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VIETNAM AND IRAQ HAVE MORE SIMILARITIES THAN
DIFFERENCES CHICAGO -- To
my immense surprise, I recently ran into the American scholar who, for
many correspondents in Vietnam, offered the most fair-minded analysis of
the war.
Suddenly, there was Gerald "Gerry" Hickey at the
Chicago Public Library, a little grayer after 35 years, but still much the
same, with a big smile on his face and a welcome "Hello!"
I remembered well how Gerry, then the Rand Corp.'s top
man in Vietnam, had meticulously explained for us the cultures and
behavior of highland tribes such as the Montagnards, but also the Viet
Cong and the "pro-American" Saigon government.
"And now we're doing the same thing all over again,"
he said as we talked about Iraq. "First, we suffer from the same
invincible ignorance about Iraq that we suffered over Vietnamese culture.
Second, in Vietnam we set the military impact with no concern about our
effect on South Vietnamese culture. By the time we left in 1975, they were
just exhausted. They were just tired out -- and so was I.
"It is so sad now that I can see the same mistakes
being made in Iraq. The GIs busting down the doors, breaking into homes,
doing everything wrong. But, you know something," he went on, sadness
outlining his voice, "I'm shocked at much of what we are seeing in Iraq:
The Americans are much crueler than they were in Vietnam. Remember, when
American correspondents found American troops burning down houses -- that
was remarkable then; today it's the norm."
Gerry and I talked a long time that day, mulling over
our common experiences, wondering primarily why the United States can't
ever pause to analyze a country correctly, and above all comparing the two
conflicts.
Despite the myriad voices in the press insisting,
"Iraq is not a Vietnam!" the indisputable fact is that, if you consider
the passions and principles applied there, it really IS another Vietnam.
Among the causes for the war are obscurantist theories about foreign
threats that have little basis in reality; civilians at the top who play
with the soldiers they have never been; and the underlying lies that give
credence to special interests (the Bay of Tonkin pretense in Vietnam, the
supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).
In Vietnam, we were following the bizarre notion of
the "domino theory," the idea that a communist Vietnam would mean that all
of Southeast Asia would fall to communism. The Johnson administration
refused to realize that it was a colonial war, and that in colonial wars,
people fight forever.
With Iraq, the second Bush administration accepted the
idea, perfervidly pushed by civilian neoconservatives, that Iraq was the
center of terrorism, the cause of 9/11 and an immediate threat, ignoring
the Greek chorus of voices warning against such intellectual, military and
moral folly.
Curiosly, in both cases it was civilian ideological
fanatics in the Pentagon, enamored of American technology and with no
knowledge of history or culture, and not the U.S. military, who pressed
for the wars. (It was Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids" then; now it's
Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and others.)
Perhaps the old American maxim of civilian control of
the military might be changed, with what we are seeing, to military
control of the civilians.
Other comparisons of the two wars:
Today, one hears a doublespeak that almost echoes the
communists of the old days. In Vietnam, it was, "We had to destroy the
village to save it." With Iraq, it is President Bush's statement of last
week that "the more successful we are on the ground, the more these
killers will react!"
Today, it's called "Iraqization." In Vietnam, it was
called "Vietnamization" -- late-hour attempts to make everything look as
though it's working. As military historian William Lind wryly remarked to
me of Iraqization, "It presumes that because you pay someone, he's yours."
In 1967 in Vietnam, I spent a lot of time interviewing
officers and troops all over the country, and I wrote a series of articles
that my paper, the Chicago Daily News, headlined with: "The GI Who Asks
'Why?'" Today's GIs are beginning to ask that same question.
America needs to look seriously at these two wars and
analyze why it repeatedly gets involved in painful and costly faraway
conflicts. Why, when we could with little effort be a great example for
mankind, do we allow the driven and arrogant technocrats of the Vietnam
era and the cynical and extremist Jacobins today to carry us to war after
useless war?
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