Two takes on the President's Vietnam reference in his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention. Christopher Hitchens "To invoke Vietnam was a blunder too far for Bush" and Mark Steyn "They wait for us to run again".
I suppose that after a lede such as this, I pretty much discount the rest:
How do I dislike
President George Bush? Let me count the ways. Most of them have to do
with his contented assumption that 'faith' is, in and of itself, a
virtue. This self-satisfied mentality helps explain almost everything,
from the smug expression on his face to the way in which, as governor
of Texas, he signed all those death warrants without losing a second's
composure.
That, of course, was Hitchens. I'm sure President Bush is distressed beyond words to find out Hitchens dislikes him. I hope he can get over it.
Hitchens at some point, after invoking Vladimir Putin and Terri Schiavo, blessed (oops, I should NOT have said blessed) us with his 13 non-exhaustive reasons why the President was wrong in invoking Vietnam. As far as I can tell, not one of them is even remotely relevant to what President Bush actually said:
...addressing the convention
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week, the President came
thundering down the pike to announce that a defeat in Iraq would be -
guess what? - another Vietnam. As my hand smacks my brow, and as I ask
myself not for the first time if Mr Bush suffers from some sort of
political death wish, I quickly restate the reasons why he is wrong to
join with his most venomous and ignorant critics in making this case.
1) The Vietminh, later
the Vietnamese NLF, were allies of the United States and Britain
against the Axis during the Second World War. The Iraqi Baath party was
on the other side.
2)
Ho Chi Minh quoted Thomas Jefferson in proclaiming Vietnam's own
declaration of independence, a note that has hardly been struck in
Baathist or jihadist propaganda.
3)
Vietnam was resisting French colonialism and had defeated it by 1954 at
Dien Bien Phu; the real 'war' was therefore over before the US even
landed troops in the country.
4)
The subsequent conflict was fought to preserve an imposed partition of
a country striving to reunify itself; if anything, the Iraqi case is
the reverse.
5)
The Vietnamese leadership appealed to the UN: the Saddamists and their
jihadist allies murdered the first UN envoy to arrive in Iraq, saying
that he was fit only for death because he had assisted in securing the
independence of East Timor from Indonesia.
6)
Vietnam never threatened any other country; Iraq under Saddam invaded
two of its neighbours and declared one of them (Kuwait) to be part of
Iraq itself.
7)
Vietnam was a victim of chemical and ecological warfare; Iraq was the
perpetrator of such illegal methods and sought to develop even worse
nuclear and biological ones.
8)
Vietnam neither sponsored nor encouraged terrorist tactics beyond its
borders; Iraq under Saddam was a haven for Abu Nidal and other random
killers and its 'insurgents' now proclaim war on Hindus, Jews,
unbelievers and the wrong sort of Muslim.
9)
There has for years been a 'people's war' fought by genuine guerrillas
in Iraq; it is the war of liberation conducted by Kurdish fighters
against genocide and dictatorship. Inconveniently for all analogies,
these fighters are ranged on the side of the US and Britain.
10)
The Iraqi Communist party and the Iraqi labour movement advocated the
overthrow of Saddam (if not necessarily by Bush), a rather conspicuous
difference from the situation in Indochina. These forces still form a
part of the tenuous civil society that is fighting to defend itself
against the parties of God.
11)
The American-sponsored regimes in Vietnam tended, among other things,
to be strongly identified with one confessional minority (Catholic) to
the exclusion of secular, nationalist and Buddhist forces. The elected
government in Iraq may have a sectarian hue, but at least it draws upon
hitherto repressed majority populations - Kurds and Shias - and at
least the American embassy works as a solvent upon religious and ethnic
divisions rather than an inciter of them.
12)
President Eisenhower admitted that if there had ever been a fair
election in Vietnam, it would have been won by Ho Chi Minh; the Baath
party's successors refused to participate in the Iraqi elections and
their jihadist allies declared that democracy was an alien concept and
threatened all voters with murder.
13)
The Americans in Vietnam employed methods ('search and destroy'; 'body
count') and weapons (napalm, Agent Orange) that targeted civilians.
Today, those who make indiscriminate war on the innocent show their
hand on the streets of Baghdad and are often the proxies of
neighbouring dictatorships or of international gangster organisations.
