| By all accounts, Vietnam is a war in which the United States should never have become involved. It was the installation of an American-backed regime under Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam - and that regime's broad human rights violations - that led to the North Vietnamese backed insurgency within South Vietnam. Feel free to extrapolate that to our current position in Iraq (American-backed regime, violation of human rights, insurgency supported from outside of the country).
It wasn't the pull-out of American troops that caused those deaths, either. It was the actions of the South Vietnamese government. Those deaths were held at bay for some two decades at the cost of hundreds of thousands of more deaths - many of them American soldiers. Those deaths would have occurred had the United States never gotten involved in trying to determine the direction of a southeast Asian government.
The Vietnam War wasn't the first war to create refugees - "boat people". It wasn't the first to see interment camps - "re-education camps" - for the survivors. And, by the way, the "killing fields" were in Cambodia. The Vietnamese Communist army actually stopped that butchery.
The lesson of Vietnam, for those of us with even a fleeting knowledge of the area (and mine is very fleeting), was that the greatest army ever known to man is still an insufficient weapon to impose liberal democratic values upon a culture we don't understand. No army in the world can defeat the US Army in the field - but some victories cannot be won in the field.
You can't blame George W. Bush - after all, he hid from the war and his anti-intellectualism is so well known it is the stuff of legends. But we can ask our NJGOP delegation why they don't stand up and correct the President. The question isn't what we will do to protect the government of Iraq but what the Iraqi people will do. Unless the "troop surge" is putting to permanent rest the fear of reprisals when we leave, then it simply can't be said to be working.
Most Americans realize that George W. Bush is a lost-cause for coming to his senses about Iraq. But the NJGOP delegation is another animal. They have to run next year, he doesn't. At this point, the only question is when one of them will have the combination of good sense and moral courage to break ranks with their partisan credentials. |
