The bitter end: Vietnam
Anyone watching recent events in Iraq who wants a refresher course on the end of the Vietnam War and our withdrawal from that area would do well to take a look at this article. Here’s one of the most poignant parts, which takes on added significance today:
The epitaph for the U.S. involvement in Indochina had been given earlier that month before the fall of Phnom Penh in neighboring Cambodia. Just days before his execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodian statesman Sirak Mitak penned a final note to the U.S. ambassador refusing his offer of evacuation.
“I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty”¦You leave and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.
“But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we all are born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake in believing in you, the Americans.”
A lot of people would say that the Iraqi people have not “chosen liberty.” But I don’t think we have any way of knowing the true figures. For sure, not enough of them have. During the last decade I’ve come to think that’s true of people in this country, too.
I find it amazing how many seem to believe that Iraq could transform from what it was in 2003 to a perfectly functioning democracy in eight short years. We’ve been working on that same goal for well over two hundred years now and a conservative or Christian can’t publicly state their views without fear of retribution.
Oh this just calls, begs, for snark.
Top ten snarks:
10. What, equality and fraternity aren’t liberty?
9. Any liberty for the “uterus challenged?”
8. How about that constitutional lawyer?
7. Everybody got a Obama phone!
6. Forget liberty. We got food stamps!
5. The academy has never felt more free.
4. Feel at liberty to hit that white girl. She bleed a lot and the media don’t say nothin.
3. People are so trusting of the govenrment’s protection that they’re buying more guns.
2. More gay marriage. More gay everything!
1. You have the liberty to keep your opinion to yourself.
The US Army rebuilt the Iraqi Army in its own image: with DIVERSITY.
The result was a total lack of unit cohesion when the jihad went active.
Further, it’s evident — even at this early stage — that Maliki had totally alienated his Sunni officers — to a man.
So they flipped sides. Duh!
By now it should be apparent that:
1) Low IQ societies can’t function as democratic republics. Their only stable form remains monarchy or despotism.
They simply don’t have enough Smart Fraction ™ adults in their polity. These are the people that make the heart of the middle class. ( IQ > 105)
2) Multi-generational tribal feuds can’t be wished away in half a generation. The process takes four to six generations — if all goes well. (rare)
3) We’ve got to stop our collective (the West generally) insistence upon European colonial borders as being highly relevant. Even with a totally clean slate, the US did not correct the internal boundaries within Iraq.
They should have been addressed as priority number one.
Good borders make for better neighbors.
4) We’ve got to stop relying upon straight up military acumen and weaponry. The result is that we have (collectively) down played the resilience of ancient enmities, grandly assuming that FDR type spending will make the bitterness go away.
Many of the players are too dull to shift positions. They live in a zero sum world — always have. These are low growth to zero growth societies. In the case of Iraq, the entire nation subsists on oil mining rents. It’s uneconomic across the board in every other endevor.
This is why pitching development aid gets no traction. Like gangs in the ‘hood, their sole ‘capital investments’ consist of better sleeping quarters and better food.
There’s no human talent to speak of that’s competitive with the world market. No-one is rushing in to hire.
What talent Iraq did have has fled. (The shortage of dentists, doctors and the like is astounding.)
5) The correct mode of governance was that used by post-war Korea: a strong man that’s in our corner. With the passage of generations, it becomes possible for a republican democracy to take root. In the case of Korea, that’s meant three generations — and Korean IQs norm to 100, if not better.
6) It was a mistake to take on too much, to be so grandiose. Most of Americas development aid was blown up. We should not have even attempted to restore the Iraqi power grid. It’s an asset that’s impossible to defend.
We’ve taken a more intelligent approach in Afghanistan: the hydro-electric power distribution dreams for Kandahar were abandoned. Even by phase one it was obvious that the Taliban were diverting all of the juice to the sticks — taking full credit — and extracting rents from dull witted locals, far and wide.
You can’t export the TVA.
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There is a bright spot: this trifecta of folly is important come this November.
It’s essential that the entire mythology of liberal interventionism gets a reset.
The Iraq Campaign needed to be held to a budget. Instead, DC spent as if the object was to replicate WWII.
We are not going to see a repetition of that conflict. No-one wants to take the ‘Axis side’ any more.
The way forward is to adopt the British style — from south Asia. Figure on the contest to last four generations — could be more. Try and keep the situation on the low boil — and to reduce the drama and expectations.
With time, oil export rents will collapse.
Stop exporting food on the cheap/ giving it away. This is disruptive everywhere its practiced. You end up putting the entire society on the dole — and causing a population boom — then an exodus to the First World by ‘talents’ that can’t do anything but watch TV.
