Street without Joy
President Bush's invocation of Vietnam in discussions of Iraq a few weeks ago surprised many
President compares Vietnam, Iraq wars - The Boston Globe. Since the consideration of and start of the war, it has been a comparison for others to make, for the administration to avoid
Historians Question Bush's Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq - New York Times. This was due to the general prevailing view of the Vietnam war as a disaster
Eugene Robinson - Good Morning, Vietnam! - washingtonpost.com. A quagmire while it was going on, a tragedy after it was over. Some question whether it was particularly apt comparison irreregardless of how you felt about it
War - History - Iraq - Vietnam - Korea - War of 1812 - New York Times. It comes up now as a nod to a certain historicism, rescuing this war is to rescue Vietnam and validate the organizing principles of the new world order
Bush Warns U.S. Withdrawal From Iraq Would Destabilize Mideast - New York Times. It always seemed to me that every time the administration and their apologists denied that the situation was in anyway analogous to Vietnam they were at the same time doing things that quietly massaged Iraq into Vietnam. I attributed this to certain instinctive and subconscious tendencies. Foremost in this our embassorial rule. That is: freedom self rule and democracy as long as everything is decided the correct way. We are preparing an embassy capable of vetting the actions of a nation. If not our way we switch sides and empower in other directions. We form models of weak contested rule in an imitation of western democracy. Division and corruption played against interference by determined alien ideologies of disorder arrayed against us. The archetype of a colonial war against a revolutionary insurgency and regional powers. While we shadow box with the past. There is a reluctance, an inability to confront the agency that resists us
GAO Reports Iraq Has Failed to Meet 11 of 18 Benchmarks .. Incomprehension that it is a struggle against independent others that have only marginal interest in fitting themselves into our roles
Military Officials in Iraq Fault GAO Report - washingtonpost.com. A further reality is that no distant others enter into the essential struggle. The (neo) conservatives are wrestling themselves, the past. The near enemy, those Americans who are not accepting of corporatized, share-held, petrochemical America. The ending of Vietnam war was always a sore point and never totally accepted among some. Increasingly it may have seemed to be a crack in the armor of triumphalism, a leak in the hermetical bubble of histories end. The glint of reality from Iraq is that neither American Unilateralism nor American exceptionalism is absolute. They trace this heresy back to Vietnam. Iraq will answer for it. It was always intended to.
Going forward in Iraq and achieving some form of decent outcome requires dissipating the fog, ceasing to make Iraq answer for Vietnam. Neither by how some suppose that war might have been won, or getting caught in historic parallels of how it ended.
Mary McCarthy remains one of my favorite observers from that period
Vietnam [WorldCat.org]. She caught the disparities between the comfort and isolation of Saigon from the countryside. The disconnect between building and painting schoolhouses on one hand, infusion of small town America into a foreign land, and the disruption of the mass population resettlement programs of the new life villages. The brutishness of the campaigns to eradicate the NLF and Viet Cong on the other. Bernard Fall, author of a book on the battle of Dien Bien Phu, was McCarthy's traveling companion, for part of that trip in 1967 (there's a picture of them together in his book Last reflections on a War). An Austrian born veteran of the French resistance (which struggle claimed both his parents lives), the French army and professor of international relations at Howard University in Washington DC
(Bernard B. Fall - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). He realized by mid 1960s America could not win the war, but thought America's military might could keep it from losing (he always blamed the U S for not adequately aiding the French a decade before). Bernard Fall seems to have thought the answer lay in new political coalitions in the South whose existing government's political underpinnings American machination had largely delegitimized. Bernard Fall, accompanying US Marines, stepped on a land mine and was killed while filming a documentary for American television. 30 April 1975 haunts the debate on Iraq. After the war ended probably less people died than during the war, no more American soldiers at any rate. Still people died, in cold one-sided retributions. With the form of state authority, but without the function of legality. My friend Tran spent a portion of her early childhood either in jail or penury and not knowing whether the communist government would find it easier to shoot, imprison, or simply watch her father for having been associated with the former government. I can only be so objective towards our responsibilities now. Iraq should not be pushed towards such a moment. One point of departure from the administrations rhetoric I have is that we shouldn't be encouraged to think the military alone can stave off such a moment. Not with any succession of surges and added Friedman Units. Any successes we believe we are seeing now means nothing. It will melt away like a morning dew in August unless the political actors make accommodation while we hold them apart. It will take the form of soft partition, and weak federal government. Amid talks towards further integration slow and ongoing. The key is to get back to normalcy of commerce and trash collection. Through mostly homogenous and trusted local government if that is the organizing principle that obtains. The origin of the war is not separable from the ineffectiveness of its conduct. We learn nothing if we try to deny this. A corollary to this we ought to leave sooner than later. When we go, we ought to go completely and not try to maintain a training, or security force. Perhaps we cannot leave now until the Iraqi police and security forces are developed enough to be politically controlled and able to maintain a monopoly of coercive force among the provinces
Iraqi Army Unable To Take Over Within A Year, Report Says - washingtonpost.com. At the same time this asks the question as to why and how the US military made itself so utterly indispensable to this project. Any force we leave could be only an oil garrison. A presence through which we would always be tempted to shape Iraqi politics to our own end. An inherently destabilizing and corrupting course which would not advance US interests in the long run.
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