Ripping off the scab
President George W. Bush is desperate to keep the U.S. in the Iraq civil war, so desperate that today he despicably sought to reignite the angry national debate of the 1960s and 1970s over the Vietnam War. Many Americans thought that debate was long over, but Bush, speaking at the convention of the Vietnam War-loving and hippie-hating Veterans of Foreign Wars, reached out to the minority of rightwing Rambo bitter-enders and all but proclaimed they were stabbed in the back. Many of the veterans, but not all, roared their approval.
Bush said the U.S. should not have withdrawn from Vietnam, a war in which he, like many other young American males, managed to avoid joining. He in effect said the U.S. should have continued to expend the lives of young American draftees--they were dying in Vietnam at a rate of about 10,000 per year--in the name of a failed foreign policy. He blamed the Khmer Rouge holocaust in Cambodia in the mid-1970s on the U.S. withdrawal, conveniently ignoring how President Nixon destabilized the Cambodian government in the early 1970s. The Nixon-ordered bombing and invasion of Cambodia in 1970 sealed the deal, driving the Cambodian peasantry into the arms of the Khmer Rouge (see the Wikipedia entry after the jump). All this tragedy will happen again if we leave Iraq, Bush said, to widespread excoriation outside the convention hall.
Historians will eventually begin to explore the impact of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam on America. Most Americans, including this one, were tired of a war that had dragged on for nearly 15 years and was seemingly without end. We wanted only for it to end and were willing to let the chips fall where they may. But a minority of Americans, including some former soldiers, did not accept the defeat and gradually convinced themselves, like some German soldiers after World War I, that they had been stabbed in the back.
You saw some of this in the controversy over the Maya Lin design of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. Some of the bitter-end veterans called it the "black gash of shame" and finally prevailed on the Reagan Administration to add a semi-heroic traditional statue of three weary soldiers. Even more insidious was the myth that took hold in the late 80s and early 90s that Americans had "spit on" returning soldiers from Vietnam. There is absolutely no proof that this happened anywhere, says historian Jerry Lembcke, author of "The Spitting Image," who tried hard to find it. The Swift Boat Veterans whose lies destroyed the John Kerry campaign in 2004 are yet another example.
I've believed for sometime there is a group of American officers who believe that the press and leftist Democrats stabbed the Army in the back in the Vietnam War. It is evident in the extreme hostility toward the press shown during the current Iraq War. Defeat in war can be a terrible thing. It shatters the most deeply held myths and illusions. And it can spawn political movements and embolden politicians like Bush who see gain in ripping open long-healed American wounds.
From Wikipedia entry on the Khmer Rouge:
"Historians have cited the U.S. intervention and bombing campaign (spanning 1965-1973) as a significant factor leading to increased support of the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian peasantry. Historian Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen have used a combination of sophisticated satellite mapping, recently unclassified data about the extent of bombing activities, and peasant testimony, to argue that there was a strong correlation between villages targeted by U.S. bombing and recruitment of peasants by the Khmer Rouge. Kiernan and Owen argue that "Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began,[3]. In his study of Pol Pot's rise to power, Kiernan argues that "Pol Pot's revolution would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilisation of Cambodia" and that the U.S. carpet bombing "was probably the most significant factor in Pol Pot's rise." [4]
When the U.S. Congress suspended aid to Cambodia in 1973, the Khmer Rouge made sweeping gains in the country. By 1975, with the Lon Nol government running out of ammunition, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the government would collapse. On April 17, 1975 the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh."