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Edited on Thu Jun-09-05 03:30 PM by Jack Rabbit
EDITED for grammar and clarity.
Still, there is something else going on here.
In the case of Vietnam, the only thing the US really wanted was a piece of real estate that it deemed strategically important. Otherwise, the best and brightest in the US government believed their own mythology about how everybody in the world really just wanted to be an American, so of course they opposed Communism. There was absolutely no appreciation among the US leadership for Vietnam as a nationalist war in which peasants simply wanted to rid their country of foreign domination, whether it was French, Japanese or American.
If one were to ask a Johnson or Nixon administration official what he thought we were doing in Vietnam, he would probably say, "I thought we were trying to contain Communism." I would accept that as an honest answer. A strategic retreat would no doubt have been better; this would have allowed Vietnam to reunify under Ho while containing any further spread of Communism. Lives would have been saved. The fact the the US was defeated in Vietnam didn't prevent the Berlin Wall from falling or the Soviet Union from collapsing, so no one can say that Vietnam was as strategically important as our best and brightest thought.
In the present situation, there is still a lot of this idea that everybody wants to be an American and that Arabs will gladly let the US make decisions for them. However, in this case, it seems that what the neoconservatives want is a greater US control over Arab society, while their predecessors in Vietnam just wanted to deny Ho Chi Minh's Communist allies a base in Indochina. To the cold warriors, the Vietnamese could be anything, as long as it wasn't Communist; to the neoconservatives, the Iraqis can be Arabs and practice Islam, as long as they sell us their oil and other resources cheap and allow transnational corporations, mostly based in the US, to operate freely in their country.
As Dylan said, "Money doesn't talk, it screams." It is screaming more loudly and using more obscenities in Iraq than it did in Vietnam.
If one were to ask a neoconservative what he thinks we're trying to accomplish in Iraq, he'll say, "We're keeping Americans safe from terrorism." That would not be an honest answer; it is steer manure and this hypothetical neocon would know it. He knew that the case for war, based on terrorism, was "thin" and therefore he worked to "fix" intelligence and facts around the policy. That kind of lying and dissembling was the mission of departments like the Office of Special Plans, headed by Douglas Feith in the Pentagon. Here, the war was about oil and resources, not terrorism. If the case was thin, then the neoconservatives undoubtedly knew that their claims about Saddam's weapons were exaggerated at best; if Saddam possessed weapons in the quantities they claimed at the time, Saddam would never have been able to hide them. Dr. Blix and his people would have been swimming in a biochemical arsenal as soon as they entered the country.
Bush could have come out smelling like a rose in Iraq, even if he wouldn't have really deserved it. All he would have had to have done was let the inspection process work, confirming that Saddam had no banned weapons. Bush could have said, "now we know Saddam has disarmed, where we didn't before." But disarming Saddam was a pretext, not the real goal. Therefore, in order to place Iraq's wealth in the hands of his corporate cronies, he had to go to war, oust Saddam and install either a classic colonial regime or a puppet regime (in fact, one, under Allawi, followed the other, under Bremer) in order to make deals with the west to which the Iraqi people, if they had any say about it through a truly popular government, never would have acquiesced. While the cold warriors may have failed to appreciate the nationalist rather than Communist goals of the Viet Cong, the neoconservatives are very aware of the nationalist sentiments of the Iraqi people and their desire to control their own resources for their own benefit. Consequently, Bush could not have let the inspections process work, especially not if it showed that Saddam was not a threat to his weakest neighbor.
This was lying and dissembling from day one, even about the stated goals of the invasion. While the cold warriors who blundered in Vietnam could always say that they were attempting to contain Communism, the neoconservatives who blundered into Iraq cannot say with any credibility that they were waging a war on terror.
That is why the case for war in Iraq has fallen apart faster than then case for war in Vietnam.
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