Random Thoughts on Vietnam, Iraq and The Ramification of a Pull-Out

The debates about America's role in the world are widespread, and regardless of geography or culture, almost everyone has an opinion on what it should be. Indeed, this site has been an advocate for offensive operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and although my site didn't exist at the time of invasion, I believed the strategic necessity of going to war didn't need international approval if we weren't to get it.

But, this is where many who argued against invasion often make a false assumption in regards to my support. Because I advocate for war does not mean that I think America is blemish-free. Now, what those mistakes are, is a long discussion that should be taken on a case-by-case basis and beyond the scope of this post, but the primary argument that I am going to make, is that the historical alternatives to American influence have been much, much worse.

Each time American intervention is put at center-stage, the spectre of Vietnam comes back to haunt us. So let's visit and analyze the consequences of the Vietnam War. The backdrop of the Vietnam War is one where the United States, operating under it's policy for containment, picked up where French colonialism failed, and tried to hold Ho Chi Mihn's communist forces from infiltrating non-communist, but not democratic South Vietnam.

At first, the United States operated in an advisory role, slowly "escalating" its involvement. For all the myths about the Viet Mihn in the North, they were a very unsophisticated fighting force. Although they had beaten the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, they had not exactly beaten the most elite of forces. As the United States replaced France in defending the South against communist revolution, and tactically, they introduced the helicopter into battle. The North Vietnamese had never seen anything like it, and their mere presence overhead would cause them to run like hell. For almost a decade, South Vietnamese forces in combination with American backed airpower was able to decisively defeat the Vietcong in almost every engagement.

But, like all military engagements, the North Vietnamese would learn how to counter superior firepower, if unsuccesful at first. An anecdote related to me by a professor at college, recalled an American pilot sitting on a small helo platform close to the North Vietnamese boarder. A Viet Cong guerrilla came out of the jungle, and aimed his rifle at the helecopter. Before he fired, he would move his rifle and shoot 10-20 feet in front of the helicopter. He repeatedly did this as the helicopter crew sat in amazement, until they had enough and shot him dead. This incident should have resonated--the Vietcong and Viet Mihn were learning and training to shoot down a moving target. In this case, however, the young man didn't understand that the target had to first be moving in order to time his shot. The counter-measures they developed became more sophisticated, and eventually resulted in successfully shooting down several helicopters in the Battle of Ap Bac. Their tactics, which involved digging deep holes in heavily fortified jungle terrain, neutralized the fire power from the air, while firing back and hitting the vunerable helicopter's underbelly as they passed overhead.

This story is just an anecdote to show that in all military engagements, the enemy will learn how to fight back in the way they are able. In WWII, the Germans sent Panzer tanks, paratroopers and artillery thrusting into Allied front lines, but in Vietnam, they utilized hit-and-run, guerrilla tactics mostly with small arms. Their style of battle, and their unrelenting endurance, exposed the major political problems Washington had in running the war. Many of the political issues were self-inflicted, some were as a result of our nuclear, communist allies adequately countering our presence there with the possible threat of nuclear retaliation if we were to full-on invade the North. Militarily, the United States generally fought well, as in far better than the Northern backed forces, but the North Vietnamese were able to prolong the war to the point where the American people tired of body-counts. The United States ultimately pulled out.

So, for all the mistakes the United States made in Vietnam, those that advocated for a pull-out, or at least, wouldn't allow the United States to take the gloves off and opt instead for a full-war versus limited engagement, the consequences of failure paled in comparison to ongoing American presence in the region. Those who saw the U.S. pull-out as a good thing, say they were justified by history because "the dominoes that the United States said would fall, didn't."

Well, here is one of the direct results of the U.S. pullout in South Vietnam:

Millions of South Vietnamese were forced onto rickety boats to flee "re-education," or more aptly, concentration camps, run by their communist oppressors. Many did not find asylum, meeting their ends by drowning or by pirates. The U.S. pull-out, contrary to those who say dominoes didn't fall, allowed the Khmer Rouge, or Communist Party of Cambodia, to gain and solidy their power. The Khmer Rouge would eventually murder 1.7 million Cambodians as part of their "People's Revolution."

The reality of these images solidifies my pragmatic view of America's foreign policy. While the United States' intervention in Vietnam is filled with images of nepalm and villages being burned down (I would argue that these images far less common than is generally accepted as fact), the indirect and direct results of the U.S. pull-out in Southeast Asia were FAR worse.

Now, some who see evil on both sides of the fence might be looking for a third way. In the case in Vietnam, what would the third way have been? Areas of the world were Communists were victorious have resulted in millions dead. American victory in other regions away from Southeast Asia, such as Germany and Korea, show that after a brutal, all-out war, the United States invests incredible amounts of money and man-power to rebuild and stabilize the area where their footprints lies. This contrast is not done in order to put a halo over the head of the United States, as war by its very nature is bloody, frickin' nasty. My contrast shows that when the U.S. projects its power, it turns its lethal and deadly war machine after victory into a more positive force than any alternative history has yet to provide.

Utopian fantasies of a third way don't have much of a real-world application. Those who are the most powerful are going to fill in the vaccums where others walk away. Those who advocate for a third-way need an engine that is powerful and capable enough to fill that vaccum. So the question is, what is the engine driving their alternative? "Purified" Communism, Fundamentalist Islam, scientology, drum circles? In the Cold War, there was no third way that was at all able to fill in the blanks.

In my opinion, the morality of equivocating between a victor who implements a society that has "McDonalds" and "Starbucks" as being equally repressive as one that sends people to re-education camps or murders them in the millions is utterly absurd. Only those in the West, who have never lived a day under a severely oppresive regime, would put forth such ridiculous arguments from afar. But they are there, and they are numerous.

This example is also relevent post-Cold War. C.S. Scott writes an excellent post about the how al-Qaeda and warlords have turned Somalia into a den of vipers since the U.S. pulled out. In this war on terror, I wouldn't be suprised if Somalia ends up back on the radar as a strategic objective at some point. Our lack of resolve there is not only effecting a suffering population and their neighbors, but might become another refuge for an enemy who has sworn to defeat us.

So, the examples listed above were intended to strengthen my point in advocating victory in Iraq, and to remind those detractors of the potential consequences should the U.S. fail in its goals and pull out early. History (real history, not the pretend history that lies within the revisionists' minds) is littered with the carcasses of people who have died because the United States pulled out short of victory. After September 11th, it should be all the more real that someday those carcasses won't be littering foreign lands, but also our own.

Posted by 10 fingers 6 strings at December 16, 2005 09:13 AM | TrackBack