I recently read an interesting article about Vietnam in The Economist. That country has experienced an economic growth rate of about eight percent per year since 2000. Saigon is a bustling modern city with fancy restaurants, and designer shops.
The gap between rich and poor is narrower than in many other South-East Asian cities. The government has an urgent program to privatize industries. Surprisingly the government is also allowing views from dissenters to be published in the press, and some areas are now holding local elections. Parents are now allowed to educate their children abroad.
We have had diplomatic relations with Vietnam for ten years, and currently we import $5.5 billion worth of goods from that country. According to the U.S. Consul General, American investment in that country is rising rapidly.
Wait a minute. Isn”t this the country where more than 58,000 American servicemen lost their lives? Wasn”t that also a war where dissenters were called treasonous, and where we were constantly told we needed to stay the course if we didn”t want all of Asia to fall to the godless communists? Were those tragic deaths worthwhile? We were given spurious reasons for engaging in that war, and were lied to about the situation in Tonkin Gulf.
The common thread between Iraq and Vietnam is that we were fed false information about the reasons for engaging in war. Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz have all made public statements that there was no connection between Al-Qaeda and the Hussein government, and we all know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That being the case there is no way that the Iraqi war can be considered a war against terrorism.
According to an article in the Journal of Foreign Affairs there have been around 125 civil wars in the world since 1945. They usually end when either both sides in the war battle each other to a stalemate or a country”s military steps in and takes over the country. We are supporting a weak Shiite government in Iraq, and the longer we seem to be supporting that government, the more we antagonize Sunnis in Iraq and neighboring states.
There certainly is no prospect of the disorganized Iraqi army taking charge. Painful as it may be perhaps the best solution is for us to step aside and let the warring factions battle each other until they become worn down enough to negotiate a peace.
The question I raise here is will we look back on the Iraqi war in 30 years and bemoan the total waste of it all as we are now doing in regard to Vietnam? When are we going to tire of the thought that our type of government has to be imposed on other countries? For that matter when are we going to stop being a hypocrite about establishing democracy in other countries?
Robert Derenthal
Lakeport
