Kissinger and Bush

Henry Kissinger wrote an appalling op-ed in the LA Times this morning. He begins by repeating the old canard that "American disunity" led to the ultimate defeat in Vietnam. But that's not the most dangerous duck he's floating. Kissinger says that we won in Vietnam, more or less, because our overtures to China got them (and the USSR, apparently, after the 1972 summit) to "stand aside" when we mined Hanoi harbor. That, he said, scared the N. Vietnamese and got them to sign the peace deal. He then says that "American disunity" again faltered when the USA would not back S. Vietnam after the war even though we had "had achieved a decent opportunity for the people of South Vietnam to determine their own fate." Now what's really scary is that Kissinger is regularly consulting with Bush and Cheney.

Of course, this is realist rubbish. McNamara and Kissinger never understood that the Vietnamese conflict was a colonial war, with the USA playing the role of imperial power (stepping in for the French) and facing a domestic insurgency motivated by its desire to be free of occupation. They always believed that they were fighting a proxy war with the USSR and/or China. They never got it. In "Fog of War", McNamara finally admits he now understands it. Too bad for 50,000 dead Americans and a scarred generation. (Rumsfeld and McNamara are twins in their arrogance: in "Fog of War", McNamara basically says that he's so smart and did the best anyone could do given the information he had, ignoring the millions of Americans at all levels who protested because they knew better- he still thinks they are somehow the problem).

Bush makes the same errors in Iraq, thinking that Syria and Iran are the "real" enemies. Or the amorphous "foreign fighters" of Al Qaeda. Or "Islamofascism." No, it's not a cold war redux. No, it's not a proxy war. What we have in Iraq is a domestic insurgency motivated by domestic politics. It's Vietnam all over again. And just like in Vietnam, the President keeps lying, saying that victory is "just around the corner." All that's around the corner are more dead boys.

Just like Iraq today, S. Vietnam was not a popular or democratic regime. It was a sick, corrupt, and ugly dictatorship. Iraq's new puppet government under Al-Maliki is becoming the same thing, beholden to various Shi'ite militias, running death squads out of the ministry of the interior, and so forth. The S. Vietnamese were not able to "determine their own fate" at any time. Neither is Iraq today. American disunity didn't cause S. Vietnam's collapse in 1975; the total lack of any support among the S. Vietnamese people did. Iraq may well go the same way, even if we achieve some form of phony "peace with honor" as Kissinger thinks he did in Vietnam.

In Vietnam, we were told that defeat would be catastrophic, the good old domino theory. Bush and Cheney say the same thing today, "defeat would be catastrophic, destroy the middle east, etc., monsters eating your children in bed..." Nope. Iraq should be so lucky to end up like Vietnam today.