CCDS FORUM & DISCUSSION BOARD

NAME: Harry Targ
EMAIL: Targ@purdue.edu
DATE: 09/04/2007

TITLE: OF BLOODBATHS IN VIETNAM AND IRAQ

Harry Targ

OF BLOODBATHS IN VIETNAM AND IRAQ

Lets be very clear. The United States engaged in a thirty year imperial war against the Vietnamese people.

The U.S came to the aid of the French, who were struggling to reestablish their one hundred year colonial regime in Indochina, between 1946 and 1954. The United States paid for 80 percent of the French war effort.

In 1954, after the Geneva Conference, the United States moved into Vietnam, establishing an alien regime in what became South Vietnam. The long exiled Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, favored by John Kennedy and others of the Friends of South Vietnam, was brought back to establish a dictatorship below the 17th parallel. Consolidating control of the South required the physical extermination of former anti-colonial fighters who lived in the South. They opposed a new western colonial imposition of control of their country by a ruthless dictator propagating a foreign religion.

Every administration, from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon/Ford brutalized South and North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in a series of invasions, surges, relocations of peoples, bombing, assassinations, counter-insurgencies, and perpetual instances of “collateral damage.” As one military officer naively stated on television in the 1960s as viewers watched a village burning: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

The Vietnamese people overwhelmingly opposed the U.S. war and the puppet regimes that the U.S. created; from Diem, to Generals Ky, and Thieu. Whatever the differences among the people, their number one priority was defeating U.S. forces.

U.S. troop presence in South Vietnam went from 1,000 as President Eisenhower left office, to 16,000 at the time of the Kennedy assassination to 514,000 in January, 1968. The U.S. launched an air war beginning in February, 1965, Operation Rolling Thunder, that by 1968 dropped more bombs on the Vietnamese people than the entirety of the allied air wars in Europe during World War II.

Each escalation of the U.S. war was based upon a lie. The U.S. was in Vietnam to fight a totalitarian enemy, The U.S. was in Vietnam to promote democracy. The U.S. was in Vietnam to stop the spread of demonic international communism.

Specifically, President Johnson’s initial escalation of military action was prompted by false claims of North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. vessels, allegedly in international waters. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution of August, 1964 gave congressional authorization for the president to make war on the Vietnamese people. As the Senator from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright admitted one year later, the near unanimous support for a presidential blank check to make war was based on a lie.

In 1970, the U.S. participated in the overthrow of the neutral regime of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia. This led to the expansion of a guerrilla war against the new Cambodian military dictatorship supported by the U.S. The U.S. and the South Vietnamese launched a major military offensive inside Cambodia one month after the coup against Sihanouk, thus insuring the continual slide to chaos in that country.

In 1975, after 100 years of anti-colonial struggle in Indochina and a thirty year war against the United States, the South Vietnamese regime collapsed and the U.S. supported military dictatorship in Cambodia fell to the heretofore obscure Khmer Rouge guerrillas. In the aftermath of the collapse, the Cambodian guerrillas, who had achieved power only because the popular Sihanouk was ousted in a U.S. sponsored coup, engaged in massive slaughter of Cambodians suspected of being tainted by western influence.

If we wish to talk about “bloodbaths” as President Bush did last week at a Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting, he should have noted that the U.S. engaged in the mass slaughter of at least 3,000,000 Vietnamese over the thirty years war and acted in ways to set in motion the Cambodian slaughter of one million of its citizens.

The Vietnam analogy works in reference to debates about Iraq today but ironically in a way opposite to what the President suggests. A bloodbath is occurring in Iraq today because the U.S. government refuses to pull out, as was the case in Vietnam. Harry Targ teaches United States foreign policy.

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