Bush Compares Iraq to Vietnam

Special VIETNAM Edition

I have noticed, in recent weeks, a tendency amongst war supporters to prepare the Vietnam defence, the argument that the US would have eventually prevailed had not the cowardly Liberals forced them to retreat. The implication being that a similar mistake is about to be committed in Iraq, where victory - as in Vietnam according to right wing fantasy - lies just across the next hill.

Well, now the theme has been picked up by President Bush, invoking Vietnam for the first time, as a reason why the US must now stay involved in the Iraq conflict. Although, he chose a different route from the others who have reached for this analogy:

"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,' 'reeducation camps' and 'killing fields,' " Bush told a receptive audience at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention.

Of course, terrible things did happen once the Americans withdrew, however, it is arguable whether or not those things were any more terrible than the napalming carried out by the nation which was withdrawing.

It is true that tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed, and hundreds of thousands exiled to "re-education" camps, by a triumphant Communist government after Saigon fell in 1975. But by the early 1970s as the worst American bombing was raging, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were being killed, and millions being exiled from their homes—carnage that came to a dead stop once the war ended. As cruel as the Communist consolidation of power was, ending the war entailed an obvious net saving of lives, and if it were saving lives conservatives actually cared about—instead of scoring ideological points—this should be obvious.

That's the first point. The second: America's war aim—standing up an anti-Communist democratic government in Saigon absent an American military occupation—was impossible. President Nixon admitted this privately all the time, even while he was simultaneously publicly claiming he was negotiating to achieve exactly that. The point has finally become so obvious that now even conservatives admit it. Though conservatives still haven't brought themselves to admit the more fundamental point: Nixon was right. Indeed, sickeningly, after more visits and better contacts in-country than any American politician, he had been saying we couldn't win in Vietnam privately since 1966, as Len Garment disarmingly acknowledged in his memoir.

Nor did Bush give any credible reasons for believing that, had the US remained in Vietnam for a further - say, five years - that those same atrocities would not have taken place once the US eventually left. Indeed, Bush's analogy was useful, but not for any of the reasons that he supposed.

As with Vietnam, leaving a conflict can always result in more death and destruction, but this is why declaring war is such a monumental decision and this is why wars of choice are to be at all times avoided unless there is absolutely no alternative. Bush sought with this speech to move the responsibility for what happens after withdrawal to the shoulders of those who want the war to end. He is avoiding a much more glaringly obvious point. The responsibility for every single death in this war is his. He began this war and he did so based on lies. He also did so against another country that had not attacked the USA. His argument that things might get worse if we leave, avoids the more important question of who got us here in the first place.

Opponents of the war, like myself, would never have advocated that the invasion take place, so it seems churlish to attempt to make us responsible for anything that happens after a US withdrawal.

But the Vietnam analogy holds. America remained in Vietnam long after many US politicians had privately come to the conclusion that the war could not be won. This resulted only in the deaths of thousands of young Americans and hundreds and thousands of Vietnamese; it did not, in any way, change the carnage that reigned once the US withdrew.

Nor, and again the analogy works - but not in the way Bush imagines - did the US withdrawal from Vietnam set off the consequences that war proponents at the time envisaged. Then, we were told that a domino effect would grip South East Asia, and that country after country would fall to the communists. It simply didn't happen. Indeed, apart from South Vietnam the only country's which turned Communist were Laos and Cambodia, both of which saw the Vietnam war spill across their borders.

Now, we have Bush threaten that "we fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here." This is a simply ludicrous claim which conflates Iraqi insurgents fighting to remove a foreign enemy from their country with al Qaeda, and implies that they all share the same outlook and ideology.

There is no doubt that al Qaeda would like to attack the US within it's own borders, but they represent a tiny fraction of the forces that the US face in Iraq, and the implication that the rest of the people the US are battling in Iraq would cross the ocean in boats and planes to fight on US soil is simply ludicrous on it's face, and the final indication of how bereft the war supporters are of an actual argument.

The American withdrawal from Vietnam took place after it became obvious to one and all that the battle could not be won. Bush's logic appears to be that they should have remained there indefinitely to avoid the consequences of withdrawal. It perfectly sums up his mindset. Never admit defeat. Never withdraw.

There will be horrible consequences when the US withdraws from Iraq, just as their were terrible consequences when the US withdrew from Vietnam.

Bush is attempting to stave off the day when he has to face up to the consequences of his own actions. He wishes to push those terrible consequences onto another President's shoulders.

But those terrible consequences remain his responsibility. After all, he is - as he likes to remind us - "The Decider". And the terrible decision to invade Iraq, was his, and his alone.

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