Iraq, Vietnam And Hillary Clinton
1 comment August 5th, 2007
In desperation, the handful of mainly Republican (plus “independent” Democrat Lieberman) supporters of Bush’s Iraq war are claiming that the so-called troop surge is “working.” Let us go back in time, exactly forty years ago. At that time, defenders of President Johnson were claiming that the American troop build-up in Vietnam was also working. Their quaint rationalizations seemed to have been reborn in the neo-con antics aimed at proving that Bush’s surge is a brilliantly-conceived strategy that is transforming the Iraqi battlefield. Substitute the Vietnamese provincial names for Iraqi provinces, and the claims of four decades ago about some exotically-named provincial region being “pacified,” and residents resuming a normal life, seem like the exact same script being pronounced by Bush’s few remaining defenders.
Simultaneously with the Vietnamese new year of 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army launched the Tet offensive, which tore asunder all the false claims about progress being made in Vietnam.
History may very well be repeating itself in Iraq. In fact, along with claims that the surge is working, even the Iraqi government’s own statistics, known for understating the level of internal violence, concede that civillian casualties in the country have actually increased significantly of late. However, the Bush administration is not known for probity in selecting its metrics for evaluating success.
Hillary Clinton, who voted in favor of the Iraq war, has been enaging in her own duplication of tactics that hark back to the Vietnam war. In virtual replication of Richard Nixon, she is letting it be known that she has her own plan to end the war. Can Hillary Clinton be believed? Hillary Clinton has also gone on record as stating that a residual troop presence must be retained in Iraq. That was actually Richard Nixon’s plan; reduce the U.S. army in Vietnam to a small presence, while shifting the ground war onto the South Vietnamese. It seems that Hillary Clinton is pulling the Nixonian “Vietnamization” plan out of mothballs, in preparation for its updated application in a Hillary Clinton presidential administration.
Everything Hillary Clinton has put on the table thus far regarding Iraq seems designed for reasons of electoral expediency. What’s missing is any recognition that something was fundamentally flawed within the American political establishment to allow a repeat of all the historical errors of Vietnam. And those flaws did not start with George W. Bush. A previous president, one Hillary is married to, played his own role deepening America’s military involvement in Iraq.
It took Richard Nixon four years to finally end America’s military involvement in Vietnam. Two years later, U.S. helicopters ignominiously evacuated the American embassy in Saigon. What will Hillary Clinton’s version of the end-game in Iraq look like? The previous record of the first Clinton administration, which included the Somalia debacle, Rwanda genocide and never-ending military involvment in the Balkans, does not present an encouraging example for what Hillary and Bill Clinton might accomplish in Iraq.