The West has plenty of low output natives. It doesn’t need to import additional dependants/ competition for blue collar employment.
Us Americans, led by Great Leaders, have fumbled so very many plays in the past that it is startling anyone should give us any credence. But they need our money and our guns, though granted only temporarily and subject to acute withdrawal.
-Roosevelt and Yalta
-Truman v. MacArthur in Korea
-Ike and Nasser’s seizure of the Suez
-JFK and the Bay of Pigs and Ngo Din Diem
-LBJ, McNamara and his “best and brightest” in Vietnam
-The majority Dems in Congress withdrawing all support from the winning South Vietnamese.
-Carter and Iran
-Bush, Bremer and Iraq
-and the never-to-be-outdone wormiest of the worms, our own Hussein, may peace be upon him
Well. Returning from Cloud Cuckoo Land, NNC, you really should read Lewis Sorley’s “The Better War”. Ever wonder why most histories of Vietnam sort of peter out after the Tet Offensive? Because it was actually going pretty well after Abrams took over. The South blunted the North’s 1972 Easter Offensive so decisively (essentially without American combat troops) that the North was not able to mount another major offensive for another three years, and the South only fell in ’75 because Congress defunded them, just like Israel would’ve lost the Yom Kippur War if had not resupplied them.
Iraq? Not so much, all interested parties had fifteen years to scheme and plot what they’d do if the Americans came back, but Vietnam was different.
Again within living memory of WWII and of the Holocaust we have failed. Pres. Bush rallied our nation to answer our higher calling. For the most part the people rose to the occasion until they were worn down by 52 weeks a year of 24/7 relentless, ruthless media mendacity, year after year. Now the Echoes of our abandonment of Vietnam are so very clear. Our elites are unwilling to confront evil.
But not just Vietnam, there was Lebanon too. The American Left and isolationist Right undercut Pres. Reagan’s options. In the end Lebanon’s Christian communities were reduced by jihad and genocide.
And Rwanda, Pres. Clinton may preen and moralistically posture, but he denied a request for just 25,000 troop to prevent a genocide. Clinton refused just 25,000 troops. Just 25,000. And 960,000 people died. Some 250,000 women and children were gang raped before they were hacked to death. And before Clinton lied about sex he lied about genocide, and some 960,000 died. Yet our elite taunted Pres. Bush’s supporters “Bush lied and people died” even though Pres. Bush demonstratively told the truth. Now Pres. Obama has failed the people of Libya, Iraq, Israel, Ukraine, Poland, North Africa and soon Afghanistan. No these are no longer omens of future ill. These instances are mounting evidence deep social pathology.
Now because of fools such as Carter and Obama the genociders of Iran and the Nork madmen have the launch and warhead technology to launch EMP attacks and kill up to 90% of Americans. So just when do you all think our luck (and that of the Israelis) will run out?
Let us forever honor Pope Urban II and King John III Sobieski and Pres. George W. Bush because they were men far more noble and greater than we.
southcentralpa:
Thanks, but I’ve not only read the Sorley book, I’ve written about it many times on this blog.
See this.
Excellent book.
blert, and Don Carlos, nice summaries of differing aspects of the historic and cultural facts of the situation. I wish we had some inkling that our leaders had such knowledge.
It is a grand vision – the idea of exporting the values and capabilities of the West to the wider world. In truth, such a project is of gargantuan proportions. Wherever you have tribalism, you have the zero-sum mentality and the inability to see how the economic pie can be expanded. How private property protected by law and courts leads to a more orderly, prosperous place for all.
I haven’t been everywhere, but I’ve seen maybe 75% of the world up close and personal. I always ask myself what makes the country work or, in most cases, not work. It’s always the same for the places that don’t work. No protection for private property and tribal values that end up in tyranny, oligarchy, theocracy, or communism.
We can never assume that people everywhere are yearning for liberty and self government. It just isn’t true. The radical jihadis yearn for a theocracy of such inordinate intolerance of humanity that it can only maintain itself through murder. We are not a shining city on a hill because most of the world has no idea how we got to where we are. Too many of our own population don’t understand why we are rich and powerful. In their eyes it’s just, you know, like magic or something, you know? 🙂
The betrayal of Vietnam should have been a lesson for this country, but it wasn’t because the commies in our midst (The MSM, academics, democrats) saw it then, and still see it, as a win not a loss. They have no clue about ISIS or the implications of radical Islam. Obama always likes to say, “Iran is a tiny country, they can’t hurt us.” Or. “Those who commit ‘man caused disasters’ are no threat to us.” The many attacks we have absorbed are of little importance to the man who has the primary duty of defending against ‘”man caused disasters.” As long as he has Air Force One, a phone, and a pen it’s all good.
