Was George Bush Right About Vietnam?
RUPERT CORNWALL / The Independent (UK) 24aug2007
This week, President Bush cited
America's experience in Vietnam
as an argument against withdrawing from Iraq.
Unfortunately, argues Rupert Cornwell,
he had got quite the wrong end
of the historical stick
|
President George W. Bush, delivering his remarks Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2007, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City, Mo., said "So long as we remain true to our ideals, we will defeat the extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan." White House photo by Chris Greenberg. Also
see: |
There have been surreal moments aplenty in the presidency of George W Bush. Few, however, can match his invocation of Graham Greene in defence of America's policy in Iraq. [Bush speech below] Where Bush is the most faith-driven of leaders, so unafflicted by self-doubt, Greene is the mouthpiece par excellence of seedy ambiguity, tattered faith and human frailty.
The subject was Vietnam, the war that Mr Bush famously chose not to fight. In the intervening 30-plus years, however, he has plainly undergone something of a conversion. Vietnam was a noble undertaking, was his basic message this week to a convention of US veterans. If anything, the mistake of America was not to stay there longer, a mistake he has no intention of repeating in Iraq.
Thus he cited Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American, and singled out one of its main characters, the US government agent Alden Pyle. Those were the days when the French still ruled Indochina, but Pyle, young, driven and naive, was already on the scene, seeking surreptitiously to bring American solutions to the unhappy land of Vietnam. Many find him insufferable — but not Mr Bush — as he tries in vain to bring American solutions to an equally unhappy Iraq.
In Kansas City on Wednesday, Mr Bush used three arguments — two negative and one positive — to draw his version of the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. A hasty American pullout, he maintained, would bring unspeakable horrors for innocent civilians in Iraq and neighbouring countries, just as American withdrawal had led to suffering and slaughter in Indochina three decades ago.
By contrast — and this was his second argument — when the US "stays the course" (to use a once-favoured but now abandoned Bushism) as it did in Germany and Japan after the Second World War and in South Korea after the 1953 armistice, the results in terms of democracy and prosperity are miraculous to behold.
Thirdly, an American retreat would do huge damage to US credibility. It would be greeted by terrorists as a victory that would embolden them in their global challenge to the lone superpower, and increase the risks of new, and perhaps even deadlier, 9/11s on the soil of America itself.
Inspect them closely, however, and each of the arguments has less substance than its predecessor. Mr Bush was on his firmest ground when he pointed to the terrible events that followed America's departure from Vietnam. Then, as now, he said, some insisted that the real problem was the US presence, "and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end". Instead unknown tens or hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were executed, imprisoned or otherwise "re-educated" in camps, and more than a million others became refugees. But these upheavals paled beside the genocide unleashed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, that killed some 1.7 million people, a fifth of the population.
In fact, however, these disasters were not precipitated by a rapid withdrawal of the sort opponents of the Iraq war seek. The departure of US forces from Vietnam was a long, gradual process that began in 1968 and continued for six years. As for the rise of Pol Pot, historians agree that without the war in Vietnam and the "collateral damage" visited upon Cambodia by US bombers and the machinations of the CIA, this almost certainly would never have happened.
And Mr Bush overlooked another point. His troop "surge" may be producing some results, but the political settlement that alone can produce genuine stability looks more remote than ever. In its absence, Iraq's own killing fields of innocent civilians multiply.
True, the victims are numbered in dozens, not thousands as in Cambodia. But that is only because millions have already fled for their lives. Some 2 million or more Iraqis are refugees. In the short term the violence in Iraq might well worsen, if US troops are withdrawn. In the long run, however, consider Vietnam, today a unified, peaceful and increasingly prosperous country.
So assume the US does stay. Is there a chance of turning Iraq into a Middle Eastern equivalent of Germany, Japan or South Korea? That was the conceit of the neo-conservatives when they made the case for war. Today that vision lies in ruins — for reasons Mr Bush conveniently omitted in his Kansas City speech.
First and foremost, Germany and Japan were homogeneous countries, by 1945 crushed, exhausted and shamed, yet with huge civic, industrial and cultural traditions waiting to be revived. Iraq is an artificial amalgam of three former and very different provinces of the Ottoman Empire, held together by a tyrant. A slightly better analogy might be South Korea, which, protected by the US military shield, has transformed itself from a poor and largely rural country into a global economic powerhouse. But partition ended the Korean War. In Iraq, civil war continues to rage — and if the Korean timetable applies, American soldiers will still be there in 2060 trying to contain it.
Second, Mr Bush refuses to put his money where his mouth is. His war — its cost of $500bn and counting already exceeds that of Vietnam — has seen no tax increases to pay for it. It demands no sacrifices except from those who actually fight it and their families. At the height of the Vietnam War, half a million US troops were deployed. Even with the surge, barely a third that number are in Iraq — as everyone but this President has long admitted, far fewer than are needed.
It is worth noting that in post-war Germany and Japan, there were three times as many allied occupation troops per head of the local population as in Iraq. But to provide more troops would mean a return of the same draft that brought Vietnam directly into the personal experience of millions of American families.
The President's third point of comparison between Iraq now and Indochina then is that withdrawal — a surrender, in his words, to "the deceptive allure of retreat" — would be disastrous for American credibility.
After all, Mr Bush noted, had not both Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, invoked Vietnam as a lesson. Americans, he quoted Zawahiri as saying, "ran and left their agents" in Vietnam, and "know better than others that there is no hope in victory ... the Vietnam spectre is closing every outlet."
