Just a Whiff
Why did he do it? Why conjure up unquiet ghosts? Why now? Vietnam is not only, as President Bush rather flatly put it, “a complex and painful subject” for Americans. The V-word is lodged in folk memory as an unwinnable war that America should never have fought, that wasted blood and treasure, and that, most woundingly, bitterly split the nation.
Vietnam, even today, is a powerful political toxin. Probably the only American politician who can talk about Vietnam without risk is the war hero John McCain.
Really? Then lawd, he’s been doing a lot of talking in a lot of fancy dress.
The Democrats’ obsession with forcing on the White House a congressional deadline for pulling out almost all America’s 160,000 troops from Iraq has the whiff of the Vietnam days.
The poisoning of the political climate was North Vietnam’s most effective weapon. It is not yet al-Qaeda’s [it isn't? --n], but it could be. As Hanoi publicly admitted at the time, its 1968 Tet Offensive ended in costly defeat, but no one in America wanted to know. Its 1972 Easter offensive also failed; but by then most Americans believed the war was lost. …
The strategy chosen to extract the US with the minimum of risk to its ally South Vietnam and the region was “Vietnamisation”. The US would withdraw its military, train up the Vietnamese and back Saigon with guaranteed and continuing military and economic support.
Those guarantees were written in to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords negotiated by Henry Kissinger under which North Vietnam pledged to withdraw from Laos and Cambodia and not to overthrow the Saigon Government. But Hanoi knew it could violate the accord with impunity, confident that the large postWatergate Democrat majority in Congress would never authorise renewed airstrikes. Not only that; the Democrats refused to authorise the promised US military aid, leaving the South Vietnamese all but defenceless against North Vietnam’s rapid Soviet-assisted military build-up, and its full-scale tank-led invasion in 1975.
(So reliable, aren’t they, the Democrats? Depending on who you ask, of course. Like dictatorial enemy communist psychopaths and terrorists.)
Dr Kissinger recently observed that “one important similarity” between Vietnam and Iraq is that “the domestic debate became so bitter to preclude rational discussion of hard choices”. Six months ago, that point seemed to have arrived. To be a hawk was to court political death and social ostracism. “Hard choices” had gone out the window with the Hamilton-Baker Iraq Study Group’s sage advice to turn the problem over to the neighbours, Syria and Iran included. Mr Bush’s ratings were awful.
They still are. But with better news has come a wiser tone. …
I do not think Mr Bush’s Vietnam parallel was aimed against the Democrats. Almost everything he says just now has a single aim, to buy time for the Petraeus “surge”. But if I were Barack Obama, I would be fretting a bit about collateral damage.
Emphases me.
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