As the government of Iraqi President Maliki teeters on the verge of collapse in the face of an insurgent assault by radical Sunnis, President Obama is sending 300 Special Forces soldiers back to Iraq. Propping up this lost cause makes one ask, what if President Ford had sent military advisers back to Vietnam as Saigon was being evacuated? Aren’t military advisers the start, rather the end, of a typical US intervention?
If Obama Had Been President in 1975
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Humor me, Ted. What, exactly, is a military adviser? I’m not going for the George Carlin one-liner, either. My sense of it is that a military adviser is a soldier, trained in all the usual skills a soldier needs, who will be telling all his advisees exactly how to fight and kill, patrol and so forth.
And who, exactly cooks, cleans, proves admin support and all the rest for these 300 advisers? Do they count in the figures?
See also the Doonesbury re-run from ’75 that Trudeau ran today.
One must read The Quiet American by Graham Greene. It is set in Vietnam in the early ’50s. Greene was actually a reporter in Vietnam. After the French lost and Greene went back to England, he wrote The Quiet American, where the narrator, a British reporter, says he had to lie in all his articles, since, if he didn’t, either the French or the British censors would confiscate them, and he got paid by the article. So he took the stories the French and British information officers wrote for him and submitted them and got paid without having to do any work. Was this how it really was? The novel says it’s all fiction, any similarity to anything real was just coincidental. But which was fiction and which was fact? No one knows.
In the novel, the Americans want a new, pro-American government. NOT a French colonial government and not a Communist government. Aid promised to the French never arrives. Instead, materiel is given to the non-Communist rebel faction, which kills women and children. Greene thought a French victory would have been best for Vietnam, that the French would have brought education and prosperity to the Vietnamese. He thought a Communist victory would have been a poor second best, since, while the Communists wanted to educate the Vietnamese and make them prosperous, they lacked the resources the French had. The absolute worst, in the novel, was an American puppet state which would have generated massive profits for American companies with baksheesh for the American puppets, but absolutely nothing for the Vietnamese people, except death if they threatened the government or American economic interests.
Spoiler alert: the French lose the war. Then the Americans take over. Then the Americans lose after dropping more tonnage of bombs on Vietnam that the total tonnage the US military had dropped in every military engagement before Vietnam.
But it was all justified by the perfidious attack, reported in the New York Times on the US Navy in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. American newspaper editorials demanded revenge, and Johnson sent 500,000 American boys, of whom 50,000 never made it back alive.
Later, of course, American newspapers said we couldn’t blame Bush, jr for Johnson’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin, Saddam REALLY had those New WMD that only the cleverest and most patriotic can see, and an invasion was not an option but a necessity.
To quote Vonnegut, ‘And so it goes.’
What’s wrong with a few hundred military advisers, Ted ; the US attains its objective of ensuring that a unified Iraq cannot play a major role in the region, while maintaining its «influence» over the major contenders in the country – and all on the cheap, which means that if Obama can resist the inevitable calls to expand the «mission», he (read : US taxpayers) might just be able to afford the so-called «pivot to Asia» (that Iraq lies in Asia is irrelevant here ; Mr Obama and his own advisers seem to have all cut geography in classes in school). And think of all the money that’s being made selling those weapons to all sides ! A win-win situation if there ever was one !…
Henri