[lbo-talk] "Stay the Course" (Empires' Development Economics)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat May 28 03:33:57 PDT 2005


Chris wrote:
>>Who said that such a regime would be viable or that Washington
>>could pacify Iraq? If Washington had wanted a stable Iraq, it
>>would have lifted its economic sanctions on it and encouraged
>>American investors to compete with French, Russian, and other
>>investors for a chance to invest in its oil industry, instead of
>>starving and then invading the country.
>
>If Washington doesn't want to pacify Iraq, why are there US troops
>there? If the goal was just to wreck Iraq, that mission is
>accomplished. Why don't the troops leave then?

Washington's goal is to pacify Iraq so as to set up a new pro-Washington Iraqi regime, protected by pro-Washington Iraqi military and police forces, whose economic and geopolitical interests would more or less coincide with Washington's and restructure Iraq's politics and economy accordingly. That's an unattainable goal, but America is run by men and women who think that Washington could and should have won the Vietnam War. :-0

<blockquote>In the new climate of making America "stand tall" again, the defeat in Vietnam was increasingly relegated to the classic propagandistic category of a "betrayal" brought on in this case by the disloyalty of the media and by extremists within the civilian population.*

The focus of this reinterpretation centered on the war's turning point in the Vietnamese Tet Offensive of 1968. Tet, it was now said, was a resounding military victory for the U.S. and South Vietnamese military forces, which decimated their National Liberation Front attackers. Yet, in a "betrayal" of the first order, we are told, it was turned into a defeat by the U.S. media and a vocal minority of war protestors, which had the effect of inducing Johnson to throw in the towel. In effect establishment opinion adopted the same verdict on the war offered earlier by General William Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam, who wrote in A Soldier Reports (1976) that the Tet offensive represented "a striking military defeat for the enemy on anybody's terms....Unfortunately, the enemy scored in the United States the psychological victory that eluded him in Vietnam, so influencing President Johnson and his civilian advisors that they ignored the maxim that when the enemy is hurting you don't diminish the pressure, you increase it." For Westmoreland, speaking of the Indochina War as a whole, "a lack of determination to stay the course...demonstrated in Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos that the alternative to victory was defeat."

References to U.S. failure to "stay the course" became a major theme of conservative accounts of the war. This phrase had been frequently employed in the war itself. For example, President Johnson had used it in 1967 to convey his resolve to continue the war. In another instance, Townsend Hoopes, the under secretary of the Air Force, had presented Secretary of State Clark Clifford in February 1968 with a strategy for "staying the course for an added number of grinding years" by concentrating merely on controlling populated areas. But the phrase became even more important later on as a hawkish slogan to explain the U.S. defeat. This happened after the noted journalist Stewart Alsop recalled in his memoir, Stay of Execution (1973), that Winston Churchill had stated in his presence: "America, it is a great and strong country, like a workhorse pulling the rest of the world out of despond and despair. But will it stay the course?" Vietnam hawks like Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson turned to Churchill's question at every opportunity-insisting that the United States had failed to stay the course in Vietnam and should not make this mistake again.*

So powerful has this right-wing, military understanding of the Vietnam War become that it is now a force to reckon with in the current war in Iraq. Thus when President George W. Bush declared with respect to Iraq in April 2004 that "We've got to stay the course and we will stay the course," his Democratic opponent Senator John Kerry echoed that the United States should "stay the course" in Iraq, adding that "Americans differ about whether and how we should have gone to war. But it would be unthinkable now for us to retreat in disarray and leave behind a society deep in strife and dominated by radicals" (Robert Scheer, "Don't Stay the Course Senator," Salon.com, April 28, 2004; Evan Thomas, "The Vietnam Question," MSNBC.com, April 19, 2004). ("The Failure of Empire," Monthly Review 56.8, <http://www.monthlyreview.org/0105editors.htm>, January 2005)</blockquote>

To put it differently, America is run by men and women who are to the right of Henry Kissinger:

<blockquote>In 1973, John D. Negroponte, now Mr. Bush's ambassador to Baghdad, was Henry A. Kissinger's special assistant on Vietnam. Mr. Negroponte protested that the peace agreement that allowed North Vietnamese forces to remain in the South after the American withdrawal would leave the situation "basically unresolved," Mr. [Stanley] Karnow recounts in his book [<em>Vietnam: A History</em>]. But Mr. Kissinger was unmoved, asking: "What do you want us to do? Stay there forever?" (Todd S Purdum, "Flashback to the 60's: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam," <em>New York Times</em>, <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0129-06.htm">January 29, 2005</a>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Monthly Review: <http://monthlyreview.org/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



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