AMERICAN FUTURE

In his comment to my “Book-Ends” post, Gregory McDowell, who was born after the war was over, takes issue with my stance on Vietnam, and asks me to help him understand my point of view on Vietnam and my perspective on how Iraq differs for Vietnam. In his words,

Having been born after the war, I have no memories or experience of how things were during those tumultuous times. So when this period of American history was covered in school, I had no idea how to grasp the perspective of the peace movement. I just saw a bunch of crazy people opposing a war that was in part to keep a ruthless dictator from overtaking the South, which I still can’t make sense of. I just don’t understand how can it be wrong to oppose Ho Chi Minh. Yes, a lot of people died but that was because the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong kept on fighting to “liberate” South Vietnam, which eventually they did. Sure, we should have somehow found someone else to lead South Vietnam other than the dictator they had, but even so we also supported dictatorships in South Korea which eventually found its way to democracy. So the question is, which is more likely to develop into a democracy, a united Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh or a South Vietnam under our protection?

I welcome McDowell’s inquiry, and I’ll begin by citing what I believe to be the differences between Vietnam and Iraq. Fortunately, I discussed this last September:

First, the intent of the two invasions could hardly have been more different. In Vietnam, the intent was to sustain a dictatorship; in Iraq, it was to overthrow a dictatorship.

Second, in Vietnam, the US intervened in a civil war, while, in Iraq, the US intervened in a country ruled by a dictator from whose grasp the populace was incapable of freeing itself. Third, while there was blood on the hands of Ho Chi Minh, it was a small stain compared to atrocities of Saddam that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Fourth, the North Vietnamese regime, unlike Iraq’s, never possessed, and was never suspected of possessing, WMD. Fifth, Iraq, but not North Vietnam, invaded neighboring countries (Iran and Kuwait). Sixth, Iraq violated numerous Security Council resolutions. The actions of North Vietnam were never the subject of such resolutions. Seventh, the North Vietnamese neither supported nor engaged in international terrorism. Saddam’s Iraq had contacts with al Queda, harbored Abu Nidal, provided financial aid to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and attempted to assassinate George H. W. Bush. Eighth, while the US didn’t attempt to involve the UN before invading Vietnam, it brought Iraq to the UN’s attention six months before the invasion. This initiative resulted in the passage of Security Council Resolution 1441, which threatened “serious consequences” if Iraq failed to come clean about its WMD programs.

With regard to McDowell’s point of view, I note the following:

1. Yes, there were a lot of crazies in the Vietnam peace movement. But as time went on, the crazies represented a progressively smaller part of the it. The central point of my “Book-Ends” was that a growing number of “average” Americans — myself included — bought into just enough of their argument to be persuaded that the US should withdraw, as seems to be happening now. Further, while the claim of today’s Left (and the Democrats) that “Bush lied” to garner support for the invasion is a distortion of the facts, the Vietnam Left’s assertion that the Johnson administration lied , as is amply documented in the Pentagton Papers and in recent scholarly studies. In the case of Vietnam, the administration lied; in the case of Iraq, it was the opponents of the administration that lied.

2. In an October post, I debunked the Democrats’ (and their media allies’) claim that Bush and members of his administration had characterized the Iraqi threat as “imminent”:

a. Testifying before a Congressional committee on February 4, 2004, George Tenet, who was then director of the CIA, said his agency’s prewar assessments never cast Iraq as an “imminent threat.” In a statement, Senator Kerry said that Tenet admitted that the CIA had never told the White House that Iraq posed an imminent threat, “[b]ut that’s not what the White House told the American people. They said Iraq posed ‘a mortal threat,’ an ‘urgent threat, an ‘immediate threat,’ a ‘serious threat.’” b. Other Democrats were more forthright in their assertions that President Bush had characterized the Iraqi threat as “imminent” to the American people: (i) On June 10, 2003, Representative John Conyers said that “In public speech after speech, the President and his supporting players assured America’s anxious citizen’s that attacking Iraq was absolutely necessary to prevent the imminent threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction from harming them . . . “ (ii) On September 18, Senator Edward Kennedy stated that “There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud.” Earlier in 2003, Senator Kennedy announced that he would introduce a resolution that would require the President to come back to Congress and present “convincing evidence of an imminent threat” before US troops could be sent into Iraq. This means that, at that time, he did not believe that Mr. Bush had argued or shown that the threat was imminent. (iii) On October 4, Senator Jay Rockefeller of Arkansas said that “it’s extraordinary that a decision was made to go to war and that we were told by our highest policymakers that there was an imminent threat.“ Eight days later on Fox News Sunday, he stated that “What I keep having to remind myself is that we went to war in Iraq based upon an imminent threat caused by weapons of mass destruction.” (iv) Also on October 4, Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, stated that “it is clear to me that there was no imminence of a threat of weapons.” (v) On October 6, United Press International (UPI) reported that “Democrats on Capitol Hill are charging the Bush administration pulled a bait-and-switch on Congress . . . warning that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to US national security.” c. Evidently taking its cue from these Democratic statements, the media repeatedly maintained that the Bush administration used the word “imminent” in its depiction of the Iraqi threat: (i) The Los Angeles Times (January 29, 2003) reported that, in his State of the Union address, Mr. Bush promised “new evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime poses an imminent danger to the world . . . “ (ii) Time (March 7) reported that “in his Thursday night press conference, President Bush stuck relentlessly to a series of familiar talking points about Iraq: Saddam Hussein has failed to disarm; he represents an imminent danger to America and its allies . . . “ In reality, at the press conference to which the Time article referred, it was a reporter that used the phrase “imminent threat.” In response to the reporter’s question, the President said that “Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation” and that “the threat is real . . . “ He did not say that the threat was imminent. (iii) On June 3, Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times said that “The public was told that Saddam represented an imminent threat.” (iv) The web site of Boston’s WCVB-TV reported (June 13) that Helen Thomas of the API had said that “In the run up to the war, Bush and his team spent months contending that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that were a ‘direct and imminent’ threat to the United States.” (v) The Washington Times (July 2) carried a UPI story stating that “the administration’s central arguments for war were entirely based on the ‘reality’ of the imminent threat posed by Iraq.” (vi) In his column in the Chicago Sun-Times (July 13), William O’Rourke said that “Bush and Vice-President Cheney went on and on about Saddam’s imminent threat.” (vii) The Boston Globe (October 4) cited David Albright (a former UN weapons inspector) as saying that “the administration has not been able to substantiate its claim that the threat was imminent.” d. It was the media, through its reporting of statements made by Democrats, that created the impression that the United States faced an imminent threat from Saddam’s Iraq. The Bush administration never made such a claim: (i) The run-up to the invasion of Iraq began in earnest with Mr. Bush’s September 12, 2002, UN address. “Saddam Hussein’s regime is a grave and gathering danger,” said the President. While the threat was serious, it was a gathering threat, not an imminent one. A threat can’t be simultaneously gathering and imminent. (ii) In a speech delivered in Cincinnati on October 2, Mr. Bush described Saddam’s Iraq as “a grave threat to peace.” His speech also included the following words: “Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time.” Significant, yes; imminent, no. (iii) Eight days later, the House and Senate passed the Joint Congressional Resolution authorizing the use of US armed forces against Iraq. In the resolution, the word “threat” appears only once: the President was authorized to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq . . . “ The word “imminent” is absent from the Resolution. (iv) The UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441 on November 8. Resolution 1441 recognized “the threat Iraq’s non-compliance with Council resolutions and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles poses to international peace and security.” The word “threat” appears no where else; “imminent” never appears. (v) In a key passage in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union Address, the President said “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come to late.” Here, Mr. Bush is stating that the threat is not imminent and responding to those who were asserting that military action should not be undertaken unless and until the threat was shown to be imminent. (vi) Secretary of State Powell, in his remarks to the UN Security Council on February 5, said that “The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world” and that “Today, Iraq still poses a threat and Iraq still remains in material breach.” No where in his speech does Secretary Powell describe the threat as being imminent. (vii) Finally, on March 17 – on the eve of the invasion – President Bush, in a televised address, said that “In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over. With these capabilities Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest. We choose to meet that threat now, where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities.” These words depict the threat as being anything but imminent.