A withdrawal from Iraq might indeed damage US credibility — but if the example of Vietnam is any guide, that damage will be very slight. Probably, Moscow was emboldened in its war-by-proxy with the US, in Cuba, Angola and like places. But the dominoes did not fall in South-east Asia. And if Vietnam fuelled a perception of American weakness that helped persuade the Kremlin to invade Afghanistan in 1979, then it contributed to the collapse not of the US, but of the Soviet Union itself.
In fact, any loss of credibility caused by an early wind-down of the US presence in Iraq would surely be outweighed by the removal — or, at least, mitigation — of the moral stain caused by an unprovoked invasion of a country that did not represent the slightest threat to the US and had nothing to do with 9/11, and by the subsequent disgrace of Abu Ghraib. Vietnam was a conflict that gradually escalated from small beginnings, as Washington's military strategists fell into the trap of believing that just one more shove would do the trick. Iraq was a pure war of choice, and as such will probably go down in US history as an even greater blunder than Vietnam.
Of course, these two wars, though more than a generation apart, do have similarities. Each of them was based on a flawed premise. Vietnam was supposed to be part of the free world's global battle against communism. In fact, the North's ultimately successful campaign to unify the country was the final act of a decades-long, anti-colonial struggle.
Iraq was, and continues to be, presented as a central front in the "war against terror", made even more threatening by those imaginary WMD Saddam Hussein was reputedly aiming at America's jugular. As even Mr Bush now grudgingly admits, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, his secular regime was anathema to Bin Laden. If Iraq is now a terrorist breeding ground, that is entirely of this President's making.
And underlying American instincts have not changed. In The Quiet American, Alden Pyle reckons he has all the answers — above all that the American way alone can bring good things like "national democracy" to the unhappy land of Vietnam.
To which the older, wiser and deeply sceptical British journalist Thomas Fowler replies that the real aspirations of the Vietnamese are less exalted. "They want enough rice. They don't want to be shot at. They don't want our white skins telling them what they want."
In a way, that world-weary line conjures up the famous remark attributed to Harold McMillan, that the Americans are "great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are". Given the enthusiastic participation by the last British government in the Iraq adventure, we should be wary of condescension. But it is hard not to see Bush as a modern Pyle, with the same disastrous blend of idealism, ignorance and well-meaning arrogance. "We are the old colonial peoples," Fowler, the authentic voice of Donald Rumsfeld's despised "Old Europe", tells Pyle. "But we've learnt a bit of reality. We have learned not to play with matches." And was ever a larger match tossed into a greater sea of petrol than that of George Bush's invasion of Iraq?
source: 24aug2007
History, by George
BRENDAN NICHOLSON / The Age (Australia) 23aug2007
AS AUSTRALIA'S defence minister during the Vietnam War and its prime minister when a flood of boat people arrived, Malcolm Fraser has a much different historical view of that conflict than US President George Bush.
Fraser says the Vietnam experience left him convinced that no Australian government should ever again commit troops to a major war as an ally of the United States unless it could place a senior minister in Washington to closely examine US policy and strategy.
In a major speech to US war veterans in Missouri this week, Bush described how the willingness of the US to persevere in wars against Japan, Germany and Korea produced economically strong democracies that were now valuable American allies.
In contrast, the decision to pull out of Vietnam contributed to the collapse of the South, the flood of boat people, retribution against those who stayed and precipitated the horrors of Pol Pot's regime in neighbouring Cambodia.
Bush argued that those historical events demonstrated why the US should stay the course in Iraq.
Fraser, army minister and then defence minister during Vietnam War, said yesterday he was far from impressed by Bush's sense of history.
"George Bush's analogies are so historically wrong that it just makes you wonder: how can such a man ever get into that position? It does make him a very dangerous man for all of us," the former PM says.
"The links he's making are historically inaccurate. It ought not to be within the capacity of a political leader, and certainly not the American President, to be so grossly misleading."
The reality in Vietnam was that the US was not going to win no matter how many soldiers it had there and how long they stayed, says Fraser.
"The Americans were defeated, the South was defeated and the American people were not going to go on with it."
He says the US military commitment in Iraq was minuscule compared with Vietnam.
Fraser says that when he was army minister, he argued that a senior member of the Government should go to Washington to try to get a handle on US strategic thinking and plans for Vietnam — effectively to be member of the US war cabinet.
That was how Canberra was kept well informed by the British during World War II.
"The Vietnam War made me believe that we should never again be an ally of the US in a significant war unless we've got somebody in the war councils in Washington when that war is being discussed and strategy is being determined.
"You know what you're getting into. If we're a real ally the Americans aren't going to have any trouble with that."
Fraser also says there are parallels between Iraq and Vietnam that are growing daily but they're not ones Bush would welcome.
Iraqi security forces are being heavily infiltrated by insurgents as the South Vietnamese forces were infiltrated by the Vietcong. Most of the insurgents are now local Iraqis and they use fear as a recruiting tactic as the Vietcong did.
Fraser says he believes the higher estimates that several hundred thousand civilians have died in Iraq are probably accurate.
"The bitterness and the way the US fought the war (in Vietnam) made the aftermath very much worse for those who'd been close to the US.
"The Bush legacy could be haunting the world for the next 50 years."
Alan Dupont, director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney, says Bush is right up to a point in that having committed so much political and military capital to democratising Iraq, the US does risk losing all that capital if it withdraws prematurely.