We must work to elect more Republicans to the Senate in November. And don’t forget to write/call your Congress critters and tell them how the loss of Iraq resemble the loss of Vietnam. We’ve got to use our phones and e-mails.
You know, it’s not like the American colonists just ‘chose liberty’ en masse and voila.
As I often say, our Founders were Marxist-method activists before there was a Marx.
They fought for it. They also fought their neighbors for it. They didn’t win their liberty because they ‘chose liberty’. They won because they defeated the enemy in combat. If they had lost, then no liberty, choice or no choice – and history teaches that it was a close shave against an enemy that wasn’t nearly as vicious as Iraq’s enemy.
There are a lot of folks in Canada descended from a lot of folks who were American colonists who were chased from their homes and reviled America’s founders as criminals, much like folks here view the Left activists on the march.
If Iraq falls, it will be have been taken by force in competition, not by people’s choice. If Iraq stands, it will be saved by force in competition, not by people’s choice.
Whether war as politics by other means or politics as war by other means, the activist game is the only social political game there is.
Jamestown disappeared. Plymouth Rock colony starved due to communist economic policies. Only the 3% at the top ever willingly participated in the Revolution. The rest were silent supporters, fence sitters, or the undecided masses. Or just British loyalists.
Still a lot of British loyalists in America. Iraq has 3 separate cultures?
How many pieces do you think the Disunited States of America will break off into, since we have how many cultures here and religions?
Don’t ever think armchair decisions for Iraq, won’t come back to bite Americans in America.
Nope. t’s not like Vietnam – only our fecklessness and inaction is like the Fall of Vietnam.
Iraq is difficult to govern because of the historic absence of nationalism and nationalist identity within the Arab world generally, and the patchwork sectarianism common to much of the Middle East (and largest in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, probably in order).
This always made Iraq vulnerable. PM Maliki used the military as a crony sinecure. This has fatally undermined much of the military’s security in the North. Elsewhere? We will see. But I expect much more pushback.
Furthermore, if Obama failed to cordon off Syria and let it fester too long, Iraq was always vulnerable to it spilling over. And this, precisely, what’s happened (into Lebanon, too). With Obama on the guilty Sunni side.
Obama shares blame here too – maybe most!
Democrats are the guilty party. There is no “our” there.
From the get-go the Iraq and Afghan wars were doomed to failure. As well intentioned as W might have been there is no way the U.S. public was going to tolerate the sacrifice of time, treasure and lives that such an endeavor would have required.
I believe Natan Sharansky and W were right that all humans have a longing to live their lives in freedom, and if given the opportunity would choose it, but they were dead wrong in their estimation of the American people. We want instant gratification, and we want results, now.
The people of Iraq and Afghanistan know that about us. They know that in a matter of time we will leave. They also saw the feckless leader we replaced W with.
Above everything, they also know all too well the patience and persistence of the extreme Islamists.
From the get go, the American Revolution was doomed to failure. It merely took a few hundred years.
public was going to tolerate the sacrifice of time, treasure and lives that such an endeavor would have required.
The US public isn’t even aware of the daily casualties in Afghanistan. Which is actually high.
But they would have been aware of the Iraqi casualties for US forces from fictional 2011 to 2014?
“Americans” do as they are told, believe as they are told, and do their job as they are ordered to do so. They follow “orders”. Propaganda orders. Military orders. Economic orders.
adagny,
I don’t believe nation-building the ‘graveyard of empires’ Afghanistan to a post-WW2 standard was a realistic expectation. Our best hope there was a ‘clear and hold’ and leaving something in place that wouldn’t allow the Taliban to come back. So I partially agree with you there.
However, I disagree with you on Iraq. Iraq was doable long-term. At the point that Obama bungled the SOFA negotiation, Iraq was settling into a familiar pattern, like our Korea mission. The Korea mission is called the forgotten war, but it was also a very unpopular war in its time.
It never became popular, it just slipped off the radar. That was the case with Iraq. Unpopular, but largely slipped off the popular radar at the point Obama bungled the SOFA.
Ike stayed the course with Korea despite campaigning against the Korean War. By the same token, Obama could have stayed the course with Iraq.
Iraq didn’t require a perpetual Surge anymore than Korea required a perpetual Korean War. The Iraq mission was already changing shape and cooling down. The Iraqi-Americans relationship was finding its rhythm, just like the Koreans and Americans figured it out. Our troops were reporting boredom in Iraq and how the mission had become routine.
Iraq was doable for us. Obama just made a choice to stop doing it.