Troublemaker’s Journal

In his recent speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, President Bush compared the situation in Iraq to that in Vietnam, arguing that the United States must continue the war in Iraq because a withdrawal of U.S. troops would lead to regional wars and bloodbaths, as happened after the withdrawal from Vietnam. There were regional wars and bloodbaths after the Vietnam War, but those events didn’t take place for the reasons that Bush suggests. The historical record demonstrates that the United States caused them.

Most of us now know a lot more about the Vietnam War than was known at the time. The French had conquered Vietnam in the late 19th century, turning it into a vast plantation for French companies like Michelin rubber, a situation beautifully and horrifically depicted in the film Indochine.

For more than 30 years the French, and later the United States, fought to prevent the Vietnamese from winning independence from foreign political and economic domination. The United States supported the French in Vietnam until they were defeated at Dien Bien Phu. Then the United States took over the war in the 1950s, supporting a series of corrupt and unpopular U.S. puppet governments in Saigon.

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States expanded the war from Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia, killing an estimated 2 to 3 million people in Southeast Asia. The U.S. war was fought by massive aerial bombing: the destruction of forests, fields and factories and the murder of civilians — women, children and elderly included — in what were many My Lai massacres.

Governments were toppled, populations uprooted and millions turned into refugees. Yet, in the end, the Vietnamese — the people of a small nation with a low level of economic development, with limited support from the Soviet Union and later aided by the U.S. anti-war movement — succeeded in defeating the United States and finally winning their independence from Western powers in 1975. That was a good thing: We Americans celebrate when people win their independence.

Before forced from office, President Nixon promised in the Secret Protocol to the 1973 Peace Agreement that the United States would re-establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam, take economic responsibility for reconstruction of the country and offer loans for economic development. However, when Gerald Ford became president, he reneged on the U.S. promise and decided to further punish the nation that the United States had virtually destroyed.

He instituted an embargo of Vietnam, froze $150 million in Vietnamese assets in the United States and the U.S. vetoed Vietnamese membership in the United Nations. President Carter continued the embargo, as did Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush. President Clinton finally ended the 19-year embargo in 1994.

The embargo meant real suffering in Vietnam. I remember visiting Vietnam about 10 years ago and having a woman ask me, “Why did your government starve us all of those years after the war was over?”

Nixon and Mao Zedong had embraced in 1972, and the United States became allied with China against the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Seeking a counterweight in Southeast Asia against Vietnam, China and the United States backed the forces of Pol Pot in Cambodia. President Carter’s advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later explained, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.” Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge is believed to have killed somewhere between 800,000 and 2 million Cambodians.

The threats from China, a U.S. ally, led the Vietnamese to drive out a million and a half ethnic Chinese (Hoa) who were Vietnamese citizens in 1968. More than 250,000 overseas Chinese also left Vietnam, often in ill-equipped boats. Between 30,000 and 40,000 of them died at sea. Vietnam’s unjust and inhumane anti-Chinese policy was a direct result of the pressures coming from China and backed by the United States.

Faced with the threat of the Chinese- and U.S.-backed government of Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia on Dec. 25, 1978, overthrowing the government and installing a new one after just two weeks of fighting. That ended the horror of the genocidal murders of Pol Pot. The United States continued to support the Khmer Rouge from 1979 to 1991 as part of a coalition government in Cambodia.

Then, in 1979, the United States gave its blessing to the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese invasion extended the destruction of Vietnam to regions that had not been destroyed by the French and the Americans. The Vietnamese put up a stiff resistance, and the Chinese withdrew after 16 days.

What is the comparison? What lesson do we draw?

The lesson is that we cannot expect the U.S. government, whether under Bush or Rudi Giuliani, whether under Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, to get out of the Middle East. Even after the United States is defeated and forced to withdraw most of its combat troops from Iraq, it will continue to try to dominate the region through other powers like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In its attempt to control Middle East oil, the United States is likely to bring about a new series of regional war and bloodbaths.

Clinton, Obama and all the other Democrats — except for Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel — call for a continued U.S. military and naval presence in the Middle East. None of the leading Democratic contenders has spoken out against the attack on Iran that the Bush administration is preparing.

If we want a different foreign policy, we have to build independent movements in the United States that oppose imperialist wars and put no faith in either the Republicans or Democrats to bring about peace. There is no hope — there is only criticism, organization and struggle.

This article appears in Aug 29 – Sep 4, 2007.