"There is no way the US is going to stay there for decades. It wants to get out but it wants to leave Iraq in better shape than it was when it went in."
Dupont says Bush is right in that if the US pulls out before democracy is established then all will have been in vain.
"But the parallels he draws historically with Japan and Europe and even Vietnam are badly flawed."
Japan and Germany were devastated by a world war and offered no opposition to the US moves to rebuild them but in Iraq the US faces a very resilient adversary.
Dupont says there are some parallels with Vietnam but a lot of differences as well.
Both were major strategic mistakes and the US should never have gone in in the first place.
"The Vietnam analogy is a very dangerous one for him to make because you can draw the opposite lessons and conclusions to the ones Bush has drawn."
Dupont says that he strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq.
"But having gone in we also have the responsibility to now keep faith with all the people we committed with, especially the Iraqis, and a responsibility to help fix the mess that's been created."
Allan Behm was formerly head of the International and Strategic Policy divisions in the Department of Defence and now advises on political risk and strategy.
He says suggestions that the US could have won if it stayed the course in Vietnam and that that was a reason to stay in Iraq were "far-fetched rubbish" and the worst form of revisionism.
"Had the Americans never intervened in Vietnam but let the French wither on the vine, the outcome would have been the same," he says.
"The difference would have been you wouldn't have had 50,000 Americans killed and vast numbers of Vietnamese killed."
There might have been refugees but nothing like the streams at the end of the Vietnam War.
And he says it's clear that the US intervention in Cambodia created the circumstances in which Pol Pot came to power.
Behm says it is fatuous to compare the war in Iraq with that against Germany and Japan.
"The Second World War was a conflict of cataclysmic proportions. It was one of those huge epochal battles that leads to fundamental constitutional change," he says.
Germany and Japan represented a kind of adventurous totalitarianism that challenged the polity and values of the US directly. The US had no option but to fight for its own values.
"It is not fighting in its own values in Iraq. There the Americans are attempting to impose freedom and democracy.
"The speechwriters are engaging in the most fanciful kind of revisionist spin. It's complete rubbish and totally misleading."
A last word comes from a New York Times report in which David C. Hendrickson, a specialist on the history of American foreign policy at Colorado College, says it is undoubtedly true that America's failure in Vietnam led to catastrophic consequences in the region, especially in Cambodia.
"But there are a couple of further points that need weighing," he added. "One is that the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power in the absence of the war in Vietnam — this dark force arose out of the circumstances of the war, was in a deep sense created by the war. The same thing has happened in the Middle East today. Foreign occupation of Iraq has created far more terrorists than it has deterred."
By the book IN HIS speech, President George Bush quoted from Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
Bush was implying that, with the benefit of hindsight, the critics of the US' involvement in Vietnam were wrong, just as critics of the Iraq war will later be seen to be misguided.
Ironically, Greene's The Quiet American is a searing attack on US foreign policy. It is set in Saigon in 1952 and tells the story of jaded British reporter Thomas Fowler and his relationship with younger US spy Alden Pyle, told against the backdrop of the French battle with the Viet Minh, the organisation that led the struggle for Vietnamese independence from French rule. "Innocence is a kind of insanity," says Fowler of Pyle as he blunders into the conflict, sponsoring a corrupt militia leader. Starring Michael Caine, the film version of the book was scheduled for release in 2001. It was test-screened on September 10 but postponed for a year after the September 11 attacks.
source: 24aug2007
Come Back Karl Rove, All is Forgiven
IAN WILLIAMS / The Guardian (UK) 23aug2007
There can have been few speeches more laughable than George Bush's latest. Referring to books he has surely never read, laden with specious historical parallels guaranteed to turn round and bite him in the bum, it is one long "speechwriter wanted at the White House" ad.
But bad speechwriting notwithstanding, didn't the president remember that Karl Rove's parting words were almost certainly "Don't mention Vietnam"? The parallels are obvious: a prolonged war started on false pretences in which untold thousands on both sides die and the US is eventually driven out anyway.
Quite apart from the historical echoes — the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the invented weapons of mass destruction — it has to be a definition of chutzpah for George Bush, of all people, to turn up at all at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. But to invoke Vietnam really takes the prize.
This was, after all, the war that he made his very own by spending five years actively avoiding participation. While his father left school immediately to fly in combat in world war two, as Vietnam heated up George W flew — to Texas, to join the Texas Air National Guard, a nepotistic boondoggle. Even that eventually proved too much for him — so he deserted. This was not a war he disagreed with. On the contrary, he took time off from his arduous and perilous National Guard service to campaign for politicians who wanted the war to continue.
And now he has the absolute gall to say that more Americans, more Cambodians, more Laotians, more Vietnamese should have died, and the war that he was dodging should have been continued.
He is, of course, quite right about the totalitarian nature of the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. But that leaves out a few details. That would of course be the Khmer Rouge whose accession to power was made possible by the American bombing of neutral Cambodia that led to the overthrow of the Sihanouk regime. It would also be the Khmer Rouge regime that was allowed to keep its UN seat even after it had been driven into the jungle — because Britain, China and the US insisted that it was the legitimate government.
The Vietnamese government is the one that is now hosting American trade delegations on a daily basis, and allowing American teams to search for US war dead. In his speech, Bush laughably cited Graham Green's "Quiet American" as typical of the Leftist thinking that led to the defeat in Vietnam. Anyone want a bet on whether he has ever read the book? We do know he is unlikely to have seen the very good film version with Michael Caine, because Hollywood, following 9/11, refused to give it commercial showing. The idea that Americans could arrange bombings was too sensitive, and may have interrupted the process of demonization that Bush and Cheney were fomenting.
