10. The Light at the Beginning Of The Tunnel

The War in Iraq is entirely just and profoundly wrong. That is my premise.  People who are too young to remember the Vietnam era will have more difficulty understanding this perhaps than those who lived through it. One does not have to belabor cliches about guerilla wars, quagmires, exit strategies, or loss of the will to win in comparing the War in Iraq to Vietnam.  Neither does one have to stretch or distort facts to draw accurate  parallels. Then as now America’s soldiers went halfway around the world to be sacrificed on the altar of American ideals. Then as now our nation embarked on a war to conquer and occupy a foreign land in order to bestow on its inhabitants the blessings of freedom and democracy.  In the process we denied to ourselves and to the world that it was a conquest or that it was an occupation.  And in truth, it was for us always a war of liberation.  From the very beginning we believed that a minority of violent and ruthless insurgents opposed us.  They were being misled and exploited by ruthless foreign powers. They had been blinded by illogical ideologies.  We would defeat them by winning over more and more Vietnamese. Our cause was irresistible, our truth irrefutable, and our military invincible.  We would lead them out of the looming shadows of communism and into the light of democracy, and we would inspire them with our generosity and our willingness to sacrifice. 

Of course, it didn’t work out that way.  Instead, while a minority of the population embraced us and a minority of the population killed us, the majority of the population tried desperately to accommodate both sides and simply survive.  But time has a way of working against an occupying force. Pacification has a way of quickly seeming like enslavement. In the end an insurmountable number, if not a majority, of South Vietnamese came to despise our generosity, reject our sacrifices, and refuse the blessings of our freedom and democracy.  Many of those who had supported us in the beginning, or who had remained unaligned became willing finally to trade everything they had and everything that we might possibly ever give them in exchange for a chance of peace.  The pipe dream of Vietnamization evaporated almost in the propeller wash of the last military transport loaded with American combat troops leaving the country.

Vietnam was never-the-less a just war in its goals.  That our frustrations and desperation-- that the very dehumanization of killing in the name of democratic ideals-- ultimately lead us to defoliate jungles, establish free-fire zones, and even in the most extreme case gather civilians in ravines and murder them does not change the fact that our intentions were altruistic.  Had the Vietnamese accepted our tutelage and assistance without violence, had they acquiesced in a peaceful transition to democracy and free trade, I have little doubt they would have been far better off today. But this of course is just idle talk. 

Something there is that doesn’t love a war of liberation.  Even the Italians and French who welcomed American troops when they came as liberators in World War II were not altogether without resentment.  The strange thing about nations is that they tend to develop a fundamental sense of nationhood.  Whatever other forces might coalesce to form the identities of citizens, the sense of nationality is one of the most powerful. It is the psychological gravity that holds unrelated individuals together. It is also the force that by antithesis creates what is foreign.  The more insular the society, the heavier the gravity of nationalistic feeling.

Our unforgivable sin in Vietnam was not being Vietnamese.  Self-determination was always at the heart of the antipathy of the Vietnamese toward foreign powers. They fought the French before World War II; they fought the Japanese during World War II; they fought the French again after World War II; and they fought us when we followed in the unhappy footsteps of the French.  This is the monumental lesson of Vietnam. The natives of even the poorest and least favored nations will die by the thousands rather than submit to domination by a foreign power—even if that power is benevolent and well-meaning. The myth of the “knife in the back” concocted and propagated by revisionist right wingers in America is among the most dangerous fictions at large in our society.  It is the notion that if America had simply bombed or napalmed or defoliated or invaded and occupied a greater fraction of the land mass of Vietnam, and done so unquestioningly without the demoralizing dissent of a liberal press and peaceniks at home we could have won the war in Vietnam. In other words, we fought that war half-heartedly.  That’s just wishful thinking of the most shameful kind, and it is an insult to the thousands of wounded an maimed American youth who fought as whole-heartedly as any soldiers our country ever produced. What is more, it is an American version of the Nazis’ lie of the “November Criminals”, and like all self-deception, it holds within it the potential for self-destruction.

Our involvement in Iraq makes it clear that the lessons of Vietnam were imperfectly learned by the current Administration.  Colen Powell should have known better, and probably did.  But somehow in the lingering smoke of 9/11 we became blinded again by our own icons.  We had an impressive, though incomplete success in Afghanistan.  Once again we convinced ourselves that our cause was irresistible, our truth was irrefutable, and our military was invincible. The heroic American giant of Pearl Harbor fame had been awakened and filled with a terrible resolve.  That icon, beloved of all Americans, was for a time after 9/11 a figure of reverence among our allies and the world as well.  When we moved against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan we were joined and supported by the United Nations and a broad coalition of nations. They were more than merely willing, they were enthusiastic. Then Iraq appeared on the horizon. The Administration began to talk about preemption, unilateralism, and the “irrelevance” of the United Nations.  We became, in the eyes of many in the world, a different kind of giant:  An unpredictable super power convinced of its righteousness and prepared to dismiss and ostracize its critics. The attacks of September 11 gave us a kind of moral mandate.  Foreign governments assisted us in tracking down and freezing terrorist funds. Muslim nations understood that they must do better in suppressing the virulent brand of Islamic extremism that threatened us all. But virtually nobody understood when we suddenly looked away from Afghanistan and began the complicated stalking of Iraq.

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