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THE ROVING
EYE
Why the lessons of Vietnam do
matter
By Pepe Escobar
HANOI
- Just as it took a few years for the Americans to lose
the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese, it took
them only a few weeks to lose the hearts and minds of
the majority of Iraqis - which ultimately means losing
the war, whatever the strategic final result.
Topographic denials - this is the Mesopotamian desert,
not the Indochinese jungle - don't work, nor do denials
saying that the Iraqis are not as politicized as the
Vietnamese were by communism. These totally miss the
point: as happened in Vietnam, what is happening now in
Iraq has everything to do with patriotism and
nationalism.
Former Iraqi vice premier Tariq
Aziz used to say, before the US invasion, "Let our
cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles."
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, aka "Comical Ali", the
unforgettable former minister of information, used to
say Iraq would be "another Indochina". The guerrilla war
strategy against what was considered an inevitable US
invasion has been perfected in Iraq for years. And the
master strategist was neither an Assyrian nor a
Mesopotamian general, but the legendary Vo Nguyen Giap,
the Vietnamese general who coordinated the victories
against French colonialism and US meddling.
Iraqi strategists - from army officials to
Ba'ath Party officials - have always been thorough
students of the Vietnam War, or American War, as it is
referred to in Vietnam. In addition, the Iraqi urban
population is very well educated and analyzes events
with a deep historical sense - as well as the
Vietnamese. Iraqis are not gullible to the point of
believing the occupying power's boast of "nation
building"- as they have not seen any tangible results
since the "fall" of Baghdad on April 9. Since the
beginning - the first huge popular demonstration
departing from Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad on April 18
- the "liberation" of the Iraqi people by America has
been viewed inside many sections of Iraq as a national
liberation war, a "popular war" in the Giap sense
against an imperialist aggressor.
It's all there
in Vo Nguyen Giap - Selected Writings, a
collection spanning the years 1969-91 and published by
Gioi Editions in Hanoi: the strategy and tactics of a
war of national liberation and how a "popular war
against the American aggression" was organized. The
Ba'ath Party and the Republican Guards may have not
implemented what they learned - as the top army
commanders, after a campaign of preventive intimidation,
were finally bought out by Pentagon cash and safe refuge
(see The Baghdad deal, April 25). But
basically the same strategy is now being implemented by
the array of groups that constitute the Iraqi national
resistance.
The objective is always to harass,
bog down and demoralize a hugely superior army. Veterans
of the American War in Hanoi - who usually congregate
every day around Hoam Kien Lake to talk about the past
and the present - stress that it was all about national
consciousness, patriotism and local traditions:
according to Giap, "patriotism associated with the
democratic spirit and love of socialism". In Iraq, the
impetus is the same - with "love of Islam" substituting
for "love of socialism". Iraqi patriotism and
anti-imperialist sentiment is as strong as it was in
Vietnam.
Giap wrote that "conditions should be
created to attack the enemy by all means appropriated",
and urban revolutionary forces should be coordinated
with the countryside: today this means attacks both in
Baghdad and in the Sunni belt (already spreading towards
the Shi'ite south). The next step of the Iraqi
resistance would be, applying Giap, "to combine armed
forces with political forces, armed insurrection with
revolutionary war". This means a concerted strategy of
the Sunni belt alongside Shi'ite groups, many of which
have already switched from a "wait-and-see" attitude
toward barely disguised hostility with the US
proconsular regime.
Giap is adamant: "The
strategy of popular war is of a protracted war." The
Iraqi resistance is following it to the hilt. The point
is not that Saddam loyalists may be behind the attacks
against the Americans: they are just one part of the
equation. Giap wrote that the Americans and the puppet
South Vietnamese government were supported by "a brutal
repression and coercion machine, applying against our
compatriots a fascist policy of barbarity". This is
exactly how the resistance - and increasingly the whole
Iraqi population - sees scared and even demoralized
American soldiers shooting to kill innocent women,
children and even the odd foreign cameraman. Against the
"repression machine", Giap recommends "guerrilla and
self-defense militias" in strategic zones - exactly the
way that the Iraqi resistance has been acting.
Iraq now is already like Vietnam after the 1968
Tet Offensive. The Americans could have left Vietnam any
time - but this would have meant to lose face, in an
Asian sense, and to admit defeat: ultimately, this is
what happened when that last helicopter abandoned the US
Embassy in Saigon in April 1975. Even if they had any
intention of doing it, which they don't, the White House
and the Pentagon - although they have declared victory -
simply cannot leave Iraq. They know that as soon as the
US leaves, a democratically elected, Shi'ite-dominated,
anti-American Iraqi government will come into power - as
an anti-American communist government took over Vietnam.
If the US remains in Iraq for "years" - as the Pentagon
would have it - there's only one question: how many body
bags does it take for the US public to demand a
withdrawal?
The Iraqi resistance's attacks are
being conducted by small, mostly well-trained groups who
generally manage to escape without losses. They follow
classic Giap thought: to demoralize American soldiers
and at the same time increase the already unbearable
distress suffered by the population, thus nourishing
resentment against the occupying power. Asia Times
Online has learned of many former high-ranking army
officials - now unemployed - who have been called to
join the resistance: they answer that sooner or later
they will "if the Americans continue to humiliate us".
Others are financing small guerrilla groups to the tune
of thousands of dollars. The reward for someone
launching a rocket against an US fighting vehicle is
about US$350 - enough for many to buy what is now the
rage in Baghdad's at least partly free market: a color
TV with satellite dish.
