Congratulations to Vietnam on the Anniversary of Reunification

Today was the thirtieth anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam. Congratulations to the people of Vietnam for their hard-fought victory in the long American War.

I can remember what it was like in the United States then. The Republican administration of Gerald Ford, led by Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger (Donald Rumsfeld would not become Secretary of Defense until later that year) and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as well as Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, tried to blame it on Congressional Democrats for voting against massive military aid for the South Vietnamese regime then in its death throes. They were afraid of taking the blame politically for losing Vietnam. You can bet that when Cheney and Rumsfeld have to leave Iraq in defeat (and, as with Vietnam, there will probably be a decent interval of a couple of years between the withdrawal of U.S. troops and the fall of the U.S. puppet regime) they will find someone else to blame. You can also bet that, just like thirty years ago, they will learn the wrong lessons.

What the right wing thought they learned from Vietnam was that the U.S. lost because a lack of will and strong political leadership. What they never admit is that they never could have won that war. They learned that they didn’t take enough control over what information the American public received. They thought that a mistake was made allowing reporters to roam around reporting what they saw and what troops told them. They never admitted that the war was a crime, not a “noble cause” at all. It is not hard to see that they have applied all their mistaken lessons to the Iraq War because they never learned the true lessons of Vietnam.

Throughout the Vietnam era in the United States, our political leaders warned us of the dire consequences of withdrawing without “finishing the job.” In fact, losing that war was one of the best things that happened to the United States. For a brief moment we had some humility and pacifist reflexes. That wouldn’t last, however, thanks to a concerted, generation-long effort of the right-wing and of the political establishment in general to overcome the Vietnam Syndrome (named as if it were a disease instead of a temporary attack of wisdom).