Evaluating McCain’s Vietnam “Experience”

Jason’s comment on my Wednesday post got me thinking a little more about McCain’s biography—most specifically the Vietnam War part—and what role it should play in the 2008 battle for the White House. . . and what was going to be a one-sentence response grew into something more like a post of its own.

First, the comment:

McCain will absolutely say anything to be elected, but I did find interest in Bai's piece. Not so much for the psychoanalyzing as for the Vietnam question.

For whatever reason, McCain believe[s] we could have and should have won Vietnam by committing more troops. That's a very interesting question to start debating right now, with the parallels with Iraq so obvious. Yet, I feel, lots of portions of America don't really want to ask that question. It brings up an era many would like to forget. Very interesting indeed.

Indeed. Therefore, my response:

That McCain thinks we could have "won" the Vietnam War is not only ignorant, it's dangerous.

Many questions were asked about Vietnam throughout the '70's and '80's. There are lots of good books (Karnow, Halberstam, and Shawcross come to mind), with lots of good insights, and they all tell us that we didn't just fight incorrectly, we fought for the wrong reasons.

Was there a way to "win" in Vietnam? I suppose we could have talked with Ho when he first turned to the US—and he did turn FIRST to the US—for help fighting a repressive colonial occupier. Short of that, there is no right answer.

I feel the right is forcing us to re-debate Vietnam history as a rehearsal for the eventual rewrite of Bush's Iraqi incursion. Imagine, even now, asking the "how could we have won Iraq" question.

The only answer is by not invading in the first place. That McCain still does not understand this makes for a bad omen when considering how or whether he would end the Iraq fiasco, and is a scary indication of just how terrible McCain might be at handling other foreign challenges.

I think the most interesting tidbit in the Bai piece—and I touched upon this the other day—was the revelation, of sorts, that "Mr. Experience" actually decided how to handle a crisis from what he read in a few books, and not from some special lesson learned at the Hanoi Hilton.

I am not against psychobiography—I have read some good ones—but I would want to look at the total of McCain's life experiences. Having been in a POW camp or in the jungle doesn't by itself predict how a veteran/lawmaker sees Iraq (take Bob Kerrey, for instance, an Iraq hawk that witnessed the worst of the Vietnam war firsthand during two tours as a Navy SEAL).

When I look at McCain's life, I see the son and grandson of very successful men who goes into the family business and quickly finds he's just not as smart and not as good at it. He then spends the rest of his life trying to one-up Daddy to prove his worth.

Sound familiar?


(cross-posted on guy2k and The Seminal)

Bears Repeating

I wrote Friday’s post without the benefit of reading that day’s lead editorial in the New York Times. The editors (in their infinite wisdom) had a remarkably similar take on the whole “Iraq as Vietnam through the beer goggles of President Bush” thing—not to mention the whole Wizard of Oz (please ignore the man behind curtain), it’s al-Maliki’s fault distraction.

Blaming the prime minister of Iraq, rather than the president of the United States, for the spectacular failure of American policy, is cynical politics, pure and simple. It is neither fair nor helpful in figuring out how to end America’s biggest foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam.

. . . .

The problem is not Mr. Maliki’s narrow-mindedness or incompetence. He is the logical product of the system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a unified and peaceful democracy.

. . . .

Washington’s failure to face these unpleasant realities opens the door to strange and dangerous fantasies, like Mr. Bush’s surreal take on the Vietnam war.

The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.

The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.

If Mr. Bush, whose decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre, took the time to study the real lessons of Vietnam, he would not be so eager to lead America still deeper into the 21st century quagmire he has created in Iraq. Following his path will not rectify the mistakes of Vietnam, it will simply repeat them.

Now, at this point, I was going to write about how remarkable it is that both the Times’ editorial board and myself would focus on Diem, and the dangers of American-influenced, repeated regime change as the real lesson of the Vietnam conflict that comes to mind at the present moment. . .

. . . except that it’s not remarkable at all.

Anyone who lived through the Sixties, or anyone who has read a decent history of the second Indochinese war, should spot the same analogy in a well-reasoned flash.

