Vietnam Comes Back To Haunt...

"The price of America's withdrawal (from Vietnam) was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like boat people, re-education camps and killing fields," so said US President George W. Bush in an unexpected attempt to draw parallels between the Iraq war and America’s cold war nightmare in Vietnam. In Bush’s view, an immediate withdrawal of the U.S. troops from the war-torn

Iraq would lead to serious consequences in that country. He hinted that Iraqis would have to undergo the similar “sufferings” of the Vietnamese people under the Communist regime. Moreover, Bush argued that if the US gets out of Iraq when the threat of militancy looms large over the West Asian country that would affect the credibility and morale of the US in its global “war on terrorism.”

So far the critics of the Bush administration have called the Iraq fiasco, the Vietnam of President Bush. And the supporters of the war, particularly the neo-cons in the administration resisted any move to draw parallels between the most contentious two wars in the history of the US. As things stand so, why this change of tone? Now, one might wonder as Bush himself accepts this analogy. Though Bush helped his enemies revive the old debate over the Iraq-Vietnam wars, his intentions look different from that of his detractors. The president is trying to shift the entire focus from Iraq invasion to the presumed consequences of an immediate withdrawal. Many US watchers are of the view that Bush’s risky game with historical examples is aimed at wining the support of the conservatives, who, still, believe that the Vietnam withdrawal was the manifest of vulnerability of the American political class.

If the critics used the Vietnam comparison to expose the flaws of Bush’s Iraq policy, the president invoked the so-called post-withdrawal miseries of the Vietnamese to defend his “stay the course” policy. “The Vietnam fiasco had serious consequences in US. The US lost its credibility among its own allies. President Bush doesn’t want to repeat the same. He believes the war in Iraq is winnable and he wants to get the job done. In another words, he was telling his critics: don’t tell me to repeat Vietnam in Iraq by withdrawing troops prematurely,” Prof. Chinthamani Mahapatra of Jawaharlal Nehru University told B&E. Bush has made plain that the White House would not show its green signal to any troop cut so long as he remains in power. “Unlike Vietnam, Iraq is more than ideological. Vietnam doesn’t have oil where as Iraq plays a central role in America’s grand energy plans. Bush doesn’t want to lose that,” Prof Mahapatra added.

Bush’s remarks have come just one month ahead of the scheduled tabling of the Iraq progress report by Gen. David Petraeus, which is unlikely to sound different from the official stand. Bush will use both the report and Vietnam tp once again befool the public and inform Pentagon that democracy would not be allowed to interfere with military demands.

(Published on Business and Economy, 20 September 2007)

Stanly Mambilly