Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community  

Go Back   Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community > The Academy > Tilted Politics


 
 
LinkBack Thread Tools
Old 11-13-2003, 10:14 AM   #1 (permalink)
God-Hating Liberal
 
Location: Silicon Valley, CA
There are so many echoes of Vietnam in Iraq

This article (link) draws some interesting parallels between the Iraq occupation and Vietnam. No, they are not the same, but there are a disturbing -- and alarmingly rising -- number of similarities. Is there any wisdom to the proverb, "those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it?" Read on, for this person's take on the matter. Charles Glass was an ABC News Chief Mideast correspondent.

Quote:
There are so many echoes of Vietnam in Iraq

It took two years for US deaths to reach 324 in Vietnam. It passed that figure in seven months in Iraq

13 November 2003

The US armed forces launched their first air raid against post-war Iraq last week, when F-16 fighter-bombers dropped 500-pound bombs on Tikrit. The new campaign against Iraq's resistance fighters, dubbed Operation Ivy Cyclone, recalls President Lyndon Johnson's Operation Rolling Thunder over Vietnam in 1965. That campaign of bombing Vietnam would eventually see Indochina devastated by 7 million tons of aerial explosives.

These are early days in Iraq, where the conflict between a growing percentage of the native population and the occupying forces is escalating far more rapidly than it did in Vietnam. It took two years, from 1963 to the end of 1964, for American combat deaths to reach 324. The US has surpassed that figure in only seven months in Iraq, where 398 American soldiers have died already. In the last 12 days, 38 have been killed. As for the Iraqi dead, the US does not count them with similar precision. Vietnam offers examples to the US, but it is learning the wrong lessons.

Parallels with Vietnam are asserting themselves again and again in Iraq. They start with the justification for committing American troops to battle. In both cases, politicians lied to persuade Congress and the public to go along. In 1964, the year Lyndon Johnson officially upgraded the US military role from advisory to combat, the secretaries of state and defence accused North Vietnam of attacking the USS Maddox.

Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, in a bravura performance emulated by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN last February, announced: "While on routine patrol in international waters, the US destroyer Maddoxunderwent an unprovoked attack." The only phrase corresponding to reality was that theMaddox was a destroyer. Otherwise, the routine patrol was in fact an attack on North Vietnam's shore installations. The international waters were really North Vietnam's. And the unprovoked attack was not only provoked, it did not take place at all.

The Johnson administration's deception, like George Bush's over Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, worked. Johnson won passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing him to take "all necessary measures". Bush passed his war resolution after telling Congress that Saddam was threatening the US. The Bush administration's dance around facts to achieve the invasion of Iraq made Johnson's chicanery look amateur.

Tonkin was shown to be a lie when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The lies over Iraq were exposed almost as soon as the US erected barriers in Baghdad to protect itself from the people it had liberated. No one found the nuclear programme, the Niger uranium or the elusive connection to al-Qa'ida. From the beginning in Iraq, as in Vietnam, the credibility gap lay wide open.

At a recent dinner in Washington, US Marine officers told me of their opposition to the occupation of Iraq. Two reasons they gave were: occupation cannot work; and young Marines risking their lives know that the sons of the war's architects, like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, will not face combat or risk death in Iraq. These officers were born about the time US troops left Vietnam. Their voices echo those of generals Matthew Ridgway and Douglas MacArthur, who warned Kennedy that the US could not win a land war in Asia. Many commanders were outspoken critics of the Vietnam war. The most consistent was the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David M Shoup.

In 1966, Shoup, who had already warned both Kennedy and Johnson that the military had no business in Vietnam, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that most of the South Vietnamese people were fighting against "those crooks in Saigon", leaders whom the US had imposed upon them. In one of his many speeches throughout the country, Shoup said, "If we had and would keep our dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. [A solution] that they design and want. That they fight and work for. [Not one] crammed down their throats by Americans."

Robert Buzzanco, in Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era, observed that the reward for Shoup's candour was to be placed, alongside other military and civilian opponents of the war, under FBI surveillance.

Robert Buzzanco wrote that, while the American officer corps was sceptical, "they nonetheless ignored their own bleak analysis with the full complicity of the civilian policy-making establishment." Many officers saw what happened to Shoup and protected their careers. Most of all, they did not want the military to take the blame for a war directed by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Avoiding blame for disaster was preferable to telling presidents what they did not want to hear.

