10-24, 9:01 am
Many Americans opposed to this disaster are comparing it to the Vietnam War. A more useful comparison as it affects Iraqis, however, may well be to Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Vietnam, despite the destruction, made a revolution against French colonialism and U.S. imperialism. Afghanistan failed to do so and continues to suffer the consequences. Iraq, whose oil resources made it more advanced economically than either Vietnam or Afghanistan, is now faced with the internal disintegration of Afghanistan while Vietnam is a unified country under Communist leadership seeking to adjust to and develop within 21st century conditions.
Iraq was a relatively advanced country with enormous oil deposits when socialist oriented military officers overthrew the British installed right-wing monarchy in 1958. From then on, the U.S. sought to remove the non-aligned, left-oriented government, which the U.S. saw as a threat to both its anti-Soviet regional alliance system and its oil interests. Although Iraqi politics of the 1960s and 1970s are very complicated, U.S. policy wasn’t. Ultimately the U.S. supported the secular Pan Arab nationalist and virulently anti-Communist Ba’ath Party against Iraqi Communists and other left forces as it supported anyone anywhere against Communist and other left forces.
After the Iranian clerical revolution (which was both anti-U.S. and anti-Soviet) the U.S. supported the Ba’ath Party dictator Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran and protected Hussein’s regime from collapse when the Iranians were winning the war and demanding his removal as the price of peace. Saddam Hussein’s most notorious crimes, the use of poison gas against Iranians and Kurds and other atrocities, were committed when he had the support of the Reagan and Bush I administrations.
After a decade of U.S. support, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait (apparently in the belief that he had a green light from the Bush I administration to do so) to replenish his treasury with new oil wealth. The result was the first Gulf war which devastated Iraq, resulting in a greatly weakened Ba’ath regime that continued to rule over a nation whose people suffered the consequences of both the war and the international sanctions imposed on the regime.
By 2000, his military forces, according to Pentagon reports, were at most 50 percent of what they had been in 1990. The nations in the region, including Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, were his enemies. Even Israel had relatively better relations with Turkey and Egypt than his regime.
The domino theory used to justify the Vietnam War was either an illusion or a delusion. The Bush administration’s contention that Saddam Hussein had 'weapons of mass destruction' and was somehow allied to Al Qaeda were as much crude lies churned out by the Bush propaganda machine as Nazi Germany’s 1939 claim that it had been invaded by Polish troops!
Iraq had been a relatively advanced nation while Afghanistan had been a very impoverished feudal one whose people were overwhelmingly illiterate and beset by complex ethnic rivalries and a traditionally weak central government in Kabul. After the Soviet supported revolutionary government (which came to power in 1978) was destroyed in 1991, the gains it had made in women’s equality, education, and social economic development were largely undermined. Brutal warlords who fought each other and were displaced by an ultra-right clerical dictatorship, the Taliban, whose savage persecution of women who sought either education or employment and anyone who refused to follow its clerical mandates earned near universal condemnation. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two major U.S. allies in the region, however, continued to recognize and support it.
The U.S. government did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people until it became clear after the World Trade Center attack that the Taliban regime was the ally and protector of Al Qaeda, a fact that was pretty clear to people throughout the world before the attack.
Today, the violence continues as Taliban forces use the Pakistan/Afghanistan border area as a base to attack the U.S. supported Karzai government. Ironically, the CIA and its Pakistani subordinates use the same region a generation ago as a base from which to arm right-wing 'freedom fighters' to attack the Soviet supported revolutionary government in Kabul.
Afghanistan was the victim of a failed revolution, for which the U.S. can claim credit and Afghan Communists and the Soviets can take at least some of the blame, and a nightmarish counter revolution that fed on the backwardness of the society.
The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq is rapidly bringing the conditions of Afghanistan to Iraq. First, warlords terrorize the people as they fight with each other. Second, the religious fanaticism that characterized the Afghan counter-revolution has become a factor in the terror that Iraqis experience in their daily lives, thanks to a U.S. invasion which drew Al Qaeda into the conflict and transformed the Sunni-Shia denominational split into mounting death and destruction.
Also, the Christian minority, an estimated 1.2 million before the U.S. occupation, has suffered escalating terrorist attacks and has seen its numbers dwindle to perhaps as few as six hundred thousand. The Bush administration, which waves the cross along with the American flag where school prayer, abortion, or 'intelligent design' are concerned to appeal to right-wing Christians in the U.S., has done nothing to protect them.
Private U.S. contractors with private armies rake in billions while the Iraqi people suffer deepening impoverishment. U.S military forces risk their lives for a fraction of what the private security forces are receiving. Iraqis as a people experience economic and social breakdown as their society is torn apart. The ideologically identical right-wing U.S. governments once supported the Iraqi regime now claim to have 'liberated' them from it. Likewise, the U.S. government claims to have 'liberated' the Afghans from a Taliban made up of the guerrillas the U.S. government had armed, trained, and supported as 'freedom fighters' in the 1980s. The money that pours into Iraq is much greater than Afghanistan, but it goes to American business interests and their local allies who loot American taxpayers while the Iraqis live in world where 'terrorism' defines their day to day existence.
