Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world’s policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world’s midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war." --J. Kirkpatrick
So, the nation's most prominent draft dodger wants to tell Americans how much of a mistake it was to pull our soldiers out of
Vietnam. Calling the debate over whether to remove our soldiers from Vietnam a "legitimate" one, Bush will argue that the "price paid by millions of innocent citizens" by that withdrawal somehow mirrors his own quagmire which the vast majority of Americans have repeatedly demanded he end his Iraq occupation and return our soldiers to home.
"Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Bush will reportedly tell Americans Wednesday as he argues to continue his Iraq debacle.
"Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields,' " Bush reportedly plans to argue.
Bush and his cabal of Cold War dinosaurs have wanted so badly to use their term in office to use our nation's defenses as a chip on America's shoulder to provoke the rest of the world to either acknowledge the U.S. as their master, or to resign themselves to being labeled an "enemy" our government; subject to military campaigns and attacks across their sovereign borders; abductions of their citizens for renditions, tortures, and detentions without charges of any measure of due process of law.
The White House is desperate to hold on in Iraq. There's been a driving obsession from this administration, from Cheney, Rumsfeld on down, with re-fighting the Vietnam war in Iraq to re-pursue the myth that we could have 'won' the conflict if we had just applied more force and not withdrawn. Bush still believes that if he stays his bloody course in Iraq -- if he sacrifices even more soldiers on top of the 3700+ he's already allowed to die for his zealotry -- he's convinced there's something worth those tragic deaths that he can 'win' there.
How many times did Nixon try to convince Americans that he could 'win' in Vietnam? Nixon, like Bush, tried to deflect responsibility for his own escalation of his war by reminding Americans about Johnson's role as he promised a victorious end to the conflict. He called his own military muckraking, "winning the peace."
One of the Vietnam War's poster boys, Henry Kissinger, slithered out last year and effectively unraveled the lame-duck loser's plans for a military victory in Iraq. Kissinger said then that a military victory in Iraq is not possible.
"If you mean, by 'military victory,' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," Kissinger told the BBC in November.
That's as reasonable as these warmongers get. They've got a lot to cover for their own complicity in the tens of thousands of Americans who were sacrificed by Nixon and his advisers. There is no parallel in Kissinger's experience in advising Nixon on his war which would mesh with his reluctance today to hold out for some military victory in Iraq. The parallel is in Bush's own strategy to remain in Iraq "for as long as he's president" and blame the failure there on those who refuse to agree to let him run amok indefinitely with our military forces there.
Kissinger, a major architect of the deadly military aggression in Vietnam, took the view when advising Nixon on how to withdraw, that if he just left the soldiers in place and propped up the South Vietnamese government instead of pulling our troops out - giving them what was described a "decent interval" - the Nixon administration could weather the presidential election and continue to hold power. Nixon was heard on recently released 1972 tapes saying "South Vietnam probably would never even survive anyway."
"We also have to realize, Henry, that winning an election is terribly important," Nixon was heard telling Kissinger. "It's terribly important this year, but can we have a viable foreign policy if a year from now or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam? That's the real question."
It's no coincidence that Kissinger's "decent interval" ploy looks a lot like the way Bush managed his Vietnam-like quagmire in Iraq in the months after the midterm congressional elections which removed his enabling republican majority and replaced it with Democrats pledged to end the occupation. It was well known almost a year before the elections that his Iraq folly would be a major factor in determining whether Bush held on to his republican enablers in Congress. In June, the military launched what they thought would be a strengthening of the new center of Iraq's fledgling government by combining Iraqi forces with U.S. troops.
Yet, the mission to reclaim Baghdad had been going on for months -- initiated right after Bush's surprise visit to the Green Zone in March 2006 -- without any noticeable reduction in violence outside of the cordons of tanks and armored vehicles that the U.S. forces erect around the towns. Neither had the 'foot patrols' that the Pentagon ordered our soldiers to perform in Iraq as a 'goodwill 'gesture' managed to reduce the animosity the Iraqis feel for our invading/occupying forces. Instead, the attacks on our soldiers in Iraq escalated and the civil war deepened. Five thousand more U.S. troops were added to the Iraq theater in the weeks leading up to the November vote, bringing the total to over 155,000 troops. If Baghdad was the 'center' of any military effort, it failed miserably.
Bush began insisting on the campaign trail that Iraq was the "center" of his "war on terror", because, "bin-Laden said so." Flying frantically around the nation with his fear and smear campaign to keep hold of his republican enabling majority in Congress, Bush told Americans that he intended to keep our soldiers in Iraq until he can manage to declare some sort of victory. He said that he was waiting for Iraqis to unify. He said he was waiting for Iraqis to train their military and police. He said he was waiting for Iraqis to stabilize their government. He said that "the only way to lose in Iraq is to leave before the job is done," but, he also said he wouldn't "put more pressure on the Iraqi government than it could bear."
Well into August, however, 'Operation Forward Together' had no more secured Baghdad than the previous mission -- dubbed 'Operation Lightning' -- did in 2005 where Iraqi militias and U.S. troops waged a campaign of repression against the resisting Sunni populations. The present mission is more of the same, with U.S. forces knocking down doors, kidnapping whoever they choose and holding them indefinitely in one their prisons without charges, basically terrorizing the residents into submission as they paint a target on the military occupied towns.
Apparently Bush thinks he has time on his side in Iraq. The "lesson" Bush said in November on his trip to Vietnam -- when he compared the Vietnam War to his own disaster in Iraq -- was that the Vietnam war lasted a long time, so, the Iraq war should, as well.
