[NYTr] Bush's Bogus Vietnam History Kills

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Consortium News - Aug 23, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/082307.html

Bush's Bogus Vietnam History Kills

By Robert Parry

It is often said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned
to repeat it. But a much worse fate may await countries whose leaders
distort and falsify history. Such countries are doomed to experience
even bloodier miscalculations.

That was the case with Germany after World War I when Adolf Hitler’s
Nazis built a political movement based in part on the myth that weak
politicians in Berlin had stabbed brave German troops in the back when
they were on the verge of victory.

And it appears to be the case again today as President George W. Bush
presents the history of the Vietnam War as a Rambo movie with the
heroic narrative that if only the U.S. military had stuck it out, the
war would have been won.

Or, more likely, the black wall of the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial
would stretch most of the way to the U.S. Capitol.

After hearing his selective historical rendition of the Vietnam
experience in his Aug. 22 address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, one
is tempted to ask Bush what he would have done as President in the late
1960s and early 1970s.

Presumably, Bush would have prolonged or escalated the Vietnam War,
although it’s doubtful he would have called up the Texas Air National
Guard where he was safely ensconced, while skipping his flight physical
and seeking an early discharge.

In his speech, Bush justified an open-ended Vietnam War by citing the
carnage that followed the U.S. military withdrawal.

“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,’” Bush said.

In Bush’s version of history, condemnation should fall on Presidents
Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford for making the painful
decisions that eventually extricated the United States from the Vietnam
quagmire – rather than on Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy,
Johnson and Nixon for inserting or keeping U.S. troops in the middle of
the Indochinese civil war.

Bush also ignores the carnage that was inflicted by U.S. aerial
bombings and massive firepower. Historians estimate that some two
million Indochinese were killed during the war, along with about 57,000
American soldiers.

Also, by invading Cambodia and authorizing secret carpet-bombing of the
countryside, President Nixon spread the chaos into that politically
fragile country, opening the door first to a military dictatorship and
then to the rise of the fanatical Khmer Rouge.

Friends, Not Enemies

In his historical account, Bush leaves out, too, the longer-term
reality and the fact that the great communist enemies of Asia – China
and Vietnam – did not turn out to be the strategic threats to the
United States that Cold Warriors insisted they would be. Dominoes did
not fall all across Asia.

Indeed, today’s biggest threats from China appear to be the quality of
the cheap goods it manufactures for American companies and its
ownership of large quantities of U.S. government bonds. Bush also has
exchanged friendly visits with the leaders of Vietnam.

But that history and reality disappear in Bush’s selective account.
Just as he cherry-picked intelligence on Iraq to justify his 2003
invasion, he is selecting what facts from history serve his political
ends now.

In his VFW speech, Bush also continued his practice of baiting critics
of his Iraq War policy as essentially imbecilic and anti-American. He
accused them of believing “that if the United States would just leave a
place like Iraq those who kill our troops or target civilians would no
longer threaten us.”

In truth, Iraq War critics have argued not that al-Qaeda would stop
being a threat but that Bush’s policies are playing into al-Qaeda’s
hands. Not only did the U.S. invasion of Iraq divert U.S. forces from
their pursuit of Osama bin Laden, but the Iraq War has proved to be a
boon to al-Qaeda in recruiting, fundraising and regrouping for new
terrorist attacks.

The evidence is that al-Qaeda actually wants the United States to
remain bogged down in Iraq indefinitely so the organization can
continue to exploit the American occupation.

In letters to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda
leaders, holed up along the Pakistani-Afghan border, warned that
al-Qaeda’s position in Iraq might collapse if the United States left,
removing both the magnet attracting young recruits and the glue holding
together the fragile coalition between foreign jihadists and Iraqi
nationalists.

A July 2005 letter attributed to al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman
al-Zawahiri urged Zarqawi to talk up the idea of an Islamic
“caliphate,” so the young jihadists, drawn to Iraq to fight the
Americans, wouldn’t just “lay down their weapons and silence the
fighting zeal” once the Americans left.

The “Zawahiri letter,” which was intercepted by U.S. intelligence, also
predicted that an American departure would force the depleted force of
al-Qaeda fighters into a desperate battle simply to carve out an
enclave inside Iraq.

In a December 2005 letter, another top aide to Osama bin Laden, known
as “Atiyah,” lectured Zarqawi on the need to act more respectfully
toward Iraqi Sunni leaders so al-Qaeda could put down deeper roots in
Iraq.

Atiyah emphasized the importance of keeping U.S. forces trapped in
Iraq. “Prolonging the war is in our interest,” Atiyah wrote in a letter
that was discovered by U.S. forces after Zarqawi’s death in June 2006.
[See Consortiumnews.com’s “Al-Qaeda’s Fragile Foothold.”]

Bush-bin Laden Symbiosis

By prolonging the Iraq War now, Bush is doing exactly what al-Qaeda
wants. “As long as I’m Commander in Chief, we will fight to win,” Bush
told the cheering VFW crowd.

In other words, Bush and the terrorists share a symbiotic relationship
with Bush using the “war on terror” to expand his presidential powers
at home and bin Laden exploiting the U.S. occupation of Iraq to enhance
his standing in the Islamic world.

Now Bush has mixed in the emotional issue of the Vietnam War, as his
father did during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Near the end of that standoff with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein,
President George H.W. Bush spurned a Russian plan for getting Iraqi
forces to withdraw peacefully from Kuwait. Instead, Bush wanted a
successful ground war to exorcise the demons of Vietnam from the
American psyche.

After U.S. ground forces administered a 100-hour drubbing to the
overmatched Iraqi troops, the elder George Bush declared in his first
post-war remarks, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and
for all.” [For details, see our new book, Neck Deep.]

Still, the elder George Bush stopped U.S. forces before they could
march up the Euphrates River and capture Baghdad. He recognized that a
military occupation of Iraq would alienate the Arab world and would
sink the United States into another Vietnam-style quagmire, which could
again embitter the American people about military adventures.

Sixteen years later, however, the specter of Vietnam has returned to
hover over the deserts of Iraq, this time conjured up by the younger
George Bush to justify an open-ended war, a war he is determined to
pursue regardless of the number of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis who die and
the number of new Islamic terrorists it creates.

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, can be ordered at
neckdeepbook.com.]