3. As to McDowell’s other assertion, there’s clearly no way to know — even with the benefit of historical hindsight — whether a South Vietnam under our protection would have been more likely to have developed into a democracy than a united Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh.

I followed a link to a post on Iraq by Stan Moore at Media Monitors Network that epitomizes the absurd beliefs of (some) leftists.

Moore talks about “some Iraqis” fighting back against American forces without identifying who they are, or noting that they are a small minority. Further, he fails to mention the presence of “foreign fighters” and ignores the fact that far more Iraqis have been targeted and killed than have Americans.

The American military came to Iraq and brutalized, sodomized and humiliated the Iraqi people. That is what happened. And some Iraqis started fighting back against the illegal, brutal occupation, thus becoming “the enemy”.

He supports Cindy Sheehan and asserts that “peace and prosperity” would prevail in Iraq if only our troops would leave. War and destitution? Not a chance.

Cindy Sheehan wants to reverse the situation. There is no intrinsic reason Iraqis should be the enemies of Americans. If America withdrew the troops, the fighting would cease. Iraqis would not attempt to follow the American army back to America to battle us here. Iraqis would like to heal and restore their nation and live in peace and prosperity, but they cannot do so under the barrel of American guns and tanks and with warplanes and attack helicopters threatening their every move.

Why are we there? Why are “some” Iraqis fighting us? Oil!

If not for oil, the U.S. Army would not be in Iraq, and the spectacular gamble to take over and control Iraq’s oil is not working, because Iraqis know that American success in controlling their oil is tantamount to colonial subjugation.

It’s easy to dismiss someone like Moore as being so far out in left field that virtually nobody will listen to him (or to similar voices). But as someone who lived through the Vietnam era, I’m not ready to. I didn’t join the activists in dissing everything American, but I did take part in peace marchs (and I’m still glad I did). I bought into just enough of the Leftist view to be persuaded that the war was wrong (and I still think it was). There’s no doubt in my mind that the voices emanating from the Left influenced me. So were a lot of others — millions of them.

Iraq is not Vietnam. While the prosecution of the Iraq war has been far from perfect, I continue to believe that the invasion was justified. What worries me is the evidence that a growing number of “middle” Americans — as I was in the late 1960s — are buying into enough of the Leftist rhetoric to cause them to favor an immediate or date-certain withdrawal of American forces. That’s what the opinion polls are showing. If the erosion of support continues, a growing number of politicans — including Republican politicans — facing reelection next year will ignore it at their peril.

If an antiwar Congress is elected in November 2006, there’s a very real possibility that the funding of the war will be imperiled. This would be a replay of the action that resulted in the American withdrawal from Vietnam, the North Vietnamese victory, and the ensuing repression and bloodbath.

After the last US soldier left Saigon in April 1975, Americans had no taste for foreign “adventures,” and the world — including the Soviet Union — knew it. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, they could be confident that the “wounded superpower” wouldn’t do much about it. If so, they were right: we responded by imposing a grain embargo and boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Big deal.

Nobody needs to be reminded that the Soviet invasion would later lead to the formation of al-Qaeda, or that the Soviet defeat provided a tremendous boost of confidence to the Afghan Arabs. One superpower down, one to go. If the influence on the attitudes of centrist Americans of today’s Left grows to the point that it matches that of the Vietnam-era Left, it will be two superpowers down, none to go. If you’re searching for a similarity between Vietnam and Iraq, this is it. They would be book-ends.