PRESIDENT Bush yesterday told US war veterans that if American troops were withdrawn from Iraq “before the job is done”, the country would experience the same collapse that followed when Washington abandoned its military intervention in Vietnam. He warned that as in Vietnam, many hundreds of thousands would die in the “killing fields”
The historic reference is at best another display of Bush’s ignorance and at worst a deliberate attempt to distort the truth. There were reprisal killings and political re-education after the South of the country fell to the victorious North Vietnamese Communists but there was no mass slaughter. The “killing fields” were in Cambodia where Pol Pot’s regime tried to impose its insane brand of proletarian government by massacring intellectuals and the middle class. The Khymer Rouge had emerged from the destabilizing interference of both the North Vietnamese who used Cambodia to keep their troops in the South supplied, and by a massive US bombing campaign which sought — unsuccessfully — to interdict this flow. What Bush did not go on to say — presuming of course that he actually knew it — was that it was the Vietnamese who finally freed the Cambodians from the misery by invading the country, overthrowing the Khymer Rouge lunatics and withdrawing their forces when the UN had organized elections.
Bush might have better, therefore, said that the Vietnamese had behaved in Cambodia much as the Americans had in Iraq. The difference between the two interventions is that traumatized Cambodia slowly returned to peace and normality. Iraqis, however, are still being traumatized.
There are however some genuine parallels between the US experiences in Vietnam and Iraq but Bush was loath to point them out. Both interventions were misjudged and based on an unrealistic faith in the absolute supremacy of America’s military might. In both cases, Washington did not understand the political and social complexities. They could only think in black and white, which produced a copious flow of red blood, American as well as Vietnamese and Iraqi. In both interventions, the idea of “winning hearts and minds” only occurred long after it was realized that US troops were not welcomed as liberators and had behaved with a brutality that alienated what little welcome there was.
And most tellingly, both Vietnam and Iraq have ended in humiliation for Washington and an exposure of the falsity of the grounds on which they justified their invasions. The world was told that if the Communists were not stopped in Vietnam, all Southeast Asia would succumb to their rule in what was called “The Domino Theory.” No such geopolitical collapse happened in the region in the wake of Hanoi’s victory. Indeed 30 years on, Vietnam though still burdened by Communist bureaucracy is slowly emerging as a free market economy. There will assuredly be chaos when American troops quit Iraq but it will be caused in significant part by Washington’s ill-informed and crass interference.
