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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bald Eagle who wrote (551832)	3/15/2004 10:21:02 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

Iraq a year later: Breaking away from the herd and rethinking the war By CHI-DOOH LI SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER I hate getting caught in stampeding herds. That may be why, one year after the onset of the Iraq war, I'm troubled by hearing rumbles in the distance indicating the herd is beginning to stampede again. As a young law student, I was caught up in the onrushing herd of the late '60s that passionately opposed the Vietnam War. That herd disdained Lyndon Johnson's rationale on why a half-million Americans were fighting and scores dying every day in an undeclared war half a world away. LBJ argued the domino theory -- that the fall of South Vietnam to Communist aggression would lead to the Communist takeover of other Southeast Asian nations as well. He warned that bloodbaths would follow in which untold numbers of innocents would be killed. Like the herd back then, I thought LBJ, and later Richard Nixon, and all their warmongering advisers, were full of deceit and not to be trusted. In the early '80s my herd mentality on Vietnam received a first jolt that awakened me to the realization that my strongly held convictions may have been an exercise in youthful self-righteousness and shallow thinking. I was sitting in the living room of recently arrived refugees from Cambodia, one of several families our church had helped sponsor for resettlement in the United States. This particular family had endured several levels of hell for six years, attempting to escape the Khmer Rouge reign of terror and mass murder in Cambodia. They were lucky survivors. Millions of others were not so fortunate. The head of the family asked me then, "Don't Americans now understand they were right to fight the Communists in South Vietnam? Don't Americans see how so many of us, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, have suffered or died after the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam?" His question put a context of unspeakable suffering by millions of men, women and children to what had been for me only a political issue of war or no war. I was speechless, and had no answer for him. That began a process of complete re-examination of my presuppositions, and then my conclusions, about the Vietnam War. I still believe that the combination of deliberate lying on the part of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and enormous blunders in policy making, made Vietnam into the nightmare it has been for an entire generation -- my generation -- of Americans. But I now believe the cause we fought for and lost in Vietnam was the right one, and that history will ultimately judge the U.S. involvement in Vietnam far more generously than we have in the past 30 years. Today, the herd blames the Bush administration not just of making a mistake in assessing the intelligence reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The herd accuses President Bush of deliberately manipulating the evidence to build a phony case for war against Saddam Hussein. Daily news reports from Iraq that focus exclusively on bad news to the total exclusion of the good feed a frenzy of second-guessing by those with 20/20 hindsight, rendering what was an extremely difficult and complex judgment call by Bush and his advisers in the months leading up to the war into what the herd wants to believe was a clear and simple decision. The context for the Vietnam War 40 years ago was the Cold War -- the confrontation of superpowers acting through surrogate states. U.S. foreign policy was then anchored in the need to show the Soviet Union and China that military aggression would not go unanswered, lest emboldened Soviet and Chinese militarist factions might be encouraged to ignite many more wars fought by surrogates across the world. Seen in its proper context, the Vietnam War may not have ended successfully for the United States but it was a right and necessary war. The context for the Iraq war is international terrorism as manifested in its most hideous form on Sept. 11, 2001, and the sheltering and arming of terrorists, potentially with weapons of mass destruction, by countries that bear the United States nothing but ill will. U.S. foreign policy is now anchored in the need to show those countries that this nation will not hesitate to strike at them preemptively to destroy their WMD capability and to punish them for harboring terrorists. Seen in its proper context years from now, and notwithstanding intentional misuse of intelligence, if proven, or massive blundering in handling the post-war transition, I believe history will judge the Iraq war as right and necessary. Stampeding herds, however, thundering either from the political left or right, have never bothered with contexts, historical or otherwise.