Vietraq

The presumptive Republican nominee just gave his victory speech. Said, "We are in Iraq and our most vital security interests are clearly involved there. The next president must explain how he or she intends to bring that war to the swiftest possible conclusion without exacerbating a sectarian conflict that could quickly descend into genocide."

I once wrote, "Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory." From Vietnam to Iraq: they can't make their argument without distortion and lies. Here I explain how this incarnation of the hustle works:

The Iraq Forever Caucus underwrites their supposed moral righteousness with their understanding of Vietnam, of course.... We left Vietnam, you see, and there was a genocide there: our fault for leaving. Preventable blood on our hands.

Like most everything conservatives claim to know about Vietnam, it's misleading in the extreme. It makes no sense as analysis on Vietnam. And it makes no sense as a lesson for Iraq.

It is true that tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed, and hundreds of thousands exiled to re-education camps, by a triumphant Communist government after Saigon fell in 1975. But by the early 1970s as the worst American bombing was raging, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were being killed, and millions being exiled from their homes—carnage that came to a dead stop once the war ended. As cruel as the Communist consolidation of power was, ending the war entailed an obvious net saving of lives, and if it were saving lives conservatives actually cared about—instead of scoring ideological points—this should be obvious.

That's the first point. The second: America's war aim—standing up an anti-Communist democratic government in Saigon absent an American military occupation—was impossible. President Nixon admitted this privately all the time, even while he was simultaneously publicly claiming he was negotiating to achieve exactly that. The point has finally become so obvious that now even conservatives admit it. Though conservatives still haven't brought themselves to admit the more fundamental point: Nixon was right. Indeed, sickeningly, after more visits and better contacts in-country than any American politician, he had been saying we couldn't win in Vietnam privately since 1966, as Len Garment disarmingly acknowledged in his memoir.

Finally, let us assume the premise of the conservatives' magical thinking: that we should have stayed and stayed and stayed, amidst the slaughter of yet more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, by fellow Vietnamese and by us until our side eventually "won," leaving only then. If so, our Saigon allies would probably have likely been just as bloody-minded in their score-settling as the Communists. This was the bunch that, in 1960, reacted to the mere hint of an impending Communist insurgency by detaining 50,000 of their own citizens in their own re-education camps, the Pentagon Papers noting "the consensus of the opinion" of rural Vietnamese that "the majority of the detainees are neither Communists nor pro-Communist." This was the government whose vice president Nguyen Cao Ky—the power behind the throne, actually—said, "People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one—Hitler." Indeed, another anti-Communist Asian strongman, Indonesia's General Suharto, enacted a genuine genocide, one to make the Vietnamese Communists look like pikers. "In terms of the numbers killed," as the CIA described it, "massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century."

And Cambodia?

another piece of conservative Southeast Asia propaganda that unfortunately has sprung sturdy legs. I'll never forget the time I arranged to spend all day debating Freepers. I introduced myself as a proud leftist. Someone posted the famous picture of the pile of skulls from the Khmer Rouge massacre and asked if I was proud of that.

It's nuts. America leaving Vietnam had nothing to do with that—unless you agree with the historians who argue that it did, for opposite reasons: that the conditions for the rise of the lunatic Khmer Rouge was the massive American bombing that left Cambodian society a bloody, nihilistic wasteland. Indeed American ground troops hadn't been in Cambodia in 1971, by statute—so how could our leaving Cambodia have caused it? Indeed, leaving Southeast Asia itself, with the subsequent unification of North and South Vietnam under a Communist government, ended up producing the conditions that stopped the genocide—because Communist Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978. That was what ended the genocide.

In an additional irony, when the world first became aware of the massacres, one U.S. senator proposed a humanitarian intervention to stop it. He had no success. Republicans insisted the regime was "not as bad as portrayed," and that besides, military intervention would be too hard. That senator was George McGovern.

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