-Caveat Lector-
If it takes some 500,000 armed personnel to keep peace in Bosnia and
Serbia, why only deploy 130,000 to a much harder campaign, against a much
larger force, namely in Iraq? Sounds like just the kind of toke presence
to make a showing but not really piss off the sheiks, just the kind of
presence necessary to sell some bombs and distract Americans from the
systematic dismantling of environmental protections, among other things.
Quoting Sean McBride [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
-Caveat Lector-
http://www.uexpress.com/printable/print.html?
uc_full_date=20031104uc_comic=gg
VIETNAM AND IRAQ HAVE MORE SIMILARITIES THAN DIFFERENCES
CHICAGO -- To my immense surprise, I recently ran into the American
scholar who, for many correspondents in Vietnam, offered the most
fair-minded analysis of the war.
Suddenly, there was Gerald Gerry Hickey at the Chicago Public
Library, a little grayer after 35 years, but still much the same, with a
big smile on his face and a welcome Hello!
I remembered well how Gerry, then the Rand Corp.'s top man in
Vietnam, had meticulously explained for us the cultures and behavior of
highland tribes such as the Montagnards, but also the Viet Cong and the
pro-American Saigon government.
And now we're doing the same thing all over again, he said as we
talked about Iraq. First, we suffer from the same invincible ignorance
about Iraq that we suffered over Vietnamese culture. Second, in Vietnam
we set the military impact with no concern about our effect on South
Vietnamese culture. By the time we left in 1975, they were just
exhausted. They were just tired out -- and so was I.
It is so sad now that I can see the same mistakes being made in
Iraq. The GIs busting down the doors, breaking into homes, doing
everything wrong. But, you know something, he went on, sadness outlining
his voice, I'm shocked at much of what we are seeing in Iraq: The
Americans are much crueler than they were in Vietnam. Remember, when
American correspondents found American troops burning down houses -- that
was remarkable then; today it's the norm.
Gerry and I talked a long time that day, mulling over our common
experiences, wondering primarily why the United States can't ever pause
to analyze a country correctly, and above all comparing the two
conflicts.
Despite the myriad voices in the press insisting, Iraq is not a
Vietnam! the indisputable fact is that, if you consider the passions and
principles applied there, it really IS another Vietnam. Among the causes
for the war are obscurantist theories about foreign threats that have
little basis in reality; civilians at the top who play with the soldiers
they have never been; and the underlying lies that give credence to
special interests (the Bay of Tonkin pretense in Vietnam, the supposed
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).
In Vietnam, we were following the bizarre notion of the domino
theory, the idea that a communist Vietnam would mean that all of
Southeast Asia would fall to communism. The Johnson administration
refused to realize that it was a colonial war, and that in colonial wars,
people fight forever.
With Iraq, the second Bush administration accepted the idea,
perfervidly pushed by civilian neoconservatives, that Iraq was the center
of terrorism, the cause of 9/11 and an immediate threat, ignoring the
Greek chorus of voices warning against such intellectual, military and
moral folly.
Curiosly, in both cases it was civilian ideological fanatics in the
Pentagon, enamored of American technology and with no knowledge of
history or culture, and not the U.S. military, who pressed for the wars.
(It was Robert McNamara and his whiz kids then; now it's Paul
Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and others.)
Perhaps the old American maxim of civilian control of the military
might be changed, with what we are seeing, to military control of the
civilians.
Other comparisons of the two wars:
Today, one hears a doublespeak that almost echoes the communists of
the old days. In Vietnam, it was, We had to destroy the village to save
it. With Iraq, it is President Bush's statement of last week that the
more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react!
Today, it's called Iraqization. In Vietnam, it was called
Vietnamization -- late-hour attempts to make everything look as though
it's working. As military historian William Lind wryly remarked to me of
Iraqization, It presumes that because you pay someone, he's yours.
In 1967 in Vietnam, I spent a lot of time interviewing officers and
troops all over the country, and I wrote a series of articles that my
paper, the Chicago Daily News, headlined with: The GI Who Asks 'Why?'
Today's GIs are beginning to ask that same question.
America needs to look seriously at these two wars and analyze why
it repeatedly gets
