One looks around at the attacks against our current foreign policy and one listens to all the complaints about how it is being conducted and one wonders; does anyone who writes in the media or schemes in Washington ever read any history.
The Cruzes and the Trumps and all the war-mongers left over from the Bush administration scream for more war, more bombs, more American kids put in the line of fire for wrongheaded goals. You won’t stop terrorists from bombing our airports or train stations by building a bigger army or more carriers. You won’t stop terrorists from killing civilians here and in Europe by occupying their homelands and droning their kids.
It isn’t like we have to figure all this out by ourselves. We already have a very vivid set of road marks and strategies laid out for us by the failures of those who have gone before us. There’s nothing new in the world but one has to be able to read in order to understand what our failures have looked like in the not too distant past, and how we can avoid making the same mistakes over and over, while expecting a different result, thereby proving that we are, in fact, insane.
The Vietnam War actually started in 1945 when Vietnamese freedom fighters led by Ho Chi Min declared their independence from France. In that same year Major Peter Dewey an officer in the OSS arrived in Vietnam. He saw what was going on and realized that Ho Chi Min was going to win simply because he was fighting for freedom. The Diem family, who ruled the south, was fighting for money and power. Before Dewey was killed he warned us again and again to get out.
Between 1945 and 1954 America gave the French millions in arms to fight Ho Chi Min and support Diem the dictator in the south. Along the way, we became obsessed with the idea of the domino theory, a stupid idea which held that, if one country fell to the communists, others would follow like a line of dominos. We were so sold on this concept and so worried about the spread of Communism that we drank the Cool Aide and sold out our children. Nam had no economic value. Its only significance was as a domino in a game that did not really exist
When Ike and John Foster Dulles decided to create a government in South Vietnam to fight the north they never understood the north was beating the hell out of Diem because the north was fighting for freedom and Diem was just another US backed dictator who was only in it for the chateau in the South of France. If you can’t draw the parallel between this and the current Middle East you are too blind to see.
In August 1964, when our ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, were attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats we passed The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving LBJ the authority to expand the fighting to “protect” our men over there. Sound familiar? Does the name Iraq ring a bell?
Senator Wayne Morris went on the Dick Cavett Show and announced that the government was lying to us, that we were violating the UN rules, the Geneva convention and just about everything else just to get our way. Phil Donahue did the same thing and lost his show on NBC.
Of course this has become our natural way of conducting foreign policy in the last 70 years or so. We decimated Central and South America along with South East Asia, backing dictators who were being attacked by freedom fighters and now we’re doing it in the Middle East. None of these wars are any of our business. There would be no ISIS if we hadn’t started a war in the Middle East for no good reason except the oil, which by the way, we didn’t get and now don’t need.
The best and the brightest got us into the war in Vietnam and then they didn’t know how to get us out. That has been true of almost every war in which we have participated since WWII. The only major exception was George HW Bush getting us into and out of the war in Kuwait
Senator Ed Muskie, speaking about Nam, made a prophetic statement. “At one point those countries are going to have to solve their political problems without our help.” Is anyone listening? They sure as hell weren’t listening then, or now in Iraq Afghanistan, Libya, you name it.
Bob Kerry came on TV and attacked the war he had just fought and been wounded in. He equated himself and other Americans as feeling like German soldiers attacking civilians. Then Daniel Ellsberg came out with the Pentagon papers and set a model for Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden and just like our current right wing warmongers, Barry Goldwater came on TV and called Ellsberg a Benedict Arnold. Things don’t change; it’s just that we do not learn from them. We will be there again unless we somehow learn to read our own history and figure out a way to not make the same mistakes over and over again.
The Middle East will not go on forever. Eventually there will be enough killing and those involved will get tired and stop, just like other wars all over the world since the beginning of man. That’s when we will have to exert every bit of self-restraint we possess to keep from repeating ourselves in Africa or Southeast Asia, because that’s where it’s going to erupt next.
One thing. North Vietnamese gunboats did not actually attack U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. It never happened. This supposed event that escalated our Vietnam involvement into an honest-to-god war was a lie the Washington warmongers employed to justify the whole murderous mess. This is not a conspiracy theory but a fact according to every reputable Vietnam War historian. Not the only time an out-and-out lie was used to get us into a war (Remember the Maine? WMDs anyone?) and it unfortunately probably won’t be the last.