. . . And Bush Won't Ask For Directions

After years of Bush stating that Iraq and Vietnam had nothing in common, Bush is now saying we should have stayed in Vietnam even longer than we did. The first American died there in 1957, the last one in April of 1975 – that’s an 18-year war.

I am no expert on wars or insurgencies, but with my personal experience (101st Airborne, Vietnam 1967-68) and travel and meetings in over 50 countries (including Kosovo in 1999), I probably have instinctive knowledge and understanding ten times what Bush Jr. and Karl Rove have on Iraq.

Bush Jr. did his war time service in Alabama getting paid about $2,000 a month “working” for a losing Republican candidate for U.S. Senate.  His landlady at the time said Bush Jr.’s room every day looked like a frat house on a Saturday morning.

Rove, of course, believed he was not fit or capable to serve in the military (he was right), so he somehow avoided military service during the Vietnam War.  Cheney used seven draft deferments (including getting Mrs. Cheney pregnant) to avoid being called up, and Rumsfeld was in the Navy right after the Korean War. 

The rest of Bush Jr.’s “Let’s Invade Iraq” team never had a drill instructor in their face. 

General Westmoreland was a very successful military officer in WWII and Korea, but he was as ill-prepared for Vietnam as were Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and most of their White House teams.

WWII had “rules,” some very odd ones, such as when a thousand or so Nazis surrendered, sometimes only a few dozen American troops were needed to guard them. In fact, in some cases both MPs and Nazi officers were allowed to keep their pistols to help maintain order among the surrendered Nazis.

Tanks went up against tanks as Allied planes bombed from Normandy to Berlin.  Finally, in May 1945, the Nazis were defeated.  In the Pacific, it was island by island, and then the Pacific War ended.  To win both fronts took huge courage and the sacrifice of millions of American troops.  The Korean War was fought over territory. The end of the war in 1953 was right where it began – at the DMZ. 

The ironies of war are many.  France, which had been overrun and occupied by the Nazis, immediately after WWII, decided to re-establish its colonies and occupations in the southeast Asian countries of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which the Japanese had occupied during WWII.  Germany had no right to occupy France, but France thought it was their “moral” duty to occupy Indochina.  France first went to Indochina in 1858.

By 1954, the Vietnamese guerillas had defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. While President Eisenhower did provide military equipment to the French, Ike refused to come to the rescue of the French with American troops and planes.

The Geneva Accords were signed by several countries but not by Ike, although he did agree to them. The Accords called for a temporary North and South Vietnam and a national election in Vietnam to unify the country.  Later the CIA told Ike that Ho Chi Minh would win the election, so Ike had the election cancelled. So much for America’s support of democratic elections!

Oh, if only the French had not gone back to Vietnam, or if we had only let the election happen -- Vietnam would have been one whole country for the last 50 years, one most Americans never would have heard of.

France made the same mistake in Algeria.  After thousands died in that guerilla war, the French eventually left in 1962. 

Tragically for my generation, the WWII generation had no clue about Vietnam’s history (China and Vietnam did not get along) nor apparently did most of them have any interest in learning about it.  For over a dozen years, they sent 2.7 million American troops to Southeast Asia, including 1968, when over 540,000 American troops were in Vietnam at the same time. 

The fact that American leaders thought that if we stayed in Vietnam for years, eventually the Soviets and Chinese would stop providing military weapons to North Vietnam and that the Vietnamese nationalists would just give up, illustrates the “Folly” of our leaders (both then and now). 

The Vietnamese just wanted all the foreigners out!

By April 30, 1975, the final American troops were grabbing the last helicopter out of Vietnam after more than 58,200 Americans were killed and ultimately more than three million Southeast Asians died.

If political leaders can’t solve a diplomatic problem, they send in the military.  The whole rationale for the war in Vietnam was the domino theory, i.e. communists would take over more countries, and then what?  We would probably be forced to trade with them. 

Today, the Chinese communist government factories have America as their number one Mall outlet.  And recently, the President of Vietnam had coffee in the White House with Bush Jr. We could have just skipped the war. 

Did anyone learn from the mistakes of Vietnam?  Sure, but not Bush Jr.  In 2000 while campaigning for president, he told the press that in 1968 (his last year at Yale) he didn’t pay much attention to the war in Vietnam. 

That year, 1968, happened to be the most significant year of the war, beginning with the Tet Offensive where 2,000 Americans were killed in February alone (about 70 each day).  President Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek re-election was followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and later the riots (caused by our government) at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

And now Bush Jr. is saying “we” (but not him) should have stayed in Vietnam. 

“We” -- the vast majority of the 2.7 million of us who did serve there -- concluded it was time to end that war.

History does repeat itself.  Bush Jr. knows he is lost in Iraq but like many men he won’t ask for directions on how to get out.  Instead, he will dither in Iraq until he leaves the White House on January 20, 2009 – and in the meantime thousands more will die, including many Americans.

Bob Mulholland is the Campaign Advisor for the California Democratic Party.  He served with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam (1967-68).