[NYTr] Maliki as Diem? Bush, Vietnam & 14 More Dead GIs

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Aug 23, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs08232007.html

Maliki as Diem?

Bush, Vietnam and 14 More GIs Dead

By RON JACOBS

After checking the baseball scores this morning, August 22, 2005, I
turned to the front page only to read that fourteen US soldiers died in
a copter crash near Baghdad. Of course, preliminary reports from the
military claimed that the cause was an accident and not from hostile
fire. The actual truth of that summation may change but the men will
remain dead, no matter what the reason, just like the other 3704
soldiers and marines killed in that war. Meanwhile, here in the US most
of the politicians who authorized this debacle continue to wrangle
about how best to continue it. As they do this, they also provide the
US people with ever-changing rationales.

US politicians from both sides of the aisle continue to talk about the
need for Iraqis to achieve political reconciliation, as if it were
something Washington can create. Even if Washington could create such a
reality, it would probably not be one acceptable to too many Iraqis.
Furthermore, its only intention would not be true reconciliation
between all Iraqi parties, since many armed actors would be left out,
but an agreement among hose willing to go along with the next phase of
the imperial occupation project.

Members of both factions of the war party are calling for the PM's head
and one wonders how much longer he will survive politically, if not
literally. If he did die in a "terrorist" attack or coup it wouldn't be
the first time the US was involved with the death of an uncooperative
puppet. Does the name Diem ring a bell?

Speaking of Diem and the "country " he ruled at the behest of the
United States, Mr. Bush is now comparing the US occupation of Iraq to
the US war in Indochina. Of course, he is doing so for all the wrong
reasons. "Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how
we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Mr. Bush will tell the
Veterans of Foreign Wars. "Whatever your position in that debate, one
unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's
withdrawal 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. Naturally, Mr. Bush fails to note that if
the United States had never been in Vietnam, there would not have been
the need to add these terms to "our vocabulary." It was the decision by
Washington to refuse the right of the Vietnamese to hold countrywide
elections as agreed to in the 1954 Geneva agreements and the subsequent
machinations by the US military and intelligence agencies to install a
client government in southern Vietnam that created the situation that
precipitated all of the newly termed phenomena.

Furthermore, (to borrow most of Mr. Bush's words), if there is one
unmistakable legacy of Vietnam it is that the price of America's
involvement was paid by millions of innocent victims.

Mr. Bush is now calling the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan part of an
ideological struggle on the scale of Dean Acheson and the Dulles
brothers' war against Soviet communism in the post World War Two era.
Besides the sheer hyperbole of this assertion, the fact is that this
perception of the current wars is held by very few people on the planet
including US residents.

This late-in-the-game rationale for the slaughter and waste undertaken
in our name is merely the most recent excuse the Washington
establishment is using to sell their war for total dominance. It is
unlikely to receive any more support than the previous lies and
half-truths have, even at the VFW convention where Mr. Bush will
officially present it.

If the US was not in Iraq, the fourteen men killed in that copter crash
would never have died there. In the same way, if the US had never been
in Vietnam, there never would have been boat people or the other things
Bush mentions. Talk about revisionism.

Beware, this is only the beginning of a new effort to sell these wars.
The next salvo will take place on September 11, 2007, when General
Petraeus, the latest general to run the war in Iraq, presents his
commercial for an extended surge and an increased commitment to the
ongoing occupation of that country. Of course, the date has "absolutely
nothing" to do with the anniversary of the attacks in New York and
Virginia six years ago.

[Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather
Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big
Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and
sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is
published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at:
rjacobs3625 at charter.net]