Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon – Phil Ochs
Sorry for two consecutive short political posts, but I just could not let this one drift past without comment. Plenty of folks have pointed out the various vapidites of Rudy Giuliani’s recent Foreign Affairs piece on terrorists and the various other baddies out in the world, so I won’t belabor those points.
I just want to focus on one paragraph which is infuriating in its willful historical ignorance:
America must remember one of the lessons of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, we fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then, as now, we corrected course and began to show real progress. Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South. The consequences were dire, and not only in Vietnam: numerous deaths in places such as the killing fields of Cambodia, a newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union, and a weaker America. The consequences of abandoning Iraq would be worse.
“Many historians”? Care to name a few?
“Succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency”? Defeating? By 1970, the US had dropped more bombs in Vietnam than had been used in all of World War II, with almost no noticeable effect on the will to resist. In the Spring of 1972, the North launched a massive offensive designed to force the US to make concessions at the negotiating table. Does this sound like an insurgency suffering its “death throes”?
The phrase “our South Vietnamese partners…” requires an interesting definition of “partner.” Does he mean Ngo Dinh Diem, who engaged in violent crackdowns, declared martial law, and presided over mass public protests? Does he mean the generals we installed through a series of coups
Let’s also notice the fanciful assertion that the rise of the Khmer Rouge is tied to US withdrawal, rather than, say, Nixon’s unlawful escalation of the war via the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. You’d also think he’d feel some responsibility for acknowledging that the “newly energized and expansionist Soviet Union” managed to up and collapse 15 years later and never had much of anything to do with Vietnam in the first place.
And to whatever extent it was energized by Vietnam, it was because we insisted for years and years that any withdrawal would be perceived as a retreat and a sign of weakness. If other nations chose to take us up on that claim and accepted the premise that Vietnam was somehow crucial to our national security, whose fault is that? Surely not those (like Church, Fulbright, and Kennan) who were insisting back in 65/66 that US presence in Vietnam was unnecessary and wrong.
In short, all I can draw from this is that one of the primary candidates for the GOP presidential nomination is either completely delusional or an outright liar. Neither proposition is particularly encouraging.