In Vietnam, the
resistance was organized by the Party. In Iraq, it is
organized by the tribes. Tribal chiefs - practically all
of them loyal to Saddam - are about to reach the
deadline of the "grace period" that they conceded to the
Americans. The resistance can count either on former
Ba'ath Party and army officials, as well as on
unemployed youngsters following the appeal of Sunni
clerics, their own tribal chiefs and, more broadly, Arab
patriotism.
The resistance can potentially count
on almost 600,000 individuals who have been demobilized
by the American proconsular regime. With more than 20
years of war, virtually all the male population in Iraq
has been militarized. More than 7 million weapons were
distributed by Saddam Hussein's regime. Millions of
rockets and mortars were abandoned when the regime
collapsed. Organized armed struggle in Iraq - in the
Giap sense - may still be in its infancy, but the
results are increasingly devastating. The "popular war"
is getting bolder: surface-to-air missiles launched
against military transport planes; sabotage of the
Kirkuk-Ceyhan oil pipeline. US Central Command admits
there may be as many as 25 attacks a day.
These
Sunni Iraqi mujahideen - the counterparts of the Sunni
Afghan mujahideen now fighting the anti-American jihad
in Afghanistan - can count on the active complicity of
the local population, just like in Vietnam. It's all
becoming a "popular war" in the sense that people in any
given neighborhood will know who organized an attack,
but obviously they won't tell the invaders about it. But
what about Saddam's tapes inciting a jihad against the
Americans? Saddam is no Ho Chi Minh - a legitimate
leader of a national-liberation struggle. There is not a
lot of Saddam nostalgia in Iraq. And former army
officials are not nostalgic either - or over-optimistic,
for that matter, about the success of the guerrillas.
They know that the Iraqi people once again will be the
greatest victims - as the Americans are obsessed with
their own, not the Iraqi people's, security. But these
former officials are ready to join the resistance
anyway.
In 1995, on the 20th anniversary of the
end of the American War, former US defense secretary
Robert McNamara met the legendary Giap in Hanoi. The old
warrior told him that the US had entered a war without
knowing anything about Vietnam's complex history,
culture and fighting spirit against a wave of foreign
invasions. McNamara was forced to agree. The US emerged
from Vietnam with nothing but humiliation. In Iraq,
corporate Bushites at least expect to get away with the
oil. And this is basically what young American soldiers
are dying for: Executive Order No 13303, signed by
George W Bush in late May.
This states with
respect to "all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products,
and interests therein", that "any attachment, judgment,
decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial
process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and
void". In other words, according to Jim Vallette of the
Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, "Bush has in
effect unilaterally declared Iraqi oil to be the
unassailable province of US oil corporations."
The Iraqi resistance is very much aware of
Executive Order 13303 - and that's why it sabotaged, and
will continue to sabotage, the crucial Kirkuk-Ceyhan
pipeline. The more Iraqis have to wait for oil money to
come flowing back and help the reconstruction of the
country, the more the US-appointed interim government
loses its already shaky credibility. The Iraqi
population reads only one thing in all this: it has to
buy motor fuel at inflated prices in the black market,
and it has to come back to its living quarters and put
up with only three hours of electricity a day.
Giap also wrote that the resistance in Vietnam
should "smash the Machiavellian design of US imperialism
of making Vietnamese fight Vietnamese, of nourishing war
by war". The Americans are making the same mistake in
Iraq. The US went into Vietnam, among other factors, to
stress its symbolic credibility and to show off its
military technology: in Iraq, the theatrical
demonstration was certainly powerful, but the symbolic
credibility risks being reduced to ashes. In Vietnam,
the US wanted to make a demonstration of how to smash
revolutionary nationalist regimes in the still
dismissively denominated Third World. It failed
miserably. In Iraq, the US wanted to show off how to
"correct" former client regimes who went astray. It is
also failing miserably - as the conditions become ripe
for a popular war ultimately leading to still another
revolutionary nationalist regime.
Pentagon No 2
Paul Wolfowitz's idea of a political and economic order
in Iraq is similar to what the US wanted in South
Vietnam - and similar to what the US forcing all over
the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s. In Vietnam, the
US may have had the power, and the control of a puppet
government (South Vietnam's). But it absolutely failed
to create a viable political, economic and ideological
system capable of counteracting the Vietnamese
revolution. This means that America's non-military
defeat was even more crucial than its own military
impasse.
The same may be happening in Iraq.
Wolfowitz and company are definitely not interested in
democracy, because they know that in any free and fair
democratic elections Iraq would switch towards a
Shi'ite-dominated, probably Sharia-ruled, and certainly
anti-American government. In Iraq - just as in Vietnam -
the US has de facto installed a military system. This
military system will be controlling - or euphemistically
"overseeing" - the political structure, and more
crucially, as Asia Times Online has already demonstrated
(US and the changing face of Iraq,
August 13), the new US-subsidized economic order. By all
means, Iraq in Wolfowitz's project is supposed to become
a US colony.
In Vietnam the US was not capable
of translating its awesome firepower into any sort of
political appeal. Fine dialecticians, Hanoi veterans
today tell us that by bombing Vietnam indiscriminately,
the US provoked an almost unbearable economic and
psychological trauma: the US could never win hearts and
minds this way. And then they switch to Iraq, stressing
that the Pentagon still has not learned a crucial
lesson: it simply cannot barge into a complex society
without causing tremendous social corrosions that
ultimately lead to the collapse of any puppet regime.
The Iraqi resistance should be underestimated by
Washington at its own peril. It is learning fast, on the
ground, the lessons of Vietnam - where the communists,
in a protracted war, won against the ultimate war
machine, Giap would say, because of three factors:
decentralization, mass mobilization and mobile military
tactics. Giap has articulated a set of political,
organizational and technical maneuvers to counterbalance
the awesome US war machine that can be applied by
resistance forces everywhere in the world, and
especially in Iraq.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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