Here is what the President actually said:
Finally, there's Vietnam. This is a complex and painful subject for many
Americans. The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one
speech. So I'm going to limit myself to one argument that has particular
significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was
America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would
end.
The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long
pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war,
Graham Greene wrote a novel called, "The Quiet American." It was set in
Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden
Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism -- and dangerous
naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man
who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered
some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there
would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference
does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam
or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince
or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen
and may never heard of?" A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a
similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the
communists: "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could
be anything but better with the Americans gone." A headline on that story,
date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: "Indochina without Americans:
For Most a Better Life."
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In
Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of
thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In
Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and
intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of
thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety
boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the
Vietnam War and how we left. There's no debate in my mind that the
veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of
America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on 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."
There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it
in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- those who came to
our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In
an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin
Laden declared that "the American people had risen against their
government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today."
His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al
Qaeda's chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to "the aftermath of
the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left
their agents."
Zawahiri later returned to this theme, declaring that the Americans "know
better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter
is closing every outlet." Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from
Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see
it differently.
The President was clearly talking about what could very possibly happen if we leave Iraq too soon. History does repeat itself. Flailing around from the President signing "death warrants" in Texas (does the governor of Texas actually do that? I sort of doubt it, but I admit I did not look it up), to Putin, to Schiavo, to comparing President Bush to Cindy Sheehan, I'd say, yes a blunder was made and Christopher Hitchens made it. He is without doubt a wonderful writer but apparently his mind wanders from time to time.
Enter, Mark Steyn:
George W. Bush gave a speech about Iraq last week, and in the middle
of it he did something long overdue: He attempted to appropriate the
left's most treasured all-purpose historical analogy. Indeed, Vietnam
is so ubiquitous in the fulminations of politicians, academics and
pundits that we could really use anti-trust legislation to protect us
from shopworn historical precedents. But, in the absence thereof, the
president has determined that we might at least learn the real "lessons
of Vietnam."
"Then as now, people argued the real problem was
America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing
would end," Bush told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Aug. 22.
"Many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for
the Vietnamese people … . A columnist for the New York Times wrote in a
similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the
communists: 'It's difficult to imagine,' he said, 'how their lives
could be anything but better with the Americans gone.' A headline on
that story, dateline Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: 'Indochina
Without Americans: For Most a Better Life.' The world would learn just
how costly these misimpressions would be."
I don't know about
"the world," but apparently a big chunk of America still believes in
these "misimpressions." As the New York Times put it, "In urging
Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the
historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative
repercussions for the United States and its allies."
Well, it
had a "few negative repercussions" for America's allies in South
Vietnam, who were promptly overrun by the North. And it had a "negative
repercussion" for former Cambodian Prime Minister Sirik Matak, to whom
the U.S. ambassador sportingly offered asylum. "I cannot, alas, leave
in such a cowardly fashion," Matak told him. "I never believed for a
moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which
has chosen liberty … . I have committed this mistake of believing in
you, the Americans." So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month
later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with about 2 million other
people. If it's hard for individual names to linger in the New York
Times' "historical memory," you'd think the general mound of corpses
would resonate.
You'd think.
The final image of the drama – the U.S. helicopters lifting off from
the Embassy roof with desperate locals clinging to the undercarriage –
is an image not just of defeat but of the shabby sell-outs necessary to
accomplish it.
At least in Indochina, those who got it so
horribly wrong – the Kerrys and Fondas and all the rest – could claim
they had no idea of what would follow.
To do it all over
again in the full knowledge of what followed would turn an aberration
into a pattern of behavior. And as the Sirik Mataks of Baghdad face the
choice between staying and dying or exile and embittered evenings in
the new Iraqi émigré restaurants of London and Los Angeles, who will be
America's allies in the years ahead?
Professor Bernard Lewis' dictum would be self-evident: "America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend."
Will it happen again?
"I never believed for a
moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which
has chosen liberty … . I have committed this mistake of believing in
you, the Americans." So Sirik Matak stayed in Phnom Penh and a month
later was killed by the Khmer Rouge, along with about 2 million other
people.
Mr. Hitchens, that's a blunder. With devastating consequences.