Bush also invoked Pearl Harbour and the fight against the Japanese empire as the equivalent of fighting back against Al Qaeda after 9/11. But attacking Iraq was the equivalent of invading Argentina after Pearl Harbour while giving Japan a free pass.
Bush withdrew forces from Afghanistan to attack Iraq — which is why the turbaned poster boy is still free. Last year the president told the same convention: "Victory will come when Iraq is not a safe haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation". This year he told the veterans: "The terrorists have made it clear that Iraq is the central front in their war against humanity. And so we must recognize Iraq as the central front in the war against the terrorists".
As chicken and eggs go, this is the big one. Saddam's Iraq was totalitarian, vicious, and belligerent, but it had nothing to do with al-Qaida. "Victory" was in our hands because Iraq, for all its faults, was al-Qaeda free before 2003. It was the invasion that wrested "victory" from our hands.
And while George Bush was only marginally responsible for inciting war in Vietnam and dodging it, in Iraq the buck stops on his desk for yet another pointless conflict heading for failure. And he stands to be condemned for his inane speeches. Karl Rove has indeed left with the president's brain.
source: 24aug2007
On Wrong Side of History:
Bush's Vietnam Analogy Incorrect
However, U.S. is Making the Same Errors in Iraq
ROBERT BUZZANCO / Houston Chronicle 23aug2007
In his continuing attempts to justify escalation of the war in Iraq, President Bush has resorted to historical analogy, warning that a hasty retreat from the Middle East would trigger a bloodbath as it did in Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1970s. Not only is the comparison faulty, it is historically inaccurate.
"In Cambodia," Bush said, "the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution" and "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."
Bush and defenders of the current war and Vietnam ignore crucial aspects of history, however. Vietnam by 1975 had been wracked by a brutal fratricidal war for over a quarter-century, and recriminations were unavoidable, and made inevitable by the nature of the U.S. intervention and occupation of the southern half of Vietnam.
His analogy of Cambodia is more off-track. The Khmer Rouge slaughter was not caused by the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina in 1973, but by the U.S. escalation of the war and intervention into Cambodia in the years prior to that time. The United States had been conducting a "secret war" kept secret from the American people but not from the Cambodians on the receiving end of B-52 strikes since the later 1960s. In April 1970, then, Richard Nixon authorized what he called an "incursion" of Cambodia on the pretext of destroying the headquarters for Vietnamese Communist military operations there, the so-called COSVN, or Central Office for South Vietnam.
A month earlier, however, in March 1970, the United States had facilitated the ouster of the Cambodian head-of-state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and replaced him with a weak but pliable politician named Lon Nol. At this time, the Khmer Rouge was a small splinter group of the far left, without much popular support or military power. But the U.S.-sponsored coup, and the subsequent invasion in April, proved to be a great blessing to the Khmer Rouge. With Sihanouk, who had tried to remain neutral in the larger Indochinese conflict and thus was not preventing either the Vietnamese Communists or the U.S. from operating in Cambodia, out of the way and Lon Nol, perceived as a "puppet" of Nixon, in office, there was no middle ground in Cambodia. As a result, the Khmer Rouge soared in influence and popularity by exploiting the heavy-handed American political and military intervention.
By the mid-1970s, as the U.S. air war against Cambodia continued, killing hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge was well-positioned as the anti-American and anti-Lon Nol alternative, and so was able to swarm into Phnom Penh and establish a regime in April 1975, and then unleashing a genocidal wave of killings that lasted until the Vietnamese intervened and ousted the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in January 1979. Even after that ouster, however, the United States continued to work with the Khmer Rouge, supporting covert operations against the Vietnamese-supported new government in Phnom Penh and even, in the Ronald Reagan years, supporting the Khmer Rouge claim to Cambodia's seat at the United Nations.
Now, as in the Vietnam era, the United States finds itself in a similarly intractable position. By intervening in a country that was not stable to begin with, putting a government into power that is derided as a U.S. client regime, heightening internal struggles, this time between Shiite and Sunni, taking sides in a civil war, causing massive destruction, and continuing to fight amid escalating bloodshed abroad and popular protest at home, the Bush administration is making many of the same errors that the Johnson and Nixon administrations did during the Vietnam War. While there does not appear to be a genocidal Khmer Rouge-type group lurking in the background and ready to cause incalculable terror, there is no question that the various armed groups that have emerged in Iraq since March 2003 are certain to persist and cause greater mayhem and death, perhaps throughout the entire Middle East.
So Bush's analogy is not only incorrect, but exposes the perhaps unavoidable fate facing the United States in Iraq. Continuing this war amid the daily deterioration will only prolong the time it will take to rebuild Iraq and try to heal the hatred and fear that now engulfs it. The sooner the United States begins a timely withdrawal from Iraq, the sooner the Iraqis themselves can begin to sort out their problems, and hopefully prevent a repeat of the killing fields of Cambodia.
Buzzanco is professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Houston. He is also author of "Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era and Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life." Readers may e-mail him at buzz@uh.edu.
source: 24aug2007
Bush's Vietnam Blunder
JIM HOAGLAND / Washington Post 24aug2007
Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq.
Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president.
It is not just that Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Wednesday drew on a shaky grasp of history, spotlighted once again his own decision to sit out the Vietnam conflict, and played straight into his critics' most emotive arguments against him and the Republican Party.