As in Iraq, getting into Vietnam was easier than getting out. The US attempted to impose a viable South Vietnamese government and army capable of defeating the popular resistance of the National Liberation Front. It never succeeded. The Bush administration tried a similar manoeuvre with its appointment last July of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). Now Paul Bremer, head of the occupyin g administration, has been recalled amid reports that they are seeking alternatives to the IGC.

In South Vietnam, a state the US more or less created after the Geneva Accords of 1954, Washington installed Ngo Dinh Diem as leader. When it became dissatisfied with Diem's inability to control the insurgency against his rule, Kennedy allowed some of South Vietnam's generals to assassinate him and take over. The US presided over one military coup after another in the elusive search for a government acceptable to South Vietnam's people.

When American soldiers died in Vietnam, the US reacted with various programmes to protect them: saturation bombing, camps called strategic hamlets in which it confined hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese peasants, and the Phoenix Programme, under which the CIA and Special Forces assassinated 30,000 suspected Viet Cong cadres. The CIA chief William Colby called Phoenix the only successful operation of the war. How far is the US willing to go to preserve the notion that it can impose a government acceptable to both itself and the Iraqi people? Will it employ the old techniques, the only ones in its counter-insurgency arsenal, as it suffers more casualties? Old words come howling out of the past: body count, kill ratio, search and destroy, destroying the village to save it and the light at the end of the tunnel.

America lost 58,000 dead in Vietnam. It killed two million Vietnamese. It was warned against that war, as it was warned against this one - and often by the military men who did not want their soldiers to risk their lives except in defence of their own country.

The last exit strategy in Vietnam was Vietnamisation, training South Vietnamese soldiers to fight South Vietnamese guerrillas. Now the word is Iraqisation and amounts to the same thing. In Vietnam, the US created a state apparatus that was corrupt and a local army that did not want to fight. Both collapsed when America pulled out. In Iraq, the Bush administration promises a different outcome - despite pursuing the same goals with the same methods.

The author was ABC News Chief Mideast correspondent, 1983-1993
__________________
Nizzle
Nizzle is offline  
Old 11-13-2003, 02:06 PM   #2 (permalink)
Banned
 
Location: norway
No way dude, Vietnam is Asian or something.

Edit: nevar forget.
eple is offline  
Old 11-13-2003, 06:53 PM   #3 (permalink)
Huggles, sir?
 
seretogis's Avatar
 
Location: Seattle
Quote:
Originally posted by eple
No way dude, Vietnam is Asian or something.

Edit: nevar forget.
Congratulations, the first post to be worthy of two of my incredibly witty and informative images:



__________________
seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames
seretogis is offline  
Old 11-13-2003, 09:50 PM   #4 (permalink)
can't help but laugh
 
irateplatypus's Avatar
 
Location: dar al-harb
i see a lot of bagging on the prosecution of vietnam, i don't see a lot of direct comparisons to the iraqi situation.

the author dismisses the Gulf of Tonkin incident as if he really knew what happened for sure. nowhere in his article does he allude to the fact that it is still unresolved.

the title is especially irritating.

"It took two years for US deaths to reach 324 in Vietnam. It passed that figure in seven months in Iraq"

yeah... but we weren't even in direct military operations till 1964, the year in which his selected period ends. thats like saying we lost more people in iraq than we have in canada since 1916.

in those 7 months in iraq we have toppled an entrenched regime, routed an admittedly poor enemy, restored basic utilities and have been training a local lawenforcement establishment. no comparison.
__________________
If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

~ Winston Churchill
irateplatypus is offline  
Old 11-13-2003, 11:13 PM   #5 (permalink)
Banned
 
Location: norway
Quote:
Originally posted by seretogis
Congratulations, the first post to be worthy of two of my incredibly witty and informative images:



Sorry, I just couldn't help it.
eple is offline  
Old 11-14-2003, 12:19 AM   #6 (permalink)
この印篭が目に入らぬか
 
Location: College
If you're going to compare Iraq to Vietnam, you've got to at least mention that Selective Service is getting draft boards together for the first time in many years...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/...077906,00.html discusses this.

There was an ad for new draft board members at defendamerica.mil but it's been taken down recently.
lordjeebus is offline  
 

Tags
echoes, iraq, vietnam

Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Trackbacks are On
Pingbacks are On
Refbacks are On



All times are GMT -8. The time now is 01:45 AM.

Tilted Forum Project

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.
Search Engine Optimization by vBSEO 3.6.0 PL2
© 2002-2012 Tilted Forum Project

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360