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2 Australia's warped war
visions By Minh Bui Jones
SYDNEY - During his first official trip to
Vietnam to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit this month,
conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard
insulted his host and the memory of millions who
died in the Vietnam War.
On a visit to the
site of the Battle of Long Tan, where 18
Australians died fighting the communist Vietcong,
Howard, prompted by a reporter's question, said he
believed his country's
decision to go to war in
Vietnam more than four decades ago was the right
one. "I supported our involvement at the time and
I don't intend to recant that," he said.
His US counterpart, President George W
Bush, similarly commented that if the United
States had stayed the course during the Vietnam
War, the result may have been different.
Howard's brusque comments about a war in
which between 3 million and 5 million Vietnamese
died were meant to be interpreted as an oblique
allusion to his hardline position on Iraq: that
is, the US and its allies, including Australia,
should dig in for the long haul.
Howard is
one of the staunchest supporters of the US-led war
in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on
the US, he was quickly sold on the US-led project
to remake the Middle East. Three days after the
attacks on the US, Australia invoked the ANZUS
Treaty - the military alliance among Australia,
New Zealand and the US - for the first time in its
history and became the first country to offer
troops to Afghanistan.
In 2003, Australian
troops were already operating in Iraq before the
US even formally launched the war. Today,
Australia has 1,400 troops in Iraq and 360 in
Afghanistan. Their numbers are small, but they are
of enormous symbolic worth to the US. President
Bush highly values Howard's unconditional support,
once fawningly referring to him as "a man of
steel".
During the APEC meeting, Bush met
with Howard twice to discuss tactics on Iraq.
Howard is resistant to any talk of withdrawal from
Iraq, even in the wake of the recent thumping Bush
took at US congressional elections, which were
widely viewed as a referendum against the war.
Meanwhile, Howard rejected British Prime Minister
Tony Blair's assessment of Iraq as a "disaster"
and counseled against any fundamental change of
strategy.
"Let's not muck around on this,"
Howard said in Hanoi. "If the coalition were to go
from Iraq in circumstances seen as a defeat, that
would be a colossal blow.
"If that were to
happen, I think that would be very, very bad for
stability in our own region. It would embolden the
terrorists and it would deliver a colossal blow to
American prestige." It was in this context that
Howard's recalcitrant comments on the Vietnam War
were made.
Since the end of World War II,
Australia has frequently gone to war to protect US
prestige. The calculation behind this is simple:
Australia's security is underwritten by the US,
and so nothing must question the supremacy of the
US military. But it's the same rationale that got
the country bogged down in an unpopular war in
Vietnam and it's happening again in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Australia's Vietnam
Australia's Vietnam experience is an
instructive lens through which to view its current
entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The
conventional wisdom today is that Australia's
participation in the Vietnam War was a strategic
miscalculation and moral blunder. Archival
evidence has demonstrated that Australian leaders
misconceived the nature of the conflict in Vietnam
and their policy, in retrospect, was a disaster of
the first magnitude.
Beginning in 1962,
the Liberal (Howard's political party) government
sent a group of some 30 military instructors to
South Vietnam to provide military training
assistance. Ten years later, some 50,000
Australian troops were in South Vietnam as
Canberra dispatched battalion after battalion to
help the US halt the communist advance. Following
the domino theory, Australian policymakers were
concerned that if not stopped, communism would
eventually spread its way Down Under.
"The
takeover of South Vietnam would be a direct
military threat to Australia and all the countries
of South and Southeast Asia," then prime minister
Sir Robert Menzies told parliament in 1965. "It
must be seen as part of a thrust by communist
China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans."
Then, many Australian politicians believed
Vietnamese communists were actually foot soldiers
in disguise for Chinese expansionism. Australia
lost 520 soldiers in Vietnam, and only the reality
check of the Vietcong's surprise Tet offensive in
1968, which helped to turn public opinion against
the war, saved it from further losses. The
Australian government then responded to growing
public pessimism over whether a victory could ever
be