What is remarkable, rather, is that more people haven’t seized upon this cautionary lesson of history. What is remarkable is that supposedly serious and informed Democrats have jumped on the “blame Maliki” bandwagon. And, even more remarkable, I’ve gotta say, is when one supposedly serious Democrat is seeking the presidency.

Yes, I’m talking about you, Senator Hillary Clinton.

Senator Clinton is supposed to be running for president and against the failed policies of the Bush Administration—the Iraq debacle being exhibit A. To disarm yourself that way, to blame an Iraqi PM (and a Bush-picked one at that) for the problems in this conflict when, frankly, all the blame (yes, all) for this circus of blood lay squarely at the feet of George W. Bush, is strategically inane. . . besides being historically ignorant.

What happens when the corrupt and connected Iyad Allawi replaces a deposed Nouri al-Maliki and things continue to go horribly wrong—as you know, if you had been a good student of the Vietnam War, they inevitably will? You can’t very well go back to a strict “blame the other guy” policy—the other guy being Bush. Hell, Senator Clinton is actually, officially, out ahead of the President on this one. Bush says al-Maliki is a “good guy.”

Memo to Clinton, and Senator Carl Levin, and any of the other Democrats even thinking about blaming al-Maliki, or joining the PR-scripted chorus of “serious” people who think Allawi is just what we need to fix our Iraqi problem: Our Iraqi problem is George Bush—because our Iraqi problem is of George Bush’s making. Plain and simple.

So, repeat after me: It’s Bush’s war. It’s Bush’s war. It’s Bush’s war.

(cross-posted on guy2k)

Our Man in Baghdad

Gallons of cyber ink have been spilled about how he who did not learn history, George W. Bush, would now mangle and distort history on his way to repeating it. The idea that the Vietnam war was a noble fight, and one that was winnable (whatever that means) had it not been for those lily-livered Americans who just “gave up” after roughly a dozen years and 60,000 deaths, would be laughable, and not worth a comment, were it not for a concerted effort by a cadre of neocons to rewrite history in just this way.

Of course, we don’t really need a rewrite, we already have Karnow, Sheehan, Halberstam, and Shawcross. . . and, for today, anyway, me.

(Not to imply I’m in a class with those four—I’m not.)

Before we get to my bright, shining two-cents, let me throw a couple of other coins in the fountain of blood first.

When Bush chose to recount the horrible echoes of Vietnam that would befall us should we bring a quick end to his Iraq fiasco, he said this:

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.”

Of course, the price of America’s prolonged involvement in Vietnam was paid by millions of innocent citizens, too, and so much of what happened after the US withdrawal would not have, had the US pursued diplomatic, rather than military, options. And, to this day, Vietnam suffers the aftereffects of the indiscriminate bombings and defoliation that were an integral part of what our current president seems to think was a brilliant strategy to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people.

Speaking of bombings. . . I have not heard nor seen one reference to this—which amazes me—but the exclamation point on Bush’s litany of historic horrors—“killing fields”—well, that wasn’t in Vietnam.

Nope. The killing fields were in Cambodia—a little “sideshow” (as William Shawcross called it) to the Vietnam War. The US, in its infinite wisdom, secretly conducted massive bombing raids into Cambodia—and also sent in ground troops—because it felt that the Cambodian government was aiding the Vietcong. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, I know, but it has to be noted that, a) roughly 800,000 Cambodians were killed by American bombs, and that, b) the events that led to the killing fields of Kampuchea (where an additional 2 to 3 million died) can be directly—directly—traced to the US actions in the region.

I would also like to point out that the US wasn’t the country that put a stop to the killing fields. No. The Khmer Rouge was ousted by the armies of Vietnam—the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

But, believe it or not, all of this is just a sideshow to what I really wanted to talk about today. Seriously. What really set me thinking about Vietnam was not Bush’s brain-dead speech, but rather the noise coming from several other noted national figures.

I have been quite disturbed for some time by the apparent ease with which we have all come to blame the Iraqi “government” (for want of a better term) for so many of the problems we now see over there. Granted, these so-called leaders have not done very much to make things better—in fact, they have made things worse—but do we really need to be reminded that a) the mess was not of their making, and b) this leadership was essentially hand-picked by the US.