More important, Bush has called attention to the elephant that will be sitting in the room when his administration makes its politically vital report on Iraq to the nation next month. For Americans, the most important comparison will be this one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms -- whatever those terms are at any given moment.
That is, the administration has constantly shifted its goals in Iraq to avoid accepting failure and blame -- only to see the new goals drift beyond reach each time. Liberation of Iraqis became occupation by Americans, democracy became an unattainable centralized "national unity" government and this year's military surge has become a device for achieving political reconciliation among people who do not want to reconcile.
Bush's appeal to Americans to turn away from "the allure of retreat" centered on the indisputably horrific consequences for the people of Vietnam and Cambodia of defeat in 1975. But his analogy also summons the historical reality that U.S. involvement in Indochina became untenable when that engagement itself became a threat to America's social fabric and national cohesion -- and then to the very institutions that had responsibility for the war, the U.S. military and intelligence services, as well as the presidency and Congress.
Iraq fortunately has not produced anything like the scale of casualties and domestic conflict that Vietnam visited on the United States. The two conflicts also differ greatly in their potential regional consequences. Bush had done well until now to steer away from such analogies.
But his words invite examination of the mounting damage that Bush's approaches to the war in Iraq and to national security in general are doing to U.S. institutions in an American society that has significantly changed since 1975.
Some military commanders, CIA agents in Iraq, Republican members of Congress, State Department diplomats and others now make their highest priority the protection of their own reputations, careers and institutions -- the three blend seamlessly into a single overriding ambition in Washington -- for the post-Bush era, which thus draws closer, in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The need to protect the White House, the Pentagon and both major political parties from greater Iraq fallout explains much of the blame being dumped on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at this late date -- even though his deficiencies and close links to Iran and Syria were clearly visible when the administration helped install him in the job in 2006. As he has been throughout the Iraq experience, Bush is condemned to play the cards he dealt himself.
The prime minister's chances of producing the "national unity" government that Bush demanded but that Maliki himself never seemed to believe in are now being shredded by the maneuvering for position in the twilight months of the Bush presidency.
The U.S. military is helping Sunni tribes organize into armed militias that will owe their loyalty beyond the tribe to American commanders rather than to Maliki's government. Similarly, the CIA has molded an Iraq intelligence service that draws no public funds from the Iraqi government and presumably is paid for by Langley. The agency's reluctance to act against Kurdish rebels operating against Iran and Turkey may also be part of a separate vision of the agency's future role in Iraq.
Such maneuvering is ultimately self-defeating, as was Bush's desperate bid this week to mobilize on his side the old resentments and fears of the political battles fought over Vietnam. Bush's speech fits Talleyrand's definition of something worse than a crime: It was a blunder.
Vietnam and Iraq are totally different situations. But U.S. institutions and their leaders will still follow the Washington laws of self-preservation when campaigns abroad begin to threaten their survival.
source: 24aug2007
President Bush Speech to
VFW National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri
Compares Iraq to Vietnam
22aug2007
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all. Please be seated. It's good to be with you again. I understand you haven't had much of a problem attracting speakers. (Laughter.) I thank you for inviting me. I can understand why people want to come here. See, it's an honor to stand with the men and women of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. (Applause.) The VFW is one of this nation's finest organizations. You belong to an elite group of Americans. (Applause.) You belong to a group of people who have defended America overseas. You have fought in places from Normandy to Iwo Jima, to Pusan, to Khe Sahn, to Kuwait, to Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. You brought security to the American people; you brought hope to millions across the world.
As members of this proud organization, you are advocates for the rights of our military veterans, a model of community service, and a strong and important voice for a strong national defense. I thank you for your service. I thank you for what you've done for the United States of America. (Applause.)
I stand before you as a wartime President. I wish I didn't have to say that, but an enemy that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001, declared war on the United States of America. And war is what we're engaged in. The struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it's a struggle for civilization. We fight for a free way of life against a new barbarism — an ideology whose followers have killed thousands on American soil, and seek to kill again on even a greater scale.
We fight for the possibility that decent men and women across the broader Middle East can realize their destiny — and raise up societies based on freedom and justice and personal dignity. And as long as I'm Commander-in-Chief we will fight to win. (Applause.) I'm confident that we will prevail. I'm confident we'll prevail because we have the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known — the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. (Applause.)
For those of you who wear the uniform, nothing makes me more proud to say that I am your Commander-in-Chief. Thank you for volunteering in the service of the United States of America. (Applause.)
Now, I know some people doubt the universal appeal of liberty, or worry that the Middle East isn't ready for it. Others believe that America's presence is destabilizing, and that if the United States would just leave a place like Iraq those who kill our troops or target civilians would no longer threaten us. Today I'm going to address these arguments. I'm going to describe why helping the young democracies of the Middle East stand up to violent Islamic extremists is the only realistic path to a safer world for the American people. I'm going to try to provide some historical perspective to show there is a precedent for the hard and necessary work we're doing, and why I have such confidence in the fact we'll be successful.
Before I do so I want to thank the national Commander-in-Chief of the VFW and his wife, Nancy. It's been a joy to work with Gary and the staff. Gary said, we don't necessarily agree a hundred percent of the time. I remember the old lieutenant governor of Texas — a Democrat, and I was a Republican governor. He said, "Governor, if we agreed 100 percent of the time, one of us wouldn't be necessary." (Laughter.)