Both Iraqis and Americans can learn from the Vietnamese experience. Vietnam was and is like Afghanistan a very poor country. Vietnam faced a much higher level of outside military intervention than anything that Iraq or even Afghanistan with all of its travails faced. But Vietnam was able at enormous cost to achieve both national liberation and a social revolution, which makes its experience very different.
First, the Vietnam War could not be separated from the Vietnamese revolution against French and American imperialism and for socialism. The Vietnamese people under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnam Workers (Communist) Party, created the Vietminh to fight the Japanese invaders during WWII. Following the war, they fought a national liberation war against the French who with U.S. backing sought to restore their Indochinese Empire (1946-1954). The Vietnamese people under the leadership of Vietnamese Communists then fought for 20 bloody years against the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administration’s attempt to partition their country and create 'South Vietnam' as an anti-Communist state and 'base' for the U.S. 'containment' policy in violation of international agreements and United Nations policies.
In Vietnam the solution was always relatively simple for the U.S.—accept the will of the Vietnamese people and negotiate a settlement for national unification, even though that would mean a Vietnam unified under the leadership of Vietnamese Communists and committed to a policy of socialist construction. And despite U.S. government claims, Vietnam never sought any military alliance against the U.S. or to any policy of 'exporting' revolutions to neighboring countries (the so-called domino theory used by policymakers to stall troop withdrawal). There were no natural resources like oil to be controlled.
Assuming one was not deluded by the 'domino theory,' the strategic importance of the region to the larger cold war conflicts was minimal. Also, the Great Society government of Lyndon Johnson, attempting to implement a sweeping progressive program of Civil Rights legislation, a 'war on poverty,' and the most significant expansion of social legislation since the New Deal, had escalated a war against an 'enemy' that was fighting for social progress, justice and dignity for the Vietnamese people. It was an 'enemy' with whom its progressive supporters at least had more in common than they did with George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, and the advocates of a racist backlash for segregation and 'love it or leave it' national chauvinism whom Richard Nixon would christen a 'silent majority' and he, Ronald Reagan, and the two Bush presidents would pander to over the next three decades.
Although Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh fought against the Japanese and aided the U.S. during WWII, all U.S. governments from Truman on refused to recognize them. We should remember that although more bombs were dropped on Vietnam then in WWII, an estimated three million people perished, and the environmental destruction remains a powerful force in Vietnamese life to this day, no reparations have ever been paid to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
While Vietnam today makes concessions to capitalist states for its development, it is independent at a level that Iraq and Afghanistan can only dream.
While the U.S. must withdraw from Iraq, we must remember that it is the Iraqis who are suffering the horrors of this conflict.
We too must learn some lessons from the Vietnam War. The first is not to move on, as most of the anti-war movement did after 1975, to simply forget about what was done and the need for the U.S. to recognize Vietnam and provide it with reparations and aid.
While the long-term solutions in Iraq are more difficult for progressives to contemplate today than the solutions were in Vietnam four decades ago, what we must do here politically is much simpler.
Defeating Lyndon Johnson and the cold war Democrats in 1968 was necessary, but of course, the eventual result was the defeat of the anti-war 'new politics' forces inside and outside the Democratic Party and the victory of Nixon. Defeating Bush and the Republican Party is something that all progressive forces in the nation can unite on with complete certainty that no Democratic Congress and administration will not be a huge advance from the Bush policies.
Then we can begin the difficult task of fighting for a peace-oriented foreign policy. Perhaps, Halliburton and the other companies who have profiteered by the billions from this war could be 'surcharged' to the tune of many billions for Iraqi reconstruction and for a greatly expanded Peace Corps. Perhaps the military budget which is now approaching $500 billion annually might be funded by a special corporate 'defense fund' rather than general revenues, the way social security is funded by payroll taxes.
While these suggestions might sound extreme to some, we must remember how extreme U.S. policy has been in the twenty-five years since Ronald Reagan became president and the Right became the most influential force in American politics. In 1981, the federal debt was $1 trillion ($9 trillion today) and the military budget roughly $125 billion ($450 billion today) in a world where the Soviet Union and its allies no longer exist.
Our enemies have long thought big. We must also think big in terms of dismantling the industrial part of the military industrial complex, reducing and redefining both military spending and the deficit while we increase massively social spending that will both increase living standards and labor productivity and revitalize a tax base that will produce long-term deficit reduction.
The first step is to defeat the Republicans in 2006. The second is to end their control of the presidency. The third will be to develop and fight for a program that will not merely ease the pain of the Bush II years (as Clinton’s policies did for the Reagan-Bush I era) but institute changes in policy that make the Reagan –Bush era as much a part of the distant past as the Pierce-Buchanan era before the Civil War or the Coolidge-Hoover era before the New Deal.