Do I think that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a hood? Yes, I do—but he’s our hood. Which is why I have to shudder when I hear the likes of Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton hopping on the “hey, hey, ho, ho, al-Maliki’s gotta go” bandwagon.

It is all the more chilling to discover, as we did this week, that said bandwagon is actually powered by a US consulting firm closely allied with another American “friend.”

The powerful Republican lobbying group of Barbour Griffith & Rogers is plotting an effort to displace Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and supplant him with former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. IraqSlogger reported:

BGR’s work for Allawi includes the August 17 purchase of the Web site domain Allawi-for-Iraq.com.

In recent days, BGR sent hundreds of e-mail messages in Allawi’s name from the e-mail address DrAyadAllawi@Allawi-for-Iraq.com.

BGR’s staff is stacked with conservative operatives with extremely close ties to the White House. Its president is Bush’s former envoy to Iraq, Ambassador Robert Blackwill. Philip Zelikow, a former Counselor to Condoleezza Rice, serves as a senior adviser to the firm. Lanny Griffith, chief executive officer, is a Bush Ranger having raised at least $200,000 for Bush in the 2004 presidential election. And Ed Rogers, chairman and founder of the firm, has been a reliable political ally for the Bush White House.

Yes, that is the same Iyad Allawi that was hand-picked by “Viceroy” Paul Bremer back in 2004 to lead the interim government of Iraq, but lost his post in the “democratic” election that President Bush likes to talk so much about. The same one that was once described as “Saddam lite,” the one that came to the US during the ’04 presidential race and campaigned for Bush’s stay-the-course “strategy,” the one that has decades-old ties to the CIA, and the one that published an op-ed in the Washington Post last Saturday calling for the Iraqi parliament to oust al-Maliki and work more closely with the American government.

Of course, journalistic integrity requires me to point out that late Thursday, a Bush Administration official denied any White House involvement with the Allawi putsch. Which reminds me of another war. . . yes, that would be Vietnam.

Ngo Dinh Diem was fervently anti-communist and a Catholic in a country that was overwhelmingly Buddhist. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration picked Diem to lead the southern half a newly partitioned Vietnam. A year later, Diem rigged an election, and assumed the Presidency of the Republic of Vietnam (aka South Vietnam). By 1961, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was hailing Diem as the “Winston Churchill of Asia” and promising him increased military aid to fight the communist influences of the North.

But, by the Summer of ’63 (and, again, I am over-simplifying here), Diem’s increasingly violent suppression of the Buddhists, and the self-immolation of monks in Saigon, made the Kennedy Administration back in DC nervous. While never publicly advocating Diem’s removal, parts of the Kennedy Administration got cozy with ARVN generals who were spoiling for a coup.

When November started with US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge refusing to see Diem, it was seen by the generals as an endorsement of action (there may well have been many stronger signals behind closed doors); by the evening of November 2, Ngo Dinh Diem was dead—murdered in the back of an armored car that was supposed to take him to General Headquarters.

Current history tends to surmise that President Kennedy didn’t think Diem would be killed after the coup, likely because he didn’t think much about what would happen at all. Three weeks later, JFK was dead, and a new administration would make a mess of cleaning up after the US-sponsored bloody overthrow of the United States’ hand-picked leader.

It is interesting to note that John’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, is said to have expressed his doubts about the coup this way: “I mean, it’s different from a coup in Iraq. . . we are so intimately involved in this.”

Which brings us right to the present, doesn’t it? Not so much with regard to the White House denials of any “coup plotting”—though I have no doubt whatsoever that they are very capable of making such a move—but with regard to the Democrats, who seem all too willing to help ease the way for al-Maliki’s unceremonious exit. I have to say: be careful what you wish for.

Be careful, and not just because, with another regime change in Iraq, the Bush Bunch will buy themselves another Friedman Unit to make “progress.” Be careful because we know our history—president and neocon cronies excluded—and we know where the Vietnam analogy does apply.

We know our history, and we know what we are damned to repeat. And how we are already damned.


(cross-posted to Daily Kos)