But here's what we do agree on: We agree our veterans deserve the full support of the United States government. (Applause.) That's why in this budget I submitted there's $87 billion for the veterans; it's the highest level of support ever for the veterans in American history. (Applause.) We agree that health care for our veterans is a top priority, and that's why we've increased health care spending for our veterans by 83 percent since I was sworn in as your President. (Applause.) We agree that a troop coming out of Iraq or Afghanistan deserves the best health care not only as an active duty citizen, but as a military guy, but also as a veteran — and you're going to get the best health care we can possibly provide. (Applause.) We agree our homeless vets ought to have shelter, and that's what we're providing.
In other words, we agree the veterans deserve the full support of our government and that's what you're going to get as George W. Bush as your President. (Applause.)
I want to thank Bob Wallace, the Executive Director. He spends a lot of time in the Oval Office — I'm always checking the silverware drawer. (Laughter.) He's going to be bringing in George Lisicki here soon. He's going to be the national commander-in-chief for my next year in office. And I'm looking forward to working with George, and I'm looking forward to working with Wallace, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you. They're going to find an open-minded President, dedicated to doing what's right. (Applause.)
I appreciate Linda Meader, the National President of the Ladies Auxiliary. She brought old Dave with her. (Applause.) Virginia Carman, the incoming President. I want to thank Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Gordon Mansfield for joining us today. I appreciate the United States Senator from the state of Missouri, strong supporter of the military and strong supporter of the veterans, Kit Bond. (Applause.) Two members of the Congress have kindly showed up today — I'm proud they're both here: Congressman Emanuel Cleaver — no finer man, no more decent a fellow than Emanuel Cleaver — is with us. And a great Congressman from right around the corner here, Congressman Sam Graves. Thank you all for coming. (Applause.)
Lieutenant General Jack Stultz, Commanding General, U.S. Army Reserve Command, is with us today. General, thanks for coming. Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell, Commanding General, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, is with us today, as well. General Caldwell, thank you for your service. (Applause.)
Thank you all for letting me come by. I want to open today's speech with a story that begins on a sunny morning, when thousands of Americans were murdered in a surprise attack — and our nation was propelled into a conflict that would take us to every corner of the globe.
The enemy who attacked us despises freedom, and harbors resentment at the slights he believes America and Western nations have inflicted on his people. He fights to establish his rule over an entire region. And over time, he turns to a strategy of suicide attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight.
If this story sounds familiar, it is — except for one thing. The enemy I have just described is not al Qaeda, and the attack is not 9/11, and the empire is not the radical caliphate envisioned by Osama bin Laden. Instead, what I've described is the war machine of Imperial Japan in the 1940s, its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its attempt to impose its empire throughout East Asia.
Ultimately, the United States prevailed in World War II, and we have fought two more land wars in Asia. And many in this hall were veterans of those campaigns. Yet even the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America's strongest and most steadfast allies, or that the South Koreans would recover from enemy invasion to raise up one of the world's most powerful economies, or that Asia would pull itself out of poverty and hopelessness as it embraced markets and freedom.
The lesson from Asia's development is that the heart's desire for liberty will not be denied. Once people even get a small taste of liberty, they're not going to rest until they're free. Today's dynamic and hopeful Asia — a region that brings us countless benefits — would not have been possible without America's presence and perseverance. It would not have been possible without the veterans in this hall today. And I thank you for your service. (Applause.)
There are many differences between the wars we fought in the Far East and the war on terror we're fighting today. But one important similarity is at their core they're ideological struggles. The militarists of Japan and the communists in Korea and Vietnam were driven by a merciless vision for the proper ordering of humanity. They killed Americans because we stood in the way of their attempt to force their ideology on others. Today, the names and places have changed, but the fundamental character of the struggle has not changed. Like our enemies in the past, the terrorists who wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places seek to spread a political vision of their own — a harsh plan for life that crushes freedom, tolerance, and dissent.
Like our enemies in the past, they kill Americans because we stand in their way of imposing this ideology across a vital region of the world. This enemy is dangerous; this enemy is determined; and this enemy will be defeated. (Applause.)
We're still in the early hours of the current ideological struggle, but we do know how the others ended — and that knowledge helps guide our efforts today. The ideals and interests that led America to help the Japanese turn defeat into democracy are the same that lead us to remain engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The defense strategy that refused to hand the South Koreans over to a totalitarian neighbor helped raise up a Asian Tiger that is the model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East. The result of American sacrifice and perseverance in Asia is a freer, more prosperous and stable continent whose people want to live in peace with America, not attack America.
At the outset of World War II there were only two democracies in the Far East — Australia and New Zealand. Today most of the nations in Asia are free, and its democracies reflect the diversity of the region. Some of these nations have constitutional monarchies, some have parliaments, and some have presidents. Some are Christian, some are Muslim, some are Hindu, and some are Buddhist. Yet for all the differences, the free nations of Asia all share one thing in common: Their governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, and they desire to live in peace with their neighbors.
Along the way to this freer and more hopeful Asia, there were a lot of doubters. Many times in the decades that followed World War II, American policy in Asia was dismissed as hopeless and naive. And when we listen to criticism of the difficult work our generation is undertaking in the Middle East today, we can hear the echoes of the same arguments made about the Far East years ago.
In the aftermath of Japan's surrender, many thought it naive to help the Japanese transform themselves into a democracy. Then as now, the critics argued that some people were simply not fit for freedom.
