Judith Coburn on "Iraqification":
However it feels to anyone else, it’s distinctly been flashback city for me ever since. One of the great, failed, unspeakably cynical, blood-drenched policies of the Vietnam era, whose carnage I witnessed as a reporter in Cambodia and Vietnam, was being dusted off for our latest disaster of an imperial war. Some kind of brutal regression was upon us. It was the return of the repressed or reverse evolution. It was enough to drive a war-worn journalist to new heights of despair.
While brooding about Iraqification, I was reminded of what historian and Vietnam-era New York Times journalist A.J. Langguth said about Vietnamization. "By [1970], well over a hundred thousand [South] Vietnamese soldiers were dead, crops destroyed, cities in ruins, and we’re talking about Vietnamization as though the Vietnamese weren’t already bearing the brunt of the war," he told historian Christian G. Appy for his oral history of the Vietnam War, Patriots. "It was one of those words that gave a reassuring ring in Washington, but it was really insulting."
A point well taken as Iraqification is heralded in the land. (From How Not to Vietnamize Iraq at TomDispatch)
Last year I read Paul Berman’s book Power and the Idealists, and it made a compelling case from a "left" point of view for military interventions in areas like the Balkans and Iraq. I’m simplifying here somewhat, so I risk misrepresenting the complexity of Berman’s presentation, but I found it surprising for its emphasis on abstract principle, as if it mattered only in a secondary sense who was intervening, and what their track record, political philosophy, and foreign policy goals were. In this argument, it was enough that powerful Western democracies should intervene where humanitarian disasters required it.
This is in broad strokes the moral argument made by left leaning types like Christopher Hitchens. And that’s how a lot of Friedmanesque Democrats and other center left types came to support the Iraq War in the beginning. They saw it as an abstract moral issue, and they assumed that America as the most powerful Western democracy had a humanitarian obligation to liberate Iraqis from Saddam’s brutal repression.
People like me, who were against the war from the beginning, were branded as hippy peacenik types who didn’t understand the real world. We were dismissed as moral lightweights because we were unwilling to shoulder the responsibility that great nations must assume in promoting freedom in democracy in areas of the world that long for it and would have it if only their corrupt political leaders were removed. And all I could think when I heard this kind of talk was, Are we living in some bubble world where abstract moral considerations
trump considerations of historical and cultural possibility? Do we have such short memories about the track record of these administration cold war hardliners? Even if we are convinced that such a war is morally justified, why would we ever trust this group to execute it?
What we’re seeing now is exactly what a lot of people thought would happen because of the actors involved. I’m not sure any other outcome would have been possible, but it was pretty much guaranteed by the fact that the main architects of the war were the cold war hardliners whose mental template hasn’t changed at all since Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Iran/Contra. Whatever made any of us think that they would have brought anything but the disasters that they were responsible for in the past? Why is the American memory so short? Why did Americans think that somehow what was proven stupid before would not be stupid now?
Time and again we are told how this group in power has an ideological mindset that creates a lens through which only self-reinforcing information is let in. It’s clear that information that does not fit into their predetermined template cannot penetrate. Coburn in her piece tells this story of an interview with a general during her Vietnam stint that was typical then and typical now:
One American general I interviewed in Vietnam was incredulous when I told him that I attended a Vietnamese wedding in the largest, most "secure" provincial capital in the Mekong Delta, only to discover that about half the guests were National Liberation Front (NLF) officials — that is, southern guerrillas.
He was no less shocked to hear about a day I spent in 1971 in a "secure" Delta village watching most of the residents line up placidly to vote for the only candidate on the ballot, American-backed President Nguyen Van Thieu. The next morning, back in Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, I found an NLF flag in my hotel mailbox wrapped in a message from those same villagers. The point they were making was a simple one about the hidden complexities of that war. The NLF, they explained, had decided to urge the villagers to vote for Thieu so that the area would continue to look "secure" and village support for the NLF would remain under the radar screen.
And the result is that we are being continually outfoxed. I think it will be shown at some future date how this whole fiasco in Iraq was largely played out according to an Iranian script. Iran right now is playing our policymakers for the fools they know they them to be. There is already quite a bit of evidence to suggest that we have fallen into a trap that they have laid. The Viet Cong and the Iranians know they are dealing with musclehead ideologues who depend solely on brute power and who see no need to understand the world as it is on the ground, and they know that while the Americans can blow a lot of things up, in the long run they can be outmaneuvered.
But be that as it may, I think it is astonishing that Americans bought all the early propaganda about how Iraq was not Vietnam. The focus was on all the superficial differences–desert not jungle, etc. But it didn’t focus on the most important similarity–the guerrilla insurgency part, and how nothing else matters if that’s what you’re dealing with.
The generals and civilian military leaders were played for fools in Vietnam because the Vietcong knew they were captives of their war doctrine, and my sense is now that there are people within the military–the ones who are speaking through Jack Murtha–who are smarter than that, but they are hamstrung by the foolishness of their civilian leadership in the Pentagon and White House. The civilians still think we should have won in Vietnam. They refused to learn its lessons, and we Americans have enabled their foolishness by foolishly voting them into office now twice.
There are a lot of decent Americans who want the U.S. to do the right thing, and they were convinced we were doing it in toppling Saddam. They bought into the abstract moral argument that humanitarian interventions are our moral obligation. I’m sure many of them would also, as a matter of principle, have supported an intervention in Rwanda. But what I think they didn’t take into consideration was the historical context. And there are two aspects that define that context. The first comprises the many levels of complexity involved in the process medieval cultures must suffer in moving into the modern world–it’s not done with the snap of the fingers or the toppling of a dictator. There are some situations where we Americans, even if we had the purest intentions, can’t do anything. If someone is drowning and you don’t know how to swim, you don’t have a moral obligation to commit suicide in an attempt to save him. To do so just compounds the tragedy.
American soldiers are drowning in Iraq because American leaders naively
thought they could swim there. Maybe another leadership group could
have swum there, but it would have required a lot of luck combined with the most sophisticated understanding the historical-cultural complexities of the region combined with consummate statecraft. Even if all those elements were in place, success in this venture would still have been a longshot, but this group of crude ideologues never had a prayer of achieving it.
And that’s what idealistic supporters of the war seemed not to take into consideration–the historical record of American interventions engineered by the cold war hardliners. Their intentions have not been the best. Their record has been shameful–all educated Americans should be aware of it. And yet if it isn’t broadcast repeatedly on major cable or network news, there is no memory of it. They just think of the Americans as the good guys, but these are the same fools who brought us Vietnam and Iran/Contra. They should never have been trusted.
So here’s the point: It doesn’t matter how morally compelling a particular action might be in the abstract, when such an action is undertaken by these fools, oafish thuggery follows, and no good can come of it.
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