THE VICE PRESIDENT COMETH
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By Richard Reeves
Op/Ed
Fri Jul 25, 8:02 PM ET
NEW YORK -- Making South Vietnam into a colony of the United States turned out to be a bad idea. But it took many of us more than 10 years to figure that out. The country, or half-country, became ours in the autumn of 1963, when President John F. Kennedy signed off on a military coup overthrowing President Ngo Dinh Diem. We abandoned the place in 1975.
Those were the good old days before satellite television and all news, all the time. News came by appointment each evening at 7 o'clock then. Reaction times usually fit 24-hour cycles. Now there is no reaction time, and we are trying to create the equivalent of quantum mechanics or chaos theory to explain how events and their force fields push, pull, impinge, collide and bounce off each other.
You know things are happening too quickly for traditional analysis when Vice President Dick Cheney is sent out to try to calm the faithful. And there he was last Thursday night to explain why it was we went to war only 130 days before. His plea for patience, understanding and patriotism fell on friendly ears in the auditorium of the American Enterprise Institute, where President Bush had gone at the end of February, before the invasion of Iraq, to say, "We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more."
No one believes that anymore. Rather, we believe now that we will get out of Iraq as quickly as we can. Bush and Cheney, too, have become prisoners of events. They decided to go into war alone, reckoning that we would be welcomed as liberators and victory would be its own reward. We did not, they thought, need allies in our "coalition" with the British -- and, it seems, we did not need a postwar plan because all those oppressed and terrified Iraqis wanted to be just like Americans, living happily ever after under the benign rule of Western-thinking exiles.
All the plans, the hopes, the fantasies seem lost in the dust. Perhaps the death of Saddam Hussein's vicious sons -- and one day the death of the tyrant himself -- will help some. But no one is betting on that, beginning with our friends and partners, the British.
One dream that died was that the country would quickly democratize with benevolent American guidance, all paid for by petrodollars when the world's oil companies bid for the right to pump the black gold out from under Iraq's northern deserts. But over the past couple of weeks, those companies have been telling us privately that they would not be willing to go into Iraq until they were persuaded the place was safe and stable.
"The safety of our people is paramount," said Sir Philip Watts, the British chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell. "There has to be proper security, legitimate authority ... with a level playing field and a transparent process by which we will be able to negotiate agreements that would be longstanding for decades. We wouldn't go into that situation until and unless these conditions were satisified."
Some of that statement is in code. Foreign companies do not trust the Bush administration to be fair in dividing the fruits of Iraqi oil between foreigners and American companies like, say, Halliburton, the one Cheney used to run.
Our friends in London have stopped speculating whether or not the militarily muscular Americans are going to be proper colonialists. The assumption now is that the question is silly, that the Americans are not even going to try. Max Hastings, in the conservative Daily Telegraph, wrote the other day: "The British dealt with the Dervishes at Omdurman in 1898 as ruthlessly as the Americans addressed Saddam's forces in 2003. Yet we redeemed ourselves by staying on to rule the Sudan with exemplary efficiency for 50 years."
Well, bully for them. Hastings reminds readers that after Rudyard Kipling's famous line, "Take up the White Man's burden," there is a second: "In patience to abide."
We do not, as most everyone knows, have the patience Cheney asked for on Thursday. One day, perhaps in memoirs, Bush and Cheney will have to admit that a series of well-meaning, very American misjudgments and miscalculations has once again put us in harm's way without a decent local map.
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