Some said Japanese culture was inherently incompatible with democracy. Joseph Grew, a former United States ambassador to Japan who served as Harry Truman's Under Secretary of State, told the President flatly that — and I quote — "democracy in Japan would never work." He wasn't alone in that belief. A lot of Americans believed that — and so did the Japanese — a lot of Japanese believed the same thing: democracy simply wouldn't work.
Others critics said that Americans were imposing their ideals on the Japanese. For example, Japan's Vice Prime Minister asserted that allowing Japanese women to vote would "retard the progress of Japanese politics."
It's interesting what General MacArthur wrote in his memoirs. He wrote, "There was much criticism of my support for the enfranchisement of women. Many Americans, as well as many other so-called experts, expressed the view that Japanese women were too steeped in the tradition of subservience to their husbands to act with any degree of political independence." That's what General MacArthur observed. In the end, Japanese women were given the vote; 39 women won parliamentary seats in Japan's first free election. Today, Japan's minister of defense is a woman, and just last month, a record number of women were elected to Japan's Upper House. Other critics argued that democracy — (applause.)
There are other critics, believe it or not, that argue that democracy could not succeed in Japan because the national religion — Shinto — was too fanatical and rooted in the Emperor. Senator Richard Russell denounced the Japanese faith, and said that if we did not put the Emperor on trial, "any steps we may take to create democracy are doomed to failure." The State Department's man in Tokyo put it bluntly: "The Emperor system must disappear if Japan is ever really to be democratic."
Those who said Shinto was incompatible with democracy were mistaken, and fortunately, Americans and Japanese leaders recognized it at the time, because instead of suppressing the Shinto faith, American authorities worked with the Japanese to institute religious freedom for all faiths. Instead of abolishing the imperial throne, Americans and Japanese worked together to find a place for the Emperor in the democratic political system.
And the result of all these steps was that every Japanese citizen gained freedom of religion, and the Emperor remained on his throne and Japanese democracy grew stronger because it embraced a cherished part of Japanese culture. And today, in defiance of the critics and the doubters and the skeptics, Japan retains its religions and cultural traditions, and stands as one of the world's great free societies. (Applause.)
You know, the experts sometimes get it wrong. An interesting observation, one historian put it — he said, "Had these erstwhile experts" — he was talking about people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the blessings of a free society — he said, "Had these erstwhile experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage."
Instead, I think it's important to look at what happened. A democratic Japan has brought peace and prosperity to its people. Its foreign trade and investment have helped jump-start the economies of others in the region. The alliance between our two nations is the lynchpin for freedom and stability throughout the Pacific. And I want you to listen carefully to this final point: Japan has transformed from America's enemy in the ideological struggle of the 20th century to one of America's strongest allies in the ideological struggle of the 21st century. (Applause.)
Critics also complained when America intervened to save South Korea from communist invasion. Then as now, the critics argued that the war was futile, that we should never have sent our troops in, or they argued that America's intervention was divisive here at home.
After the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel in 1950, President Harry Truman came to the defense of the South — and found himself attacked from all sides. From the left, I.F. Stone wrote a book suggesting that the South Koreans were the real aggressors and that we had entered the war on a false pretext. From the right, Republicans vacillated. Initially, the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate endorsed Harry Truman's action, saying, "I welcome the indication of a more definite policy" — he went on to say, "I strongly hope that having adopted it, the President may maintain it intact," then later said "it was a mistake originally to go into Korea because it meant a land war."
Throughout the war, the Republicans really never had a clear position. They never could decide whether they wanted the United States to withdraw from the war in Korea, or expand the war to the Chinese mainland. Others complained that our troops weren't getting the support from the government. One Republican senator said, the effort was just "bluff and bluster." He rejected calls to come together in a time of war, on the grounds that "we will not allow the cloak of national unity to be wrapped around horrible blunders."
Many in the press agreed. One columnist in The Washington Post said, "The fact is that the conduct of the Korean War has been shot through with errors great and small." A colleague wrote that "Korea is an open wound. It's bleeding and there's no cure for it in sight." He said that the American people could not understand "why Americans are doing about 95 percent of the fighting in Korea."
Many of these criticisms were offered as reasons for abandoning our commitments in Korea. And while it's true the Korean War had its share of challenges, the United States never broke its word.
Today, we see the result of a sacrifice of people in this room in the stark contrast of life on the Korean Peninsula. Without Americans' intervention during the war and our willingness to stick with the South Koreans after the war, millions of South Koreans would now be living under a brutal and repressive regime. The Soviets and Chinese communists would have learned the lesson that aggression pays. The world would be facing a more dangerous situation. The world would be less peaceful.
Instead, South Korea is a strong, democratic ally of the United States of America. South Korean troops are serving side-by-side with American forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And America can count on the free people of South Korea to be lasting partners in the ideological struggle we're facing in the beginning of the 21st century. (Applause.)
For those of you who served in Korea, thank you for your sacrifice, and thank you for your service. (Applause.)
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.
We must remember the words of the enemy. We must listen to what they say. Bin Laden has declared that "the war [in Iraq] is for you or us to win. If we win it, it means your disgrace and defeat forever." Iraq is one of several fronts in the war on terror — but it's the central front — it's the central front for the enemy that attacked us and wants to attack us again. And it's the central front for the United States and to withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating. (Applause.)
If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities. Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home. And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America. (Applause.)
Recently, two men who were on the opposite sides of the debate over the Vietnam War came together to write an article. One was a member of President Nixon's foreign policy team, and the other was a fierce critic of the Nixon administration's policies. Together they wrote that the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq would be disastrous.
