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----- Original Message ----- From: Dwayne Monroe To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 9:46 AM Subject: [lbo-talk] Iraq: Why the lessons of Vietnam do matter
Regarding the Iraq invasion, I'm convinced of three things:
1. The US will be driven from the field sooner or later after many grotesque manipulations, countless counter-insurgency 'operations', needless death and pain.
2. The humiliating withdrawal of the US will be the end of the superpower era - at least for the colossus of the North. There will be much huffing and puffing and speechifying about our national 'mission' but the cat will be totally out of bag. Practically the whole world will realize that carrier battle groups, 'precision munitions' and all the rest of it make the US a superb killer with global reach and, therefore, dangerous but not an imperial power of any depth.
3. The Vietnam war, while quite different in many important ways, does provide important clues as to the trajectory of the occupation's future.
But don't take my word for it...
Why the lessons of Vietnam do matter By Pepe Escobar
<snip>
Giap also wrote that the resistance in Vietnam should "smash the Machiavellian design of US imperialism of making Vietnamese fight Vietnamese, of nourishing war by war". The Americans are making the same mistake in Iraq. The US went into Vietnam, among other factors, to stress its symbolic credibility and to show off its military technology: in Iraq, the theatrical demonstration was certainly powerful, but the symbolic credibility risks being reduced to ashes. In Vietnam, the US wanted to make a demonstration of how to smash revolutionary nationalist regimes in the still dismissively denominated Third World. It failed miserably. In Iraq, the US wanted to show off how to "correct" former client regimes who went astray. It is also failing miserably - as the conditions become ripe for a popular war ultimately leading to still another revolutionary nationalist regime.
The same may be happening in Iraq. Wolfowitz and company are definitely not interested in democracy, because they know that in any free and fair democratic elections Iraq would switch towards a Shi'ite-dominated, probably Sharia-ruled, and certainly anti-American government. In Iraq - just as in Vietnam - the US has de facto installed a military system. This military system will be controlling - or euphemistically "overseeing" - the political structure, and more crucially, as Asia Times Online has already demonstrated (US and the changing face of Iraq, August 13), the new US-subsidized economic order. By all means, Iraq in Wolfowitz's project is supposed to become a US colony.
In Vietnam the US was not capable of translating its awesome firepower into any sort of political appeal. Fine dialecticians, Hanoi veterans today tell us that by bombing Vietnam indiscriminately, the US provoked an almost unbearable economic and psychological trauma: the US could never win hearts and minds this way. And then they switch to Iraq, stressing that the Pentagon still has not learned a crucial lesson: it simply cannot barge into a complex society without causing tremendous social corrosions that ultimately lead to the collapse of any puppet regime.
The Iraqi resistance should be underestimated by Washington at its own peril. It is learning fast, on the ground, the lessons of Vietnam - where the communists, in a protracted war, won against the ultimate war machine, Giap would say, because of three factors: decentralization, mass mobilization and mobile military tactics. Giap has articulated a set of political, organizational and technical maneuvers to counterbalance the awesome US war machine that can be applied by resistance forces everywhere in the world, and especially in Iraq.
full at
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EH20Ak04.html
DRM
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