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Dien Bien Phooey
By Spengler
There is a difference between thrashing a spindly, bespectacled schoolmate who
is an only child, and thrashing a spindly, bespectacled schoolmate whose
sixteen-stone elder brother teaches martial arts. That summarizes the
difference between Iraq and Vietnam. Had Washington unleashed its full fury
upon Hanoi, the result well might have been nuclear confrontation.
Then national security adviser Henry Kissinger feared that Indochina
might become a flashpoint for Soviet-American confrontation. Part of his  motive
for abandoning America's South Vietnamese ally was to ensure that a proxy war
did not escalate to hostilities between the two major powers.
In fact, the record suggests that Kissinger subordinated tactical requirements
on the Indochinese ground to the requirements of superpower summitry over arms
control. I will return to that topic blow.
Matters today are quite different. America is the sole superpower, and in any
event Iraq's Sunnis have no friends among the remaining minor powers. As long
as American casualties remain below the threshold of popular irritation in the
United States, Washington's nation-building program can hit the wall with an
arbitrarily high degree of splatter, without perceptible consequences.
I am not privy to the details of American military deployments, but the shift
in casualty figures towards Iraqi soldiers and policemen and away from
coalition personnel strongly suggest that CENTCOM is keeping Americans out of
harm's way. Sunni terrorists, both homegrown and imported, display fearful
abandon in suicide attacks, and no doubt wish to kill as many Americans as they
can. The fact that they are killing Iraqis instead indicates that American
soldiers are holed up in their compounds out of reach.
At the beginning of 2005, the monthly rate of Iraqi casualties was the same as
coalition casualties. Since then coalition casualties  have
fallen by half while Iraqi casualties have tripled. There is no reason for
these trends to change
Iraq's military and police forces well may become an instrument of Kurdish and
Shi'ite domination of the Sunni minority. Assuming the putative worst case,
namely that Shi'ites increasingly wage civil war against a Sunni resistance,
their young men will continue to fill uniforms even if casualty rates rise
drastically. Iraq's Shi'ites have no choice about it. The alternative would be
to capitulate to a combination of Ba'athist remnants and Islamists whose agenda
would be to restore the Sunni dominance of the status quo ante.
"Iraqification" bears no resemblance to "Vietnamization". Hanoi commanded a
regular army of more than half a million men, with a record of conventional
military victories going back to the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1953-1954. It
could count upon unlimited Russian materiel. After "Vietnamization", Northern
regulars beat the army of the Republic of Vietnam in conventional war. The new
Iraqi armed forces, haphazard as their organization might be, face no challenge
from regulars, only the constant annoyance of suicide attacks. As noted, the
Shi'ites have nowhere else to go. "Iraqification" may turn out to be a dog's
breakfast, but no one will have to consume it on the Potomac.
Washington is embarrassed by this turn of events, but has no other choice than
to adapt to it by removing American troops from the line of fire. Although
President George W Bush and his advisors would prefer a stable and democratic
Iraq, no degree of violence among Iraqis will undermine American interests. In
an earlier era, the British would have encouraged such things. America lacks
the sophistication, not to mention the cynicism, to stir the pot, but the pot
appears to be stirring itself briskly enough without outside encouragement.
There is a world of difference between America's complacent position with
respect to Iraq's problems and the Vietnam-era dangers of engaging an ally of
the Soviet Union. The Nixon administration was at pains to ensure that its
actions in Vietnam did not interfere with arms-control negotiations with the
Soviet Union. The mining of Haiphong harbor and consequent damage to a Russian
ship marked the sharpest threat to Russian-American relations during the
Vietnam War, and Kissinger was eager to defuse the situation.
Anatoly Dobrynin, then Russia's ambassador to the United States, described the
events in an interview with CNN aired in March 1997: Some time before
the [1972 Nixon-Brezhnev] summit [in Moscow], the Americans began to complain
that the Vietnamese were speeding up their military activities, but we said to
them, "Well, it's up to you: you have to finish the war." Then, on the 7th or
8th May Nixon said, "Five or six Vietnamese divisions have crossed the
demilitarized zone and started light-scale assault operations, and we had to
retaliate to restore the balance." ... He said, "I have to continue to step up
the military activities, and unless [we] do something, the Vietnamese could
destroy the American military contingent." I [told him] that on the eve of the
[summit] meeting, [this] was a very delicate issue; but nevertheless he gave
the order to his airforce to bomb North Vietnam and lay mines in the Haiphong
port ... in order to prevent the delivery of any military equipment to Vietnam.
[The mines] almost sank one of our ships. Kissinger telephoned me and we talked
on our hot line, about which no one knew, and Kissinger said that they didn't
know that a Soviet ship had been destroyed; there had been no orders about
that. Then he called me back again after he had talked to the president, and
said that the president apologized and promised to pay for the damage; but
nevertheless, they were going to carry on with their military activities. It
was the 10th of May already. Moscow accused them of breaking international sea
law, and they were involving us in that conflict. We all thought that the
situation was serious. Kissinger apologized, and then said, "How about the
summit? What will be happening?" I said I didn't have any instructions to say
anything about that; I had to voice [the Kremlin's] protest against their
activities. But he asked, "Can I tell the president that we aren't canceling
the visit?" Today there is no one at the other end of the hot
line. America speaks imperially to itself.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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