Here's what they said: "Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences." I believe these men are right.
In Iraq, our moral obligations and our strategic interests are one. So we pursue the extremists wherever we find them and we stand with the Iraqis at this difficult hour — because the shadow of terror will never be lifted from our world and the American people will never be safe until the people of the Middle East know the freedom that our Creator meant for all. (Applause.)
I recognize that history cannot predict the future with absolute certainty. I understand that. But history does remind us that there are lessons applicable to our time. And we can learn something from history. In Asia, we saw freedom triumph over violent ideologies after the sacrifice of tens of thousands of American lives — and that freedom has yielded peace for generations.
The American military graveyards across Europe attest to the terrible human cost in the fight against Nazism. They also attest to the triumph of a continent that today is whole, free, and at peace. The advance of freedom in these lands should give us confidence that the hard work we are doing in the Middle East can have the same results we've seen in Asia and elsewhere — if we show the same perseverance and the same sense of purpose.
In a world where the terrorists are willing to act on their twisted beliefs with sickening acts of barbarism, we must put faith in the timeless truths about human nature that have made us free.
Across the Middle East, millions of ordinary citizens are tired of war, they're tired of dictatorship and corruption, they're tired of despair. They want societies where they're treated with dignity and respect, where their children have the hope for a better life. They want nations where their faiths are honored and they can worship in freedom.
And that is why millions of Iraqis and Afghans turned out to the polls — millions turned out to the polls. And that's why their leaders have stepped forward at the risk of assassination. And that's why tens of thousands are joining the security forces of their nations. These men and women are taking great risks to build a free and peaceful Middle East — and for the sake of our own security, we must not abandon them.
There is one group of people who understand the stakes, understand as well as any expert, anybody in America — those are the men and women in uniform. Through nearly six years of war, they have performed magnificently. (Applause.) Day after day, hour after hour, they keep the pressure on the enemy that would do our citizens harm. They've overthrown two of the most brutal tyrannies of the world, and liberated more than 50 million citizens. (Applause.)
In Iraq, our troops are taking the fight to the extremists and radicals and murderers all throughout the country. Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year. (Applause.) We're in the fight. Today our troops are carrying out a surge that is helping bring former Sunni insurgents into the fight against the extremists and radicals, into the fight against al Qaeda, into the fight against the enemy that would do us harm. They're clearing out the terrorists out of population centers, they're giving families in liberated Iraqi cities a look at a decent and hopeful life.
Our troops are seeing this progress that is being made on the ground. And as they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they're gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq? Here's my answer is clear: We'll support our troops, we'll support our commanders, and we will give them everything they need to succeed. (Applause.)
Despite the mistakes that have been made, despite the problems we have encountered, seeing the Iraqis through as they build their democracy is critical to keeping the American people safe from the terrorists who want to attack us. It is critical work to lay the foundation for peace that veterans have done before you all.
A free Iraq is not going to be perfect. A free Iraq will not make decisions as quickly as the country did under the dictatorship. Many are frustrated by the pace of progress in Baghdad, and I can understand this. As I noted yesterday, the Iraqi government is distributing oil revenues across its provinces despite not having an oil revenue law on its books, that the parliament has passed about 60 pieces of legislation.
Prime Minister Maliki is a good guy, a good man with a difficult job, and I support him. And it's not up to politicians in Washington, D.C. to say whether he will remain in his position — that is up to the Iraqi people who now live in a democracy, and not a dictatorship. (Applause.) A free Iraq is not going to transform the Middle East overnight. But a free Iraq will be a massive defeat for al Qaeda, it will be an example that provides hope for millions throughout the Middle East, it will be a friend of the United States, and it's going to be an important ally in the ideological struggle of the 21st century. (Applause.)
Prevailing in this struggle is essential to our future as a nation. And the question now that comes before us is this: Will today's generation of Americans resist the allure of retreat, and will we do in the Middle East what the veterans in this room did in Asia?
The journey is not going to be easy, as the veterans fully understand. At the outset of the war in the Pacific, there were those who argued that freedom had seen its day and that the future belonged to the hard men in Tokyo. A year and a half before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan's Foreign Minister gave a hint of things to come during an interview with a New York newspaper. He said, "In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished, the democratic system bankrupt."
In fact, the war machines of Imperial Japan would be brought down — brought down by good folks who only months before had been students and farmers and bank clerks and factory hands. Some are in the room today. Others here have been inspired by their fathers and grandfathers and uncles and cousins.
That generation of Americans taught the tyrants a telling lesson: There is no power like the power of freedom and no soldier as strong as a soldier who fights for a free future for his children. (Applause.) And when America's work on the battlefield was done, the victorious children of democracy would help our defeated enemies rebuild, and bring the taste of freedom to millions.
We can do the same for the Middle East. Today the violent Islamic extremists who fight us in Iraq are as certain of their cause as the Nazis, or the Imperial Japanese, or the Soviet communists were of theirs. They are destined for the same fate. (Applause.)
The greatest weapon in the arsenal of democracy is the desire for liberty written into the human heart by our Creator. So long as we remain true to our ideals, we will defeat the extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will help those countries' peoples stand up functioning democracies in the heart of the broader Middle East. And when that hard work is done and the critics of today recede from memory, the cause of freedom will be stronger, a vital region will be brighter, and the American people will be safer.
Thank you, and God bless. (Applause.)
END 10:29 A.M. CDT
source: Whitehouse website 24aug2007
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