03Jan04-William Pfaff-William Pfaff: Bush is ignoring the political lesson of Vietnam
William Pfaff IHT
Saturday, January 3, 2004
PARIS This year will be the year of all the answers. We will learn whether George W. Bush remains president of the United States. His fate will tell us whether the basic shift in American foreign policy he carried out will last beyond November 2004. We will discover whether the electorate supports pre-emptive and preventive war, mounted when a U.S. administration judges this necessary.
We thus will know whether the Bush administration's National Strategy Statement of September 2002 represented a simple lapse in traditional military policy and ethics, or reflects a lasting rupture in how Americans think about the rest of the world.
That, in turn, will automatically tell us whether the alliance-based cooperation and constructive multilateralism of U.S. policy since World War II is truly finished.
We will know who has won in Iraq.
Iraq's fate is the most important variable in any attempt to assess where the United States will stand a year from now. If a secure and at least nominally sovereign Iraqi government exists a year from today, alongside American bases in that country, the United States will have won the Iraq war. The odds are low that there will be such a government.
The possibility that the United States might lose the Iraq war has yet to be seriously discussed at the level of national politics and policy. There is an all but universal assumption that American power will in the end crush anything that resists it.
It is true that some critics have warned of a "new Vietnam," but they nearly always do so in terms that suggest only that the eventual victory will be more costly than the Bush government expected.
The Vietnam analogy is wrong in military terms. The insurgents in Iraq are not an organized, disciplined national movement, amply supplied with arms and leadership from a sister country across the border, itself protected by a nuclear power. That was South Vietnam's case, with North Vietnam and China backing the NLF insurrection.
The relevant analogy of Vietnam with Iraq is political. The Bush administration's ambition in Iraq is identical to that of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations in Vietnam. It is to find or shape a plausible national movement that will turn the country into a strategic American ally.
In Vietnam there was from the start a Westernized national force, the Catholic elite and educated middle classes that had run the country when it was a French colony. But they represented too narrow a segment of the population and were too weak to overcome the dynamic, Communist-led National Liberation Movement, which combined peasant nationalism with Marxist utopianism.Frustrated by the failure of Ngo Dinh Diem - the Catholic mandarin and nationalist whom the United States had brought back from American exile and installed in power - to impose himself across the country, the Kennedy administration instigated a military coup and acquiesced in his murder.
It replaced Diem with the first in a series of generals, one after another of whom failed in turn, essentially because they represented the interests and ideas of the United States against Vietnamese nationalism. Eventually the Nixon administration abandoned the last of the generals, Nguyen Van Thieu, and formally withdrew from the war, calling this "Vietnamization." When Saigon fell two years later, President Richard Nixon blamed the U.S. Congress and the liberal press.
The Bush administration, in Iraq, is still looking for its Ngo Dinh Diem.
It ignores the political lesson of Vietnam, which is that no leader in Iraq will be capable of rallying the country, or its major religious or ethic components (except the minority Kurds), whose program is not national sovereignty, an end to American occupation, and national renewal on Iraq's own terms. That means an Iraq in full control of its resources, its security, and its foreign policy. This is not what the Bush administration wants.
Washington initially projected a two-year democracy-building program under U.S. supervision. Military resistance in the "Sunni triangle," an ominous growth of anti-American tension within the Shiite community, and the lack of convincing national leadership caused the administration to decide in November to accelerate the "Iraqization" of the occupation.
Now there is supposed to be an Iraq government in Baghdad by July, still under overall American suzerainty and with 100,000 U.S. troops still stationed in the country. That does not appeal to Iraq's nationalists.
There is debate in the United States over the Iraq invasion, but surprisingly little dissent among U.S. foreign policy elites, officials, commentators and presidential candidates concerning the general American policy of intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere, meant to "install democracy."
If the administration's Iraq policy fails, not only the Bush presidency will be in jeopardy in 2004. So will this complacent cross-party assumption that Pax Americana is America's new destiny. That, in itself, would not be a bad thing.
Tribune Media Services International
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