"I think one thing -- yes, I mean, one lesson is, is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while," Bush said to reporters. He made no mention at all of what effect waiting would have on the killing and maiming of our soldiers who are being made to wait until he comes up with a plan to get them out. But, he said he wanted victory. So, our soldiers continue to bust down doors in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, fighting and dying on one side of a multi-fronted civil war as Bush looks for some sort of "win" in the "ideological struggle" he's chosen to wage on the backs of the Iraqis.
It has been reported that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed since Bush's initial invasion. Over 1.5 million refugees have reportedly fled into the countries neighboring Iraq, particularly Syria, Jordan and Iran. That "price paid by Iraqis" is one which Bush bears direct responsibility. Moreover, the negative consequences of Bush's invasion and occupation are accelerating right along with his increase of U.S. forces. If there is to be a catastrophe which results from our withdrawal as Bush claims, its effect will have to multiply many times over to rival the death and destruction Iraqis and their defenders have reckoning with for years since the invasion. "Bring them on," I presume, is still the rallying cry from the White House, inviting attacks on our soldiers who've become targets for the many factions of resistance to Bush's military prop of the Iraqi regime.
Americans who remember Gerald Ford's speech heralding the end of the war will be struck by the revisionist view Bush is promoting when he claims our withdrawal from Vietnam was something we should regret because of Nixon's failure to 'win' anything out of the slaughter and mayhem.
"America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam," Ford said in his speech at Tulane University But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned. As I see it, the time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the Nation's wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence," he said.
Bush would reopen those wounds, just to further his political agenda to escape a verdict of defeat for his failed Iraq misadventure. His message to Americans is one of scorn for their weariness of war, and ridicule for their demand that he stop. Pulling out now would be an appeasement, he will say, of the 9-11 'terrorists' he let escape into the mountains of Afghanistan five years ago. Any threat to the U.S. in Iraq, however, represents resistance to his oppressive occupation more than any "evil" that Bush claims he's defending against.
If, somehow, there is to be any consolidation of power in Iraq by the 9-11 attackers or their supporters after our troops withdraw, it will not go unnoticed that al-Qaeda didn't exist at all in Iraq before Bush inflamed the region and invited 'terrorists' to "fight us there." Any gains which are made by 'extremists' in the Mideast (other than by our own 'extreme' rule in the U.S.), will be attributed to Bush's unnecessary destabilization -- undertaken in Iraq by choice; not necessity. And the world wouldn't end if Iraqis were still fighting among themselves if we leave. Bush has admitted that a continuation of attacks was inevitable, if not completely unavoidable. And, even Gerald Ford didn't feel that losing Indochina to 'communists' was the end of the world:
"We, of course, are saddened indeed by the events in Indochina, he said as he announced our withdrawal from Vietnam," "But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world," he said.
"Let me put it this way, if I might," Ford said, "Some tend to feel that if we do not succeed in everything everywhere, then we have succeeded in nothing anywhere. I reject categorically such polarized thinking. We can and we should help others to help themselves. But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands, not in ours," President Ford told Americans.
That same sentiment of reduced expectations for an end to the violence they sparked with their invasion and overthrow has been expressed repeatedly by Bush and his cabal. As Bush admitted when he sold the country his "surge," "Even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue – and we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties," he said.
Notice how much more concerned Bush is with our perception of his occupation. He wants to get us on board in his paranoid grab for power with a campaign of propagandized fear. Their 'war' is only authorized by Congress to pursue the 'perpetrators of 9-11", not an open ended license to conquer the world and hijack our hard earned sacrifices to generations of militarism. The only way they can perpetuate that is to lie. The realities of these military interventions don't support Bush's constant boasting about defending democracy, spreading freedom, or defeating terror. All they are left with after years of oppression in Iraq and Afghanistan is more violence and more 'enemies' bent on our destruction.
The people of Iraq will ultimately be responsible for their own affairs. That will happen just as soon as the U.S. military takes their jackboots off of their throats. Even Bush has said in his more defensive moments that, "a military solution alone will not stop violence." Yet, he has contradicted that sentiment at every opportunity. There really isn't any component of Bush's Iraq strategy which hasn't expected our military forces, at every turn, to cow the Iraqis into a forced acceptance of his puppet authority's propped-up rule.
President Ford spoke about that expectation that our military can be relied on as the only representation of our nation's strength in his announcement of the end of the Vietnam folly as he quoted a speech Abraham Lincoln had given, ironically, on September 11, 1858.
I would like to talk about another kind of strength, the true source of American power that transcends all of the deterrent powers for peace of our Armed Forces," Ford said. "I am speaking here of our belief in ourselves and our belief in our Nation."
Abraham Lincoln asked, in his own words, and I quote, "What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?" And he answered, "It is not our frowning battlements or bristling seacoasts, our Army or our Navy. Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere," Ford told Americans in his address.
Lincoln continued:
"These are not the reliance against the resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle."
"Our reliance is in the love of liberty, which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is the preservation of the spirit, which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere." Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your down doors."
"Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage," Lincoln warned, "and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you."
This government and this administration have become accustomed to trampling, and bondage. And we have allowed them to skirt accountability for their sly justifications for their attacks on our civil liberties; demagogic appeals to patriotism and to our nationalism; the deliberate inflaming, and careful stoking of the sparks of fear that flashed from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center; and the mortgaging of ours and our children's future toil and tribute to the subsidizing of both of the Bush president's bloody and costly wars of opportunity.
We are not any safer for our invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq. We are, in fact, less safe as a result of Bush's blundering mimic of military commander. In his occupation, he contradicts the most basic of our nation's values of freedom, liberty, and democracy. He should not be allowed to prevail in his attempt to con our nation into parsing his privileged impression of the war he dodged into some validation of his obstinacy in Iraq. He should not be allowed to prevail.
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