Christopher Hitchens: Vietnam was appalling, Iraq's ideal
THE argument presented on this page by the Australian conservative Owen Harries about how the Vietnam War was worthwhile and the Iraq war is not is, for my dialectical purposes, almost perfect ("Different battles, different response", July 5).
For one thing, it underlines what I have always maintained, which is that advocacy of the liberation of Iraq is a radical cause that deserves to be opposed (and is opposed) by all the forces of reaction in Iraq and internationally. For another, it shows what nonsense is involved in any comparison with Vietnam.
There should never have been any Vietnam War to begin with. By 1945 the successive French and Japanese occupations had been discredited and defeated, and if Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived it is unlikely the US would have supported the disastrous restoration of French rule in Indochina.
Had Ho Chi Minh's 1945 declaration of independence been accepted and recognised, the best that could have happened would have been an Asian Titoism and the worst that could have happened would have been a period of crude and brutal collectivisation, succeeded as in China by a realisation that this was a mistake.
As it was, all of the worst happened to Vietnam anyway, but only after a hideous war in which the most appalling atrocities - from ecocide by chemical weaponry to the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians - were committed by American and, sad to say, Australian forces.
Harries quotes president John F. Kennedy's court historian Arthur Schlesinger as saying that Southeast Asia was rife with fictitious states. Can he name one? Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos are still recognisable countries. The only fictitious ones were North and South Vietnam, artificially created by a partition in which no Vietnamese, then or now, believed.
(Incidentally, Russia and China colluded in that partition and this, along with China's famous hostility to Vietnamese nationalism, makes an absurdity of Harries's claim that the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam was a front, either for fellow countrymen in the North - which is a distinction without a difference - or for the international communist oligarchy.)
In any case, the analogy with the Cold War is historically unfounded. The collision with al-Qa'ida and with the irrational and suicidal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is much more like the earlier battle with fascism. One is not dealing, in other words, with people whose self-interest can be counted on to prevent them from doing insane things.
One may cite in Iraq's case the mad invasion of Kuwait, the even madder refusal to withdraw and the development - and use - of weapons of mass destruction. ...
Read entire article at Australian
For one thing, it underlines what I have always maintained, which is that advocacy of the liberation of Iraq is a radical cause that deserves to be opposed (and is opposed) by all the forces of reaction in Iraq and internationally. For another, it shows what nonsense is involved in any comparison with Vietnam.
There should never have been any Vietnam War to begin with. By 1945 the successive French and Japanese occupations had been discredited and defeated, and if Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived it is unlikely the US would have supported the disastrous restoration of French rule in Indochina.
Had Ho Chi Minh's 1945 declaration of independence been accepted and recognised, the best that could have happened would have been an Asian Titoism and the worst that could have happened would have been a period of crude and brutal collectivisation, succeeded as in China by a realisation that this was a mistake.
As it was, all of the worst happened to Vietnam anyway, but only after a hideous war in which the most appalling atrocities - from ecocide by chemical weaponry to the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians - were committed by American and, sad to say, Australian forces.
Harries quotes president John F. Kennedy's court historian Arthur Schlesinger as saying that Southeast Asia was rife with fictitious states. Can he name one? Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos are still recognisable countries. The only fictitious ones were North and South Vietnam, artificially created by a partition in which no Vietnamese, then or now, believed.
(Incidentally, Russia and China colluded in that partition and this, along with China's famous hostility to Vietnamese nationalism, makes an absurdity of Harries's claim that the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam was a front, either for fellow countrymen in the North - which is a distinction without a difference - or for the international communist oligarchy.)
In any case, the analogy with the Cold War is historically unfounded. The collision with al-Qa'ida and with the irrational and suicidal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is much more like the earlier battle with fascism. One is not dealing, in other words, with people whose self-interest can be counted on to prevent them from doing insane things.
One may cite in Iraq's case the mad invasion of Kuwait, the even madder refusal to withdraw and the development - and use - of weapons of mass destruction. ...