Lately I\u2019ve been reading Stanley Karnow\u2019s book \u201cVietnam A History\u201d, looking back on the Vietnam War, the \u201cbig war\u201d of my youth. It\u2019s still hard to get a grasp on what that war was all about. But then again, probably no war is as simple at its proponents would like the world to believe. Still, Vietnam was especially complex. Back in 1969 or so, you seemed to have two popular ways of looking at the Vietnam War. According to way number one, the war was necessary to stop Communism from taking over the world and ending the good life that we\u2019ve come to know here in America (or at least most of us have come to know \u2013 people living in urban ghettos or poor mountain villages might not feel quite as enthusiastic about the Land of Opportunity). Way number two was heard mostly from the younger generation, the long-haired, colorfully dressed college crowd chanting \u201cpeace, pot, microdot\u201d and \u201cHo, Ho, Ho Chi Minh\u201d at impromptu campus demonstrations. According to this view, the Viet Cong were a people\u2019s liberation army that was totally misunderstood by the over-30 crowd, the people that run this country. The problem wasn\u2019t in Vietnam, it was here in the U.S., where the old fogies in charge were heartlessly sending thousands of young men to their deaths in Nam because of their political senility.<\/p>\n
Well, even back then, I was somewhat suspicious of both of these popular viewpoints (I was never big on the Generation Gap, and I’m glad that the youth of today aren’t into it either, since I’m now an old fogie myself!). Unfortunately, amidst all the noise and shouting of the late 60\u2019s, there wasn\u2019t much opportunity for the truth about the Vietnam situation to be seen and heard. Over the past 30 years, it has become clearer and clearer that Vietnam could not and was not accurately being explained by the bigwigs such as McNamara, Rusk, Bundy and Kissinger when they stated that it was all about world Communism. Not that world Communism had nothing to do with it. But the historical, social and political situation in Vietnam was so complex and so tightly wound up, there was just no way that American firepower could build a new nation. We had lots of success in killing Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars; but we just didn\u2019t understand what nation-building was about, especially in the context of that strange and far-off Asian land. We just didn\u2019t realize that people there just don\u2019t look at the world the same way that we do here in America.<\/p>\n
Are there any lessons for our involvement today in Iraq? Do we understand the subtleties of \u201cnation-building\u201d any better three decades later? I have my doubts, and the horrible incident this past week in Fallujah only reinforces my view that the whole Iraq thing is not going to come out as our leaders had plannned (i.e., formation of a stable Arabic \u2013 Moslem democracy). We\u2019re involved in a situation that we don\u2019t understand. The boys in the Pentagon (and Ms. Rice) did a great job with the military tasks. They did the world a great favor by capturing Sadaam Hussein and taking out the remnant of his threatening military machine. But their \u201cphase two\u201d assumptions are not working out very well thus far. They told us that the people of Iraq would respond wonderfully once the evil shadow over their lives was gone. The Iraqis have lots of resources, not least of which includes their oilfields, and given a little bit of direction, they\u2019d have stable, democratic institutions in place in no time. They will see us as saviors, not as invaders, and will cooperate fully in our efforts to set them on the road to peace and progress.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m obviously setting up a straw man here, ready to knock him down with the brazen anti-American attitudes that were evident in Fallujah this past week. But admittedly, perhaps I am being hasty. There is still a chance that a workable social compromise may emerge that will allow a better form of government in Iraq. Perhaps not a vigorous democracy as in India, but something much better than Sadaam, maybe something like Jordan or Egypt — imperfect, but better.<\/p>\n
But the problem is, we\u2019re in the middle of a situation where we don\u2019t fully understand all the forces and motives involved. There seem to be powerful religious and ethnic undercurrents such that the people of Iraq may not be ready to share one nation. The Shiites and the Sunnis have long histories and contentious memories that aren\u2019t going to go away overnight. And do the Kurds really want to share a Parliament and a Prime Minister with the Arabs to the south?<\/p>\n
If we had the power and guts to just sit there in Iraq for a decade or two and run the place as an American colony (while absorbing continuing loss of life), a sense of nationhood might start emerging. The opposing factions would then have a common enemy, us, and might over time build up a tradition of cooperation that would carry on once we finally left. But I doubt if that\u2019s going to happen. One way or another, the US is gonna cut and run within a year or two (at most). The Fallujah incident says to me that there are still deep fears and hatreds that will take years and years to overcome. I honestly don\u2019t think that the crowds involved in that riot hate America for being America. As Sunnis, the favored minority in Iraq over the past 30 years, they know that our democratic institutions will shift power to the Shiites, the unfavored majority. And they\u2019re scared as hell of that \u2013 payback is a bitch. So they\u2019re trying to scare us out before we open the polls. I’m not an expert, but from what I\u2019ve read thus far, the Shiites aren\u2019t being entirely gracious about sharing their newly-realized power either. Whether or not you sympathize with them, the Sunnis probably have good reasons to be fearful. And most everyone else is distracted with shortages of basic things like power, water, jobs and education. It may still be a long time until we have all of that back in working order. Would there really a good time for elections in the next five years?<\/p>\n
So just what is the solution? Well, this is the kind of thing that the United Nations was supposedly made for. Unfortunately, over the past few years the USA has taken a lot of air out of the UN\u2019s tires. I agree that committees usually don\u2019t do good jobs of designing things, and nations are probably no exception. But at least the UN would have more moral authority for a long-term oversight and peace-keeping mission in Iraq until the people there were a bit more ready for democracy, until the basic infrastructure could be fully restored, until the religious and ethnic wounds had more time to heal, until people could learn to trust in government. The UN is far from perfect, but it still seems to me like a better option than some quickie election and US pullout, followed by who-knows-what kind of instability, maybe even civil war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lately I\u2019ve been reading Stanley Karnow\u2019s book \u201cVietnam A History\u201d, looking back on the Vietnam War, the \u201cbig war\u201d of my youth. It\u2019s still hard to get a grasp on what that war was all about. But then again, probably no war is as simple at its proponents would like the world to believe. Still, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}