Iraq and Vietnam
08.23.07 - 08:53am
For a man who has spent his entire presidency asserting that black is white and up is down while everything around him turns to disaster, no misrepresentation or twisting of the facts is a fabrication too far.
And yesterday, George W Bush finally went for broke. After spending years denying, avoiding and scoffing at any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, he stood up in front of American war veterans, with that smirk on his face, and fully embraced it.
It is just that his comparison was not between the Iraq conflict and the oft-lamented “quagmire” of Vietnam, the comparison made by so many war critics (erroneously in my view, for several reasons) but between the fairy tale Iraq in which America is battling international terrorism and the fantasy Vietnam conflict in which America failed millions of innocents by losing its resolve in the face of international communism.
According to Bush: “The price of America’s withdrawal [from Vietnam] was paid by millions of innocent citizens.”
That he can stand up in front of an educated audience before the world’s media and make such a statement without everyone falling around laughing is a testament to the power of the enduring falsehoods surrounding America’s “involvement” in Indochina.
This narrative is illustrated here in the BBC’s summary of the Vietnam conflict. According to the BBC, the salient points are that North Vietnam defeated the US-backed South Vietnam, an estimated four million Vietnamese civilians died in the conflict, up to 250,000 South Vietnamese troops were killed and America lost roughly 58,000 soldiers.
In the real world the facts are that rather than being a war between North and South, the Vietnam War was, overwhelmingly, an attack on the rural population of South Vietnam by the United States and the government it was supporting, in order to suppress an internal rebellion vast numbers of that population were willingly supporting. The estimated four million Vietnamese civilians died, to a significant degree, by United States firepower. The US military was bombing gigantic swathes of rural South Vietnam before a single North Vietnamese soldier was even seen south of the border.
All of this information is readily available, much of it does feature in mainstream coverage, certainly on this side of the Atlantic. Yet it must be hidden from view when the “Commander-in-chief” stands up to yet again mangle the historical record for political expediency.
The BBC reports:
“Many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people,” Mr Bush said. “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.
“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left.
“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” Mr Bush said, mentioning reprisals against US allies in Vietnam, the displacement of Vietnamese refugees and the massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
The obvious fact that much of the region was left in a state of utter devastation by the US assault does not seem to be of any relevance to Bush. Nor is the fact that America proceeded to isolate Vietnam internationally following the end of the war, exacerbating the social and economic problems caused by the destruction of its national infrastructure and the devastation of its agricultural lands. Nor the fact that America moved to surreptitiously support the Khmer Rouge because they were aligned against Vietnam.
Milan Kundera once said: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Nowhere is this more applicable than in trying to understand the devastation of Indochina.
However, there certainly are valid comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.
In both of these conflicts, aggression was justified by lies and in both, the United States (with Britain slavishly following in Iraq) unleashed unpredictable forces it was to discover even a military superpower could hardly contain.
Breathtaking lies upon lies, come back Lee Harvey. Also this-
John Pilger on Democracy Now!- I’ve made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first was Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia. It describes the American bombing that provided the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot. What Nixon and Kissinger had started, Pol Pot completed—CIA files alone leave no doubt of that. I offered Year Zero to PBS and took it to Washington. The PBS executives who saw it were shocked. They whispered among themselves. They asked me to wait outside. One of them finally emerged and said, “John, we admire your film. But we are disturbed that it says the United States prepared the way for Pol Pot.”
I said, “Do you dispute the evidence?” I had quoted a number of CIA documents. “Oh, no,” he replied. “But we’ve decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator.”
Now the term “journalist adjudicator” might have been invented by George Orwell. In fact they managed to find one of only three journalists who had been invited to Cambodia by Pol Pot. And of course he turned his thumbs down on the film, and I never heard from PBS again. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries and became one of the most watched documentaries in the world. It was never shown in the United States. Of the five films I have made on Cambodia, one of them was shown by WNET, the PBS station in New York. I believe it was shown at about one in the morning. On the basis of this single showing, when most people are asleep, it was awarded an Emmy. What marvelous irony. It was worthy of a prize but not an audience.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/07/130258
Excellent write-up, man. It’s almost as if he’s actually trying to see just how audacious a lie he can get away with.