. They have no personal stake in it, as Lawrence O'Donnell so passionately declaimed on Hardball the other day, and as Charles Rangel knows so well. Oh, they may "know someone" who is serving in the military, they may even be the elected representatives of people serving (indeed, they probably are, since there are troops from everywhere). But how different would their votes on the war be if they knew their sons, their daughters, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews, their wives and husbands, were ALL subject to call-up? Not just one of them, but ALL of them? And if there were no cushy exemptions for the rich and powerful? No champagne National Guard units, no "other priorities," no pustules on the posterior to save the privileged from the risks their privileged fellows created? What would happen then?

People's lives changed in the 1960s and 1970s because of Vietnam. Young men got married before they wanted to, had children before they were ready to, all to avoid the draft. The wealthy and powerful set themselves up as "too good" to serve and got special dispensations. The draft took the poor, the unlucky, the unfortunate; it was their families who suffered the most. And they continue to suffer, as their children grow up to maturity without their dead parents, as their VA benefits are cut, as their fellows like Jack Murtha and John Kerry are villified by the same kind of liars who villified them a long generation ago. The price is a high one that they have paid, and they continue to pay.

But the people who sent them there do not pay, nor will they ever. We have a government run by these people now, the privileged liars and the arrogant elites, and they do not care. Their only interest is their own, in strictly financial terms. They have no risks to their children, their grandchildren, their loved ones. And they will pin our hopes for peace on "Iraqization" or whatever they want to call it, but they will put no muscle in that hope.

The Iraqi people, like the Vietnamese before them, want us out of their country, or countries as they may become. They want to make their own determination of their future. The Great Goddess knows I do not agree with hardly any of their intentions, but neither do I agree with the intentions of this awful administration. I do not want to see Sunni murder Shia or Kurds slaughter anyone. And whether Iraq "descends" into the chaos of civil war should not be our issue -- other than that our own actions prompted it. It may even be that if left to their own devices, they may work out an honorable solution without our dubious assistance.

And when it is all over, Iraq -- or whatever it becomes -- will have a monumental task of rebuilding from the smithereens to which we have reduced it. Perhaps we as a nation will have something left from the destruction of our own economy, our own industrial capacity, to offer them some help. Or perhaps they will have to help us.

Keith Olbermann was right: George W. Bush never learned the lessons of Vietnam. But the George W. Bushes of the world don't need to. The lessons of Vietnam do not pertain to them, because they will continue as before regardless. It is we the people who need to understand how terrible the Vietnam war was, so that we can take to the streets, either literally or figuratively, to make sure this newly-elected Congress, elected on the premise that this war in Iraq is wrong and can come to no good, hears us and listens to us and learns, if it has not already, the lessons of Vietnam.

Vietnamization didn't work. Period. We must not go further down that road this time.


Tansy Gold, talking off the top of her pointed little head.