13:12 local time
Kristian Isringhaus
We need to learn from the past. That is one of the reasons why historical education is so important. We should do everything in our power to make sure we do not repeat our mistakes or the mistakes our ancestors made. The holocaust is a great example of something we can learn from; the Vietnam War is another one.
I have to admit that I have been a little negligent in learning about the latter. Before travelling to South East Asia, I didn’t know too much about it, except maybe from a few movies. But even Wynne, who has enjoyed a great education in some of the finest high schools and universities of the United States, was not aware to what extent America screwed up the whole region for generations.
I did some research to fill the gap in my education and want to share my thoughts about it. Whether you think you could do with a little more knowledge about the Vietnam War or whether this will merely refresh what you already know—it can’t hurt to read on.
I do also see parallels between the war back then and the wars the United States is involved in right now. If I am not mistaken by seeing these parallels, then that means that other people, more important people, have refused to learn from the past, repeating mistakes that led the United States to one of the darkest hours of its history.
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower came up with an almost ridiculously far-fetched justification to support France financially in the First Indochina War against Vietnam (the “Vietnam War” being the Second Indochina War). Ike explained that if Vietnam fell under a communist regime, the rest of Southeast Asia would probably soon follow, leaving Malaysia dangling off of it with no chance to oppose Marx’s demonic henchmen and once Malaysia “fell”, Indonesia could become communist, as well.
And then, god forbid, the United States would lose cheap access to Indonesia’s tin and tungsten. See any parallels to recent wars yet? Tin and tungsten? Oil?
The logic, however, is flawless, I suppose. If Vietnam becomes a communist country, other countries might become communist, too. All correct so far. He might have overlooked that other countries could become communist even without Vietnam following Marx’s ideas but that is not the point. The point is that according to the United Nations Charter which the US had signed only eight years before, neither a nation’s political orientation nor the access they provide to resources is a legal reason to attack a sovereign country.
However, the congress agreed to support France’s war against Vietnam with a total of no less than 400 billion dollars, which was a lot of money back then. In the last years of the war the US spent more on France’s battle to keep its illegally conquered colony than France itself did.
Shockingly, in 1954 the Vietnamese army defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu and forced them to surrender unconditionally. The United Nations devised a plan to rebuild the country. According to the plan, it was to be divided temporarily until free elections in 1956 were supposed to find a single government for a reunified Vietnam. Guess who opposed those free elections: the United States and South Vietnam, who were scared that the people might vote for the popular communist leader Ho Chi Minh. Apparently, free elections are only approved by “the land of the free” if American interests are well taken care of. We will see again later that the United States will pick a tyrant over a democratically elected government in a foreign country any time as long as they can control that leader like a puppet.
Therefore, the US decided to support the inhumane, despotic dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, who ruled over southern Vietnam. More than 12,000 people who dared to differ in their religious or political views were slaughtered in the first few months of the Catholic ruler’s cruel regime. More and more people started to fight for their freedom and organized in militant opposition groups. Ho Chi Minh supported these people against the oppressive regime.
Reason enough for the US to engage in a war that would, over the next ten years, cost two million Vietnamese and 58,000 American lives. It also cost the American tax payer over 600 billion dollars (a lot of money back then), proving Eisenhower wrong in assuming that a war would be cheaper than the possibility of losing access to Indonesia’s tin and tungsten.
In the course of this war, the US probably broke every single one of the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, and every article of the Geneva Protocol and the UN Charter, attacking a sovereign country only to preserve their own economic interests, using illegal weapons such as napalm and Agent Orange, and piling up crimes of war and crimes against humanity in an unprecedented manner. The dioxin in Agent Orange alters the DNA and is therefore passed down through the generations. To this day, babies are still born with horrible disfigurements, sometimes to healthy parents, since the diseases can skip generations.
Another thing that the world is widely unaware of is that during the war more bombs were actually dropped over Vietnam’s neighbor Laos than over Vietnam. The weapons used there were so-called cluster bombs, which are big containers holding about 100 tennis-ball-sized bombs. About 80 Million of those little explosives did not detonate and are still littering vast parts of eastern Laos. To this day, about 100 people get either killed or crippled by them every year, mostly kids playing outside.
But even when the war was lost for the US, they weren’t done doing evil in that region. Their war that they had taken also to Laos and Cambodia had destabilized Southeast Asia to an extent that enabled the Khmer Rouge to take over in Cambodia when the country was literally collapsing under the weight of Vietnamese refugees. The regime of the Khmer Rouge was likely one of the cruelest in the history of this planet, paralleled only maybe by Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. In only three years and eight months of power they managed to kill directly or torture to death over two million of their own country’s men, women, and children.
The details of the horrific regime of the Khmer Rouge are a different story. But here is my point: in 1979 the Vietnamese army marched into Phnom Penh to free the people of Cambodia from the cruelties of this regime. The Vietnamese never had the intention to take over Cambodia and wouldn’t have been able to afford that financially anyways. They simply freed their neighbors from their oppressive rulers and left when the country was somewhat stable enough to carry on on its own.
The joke, however, is that members of the Khmer Rouge still held the Cambodian seat at the United Nations until well into the 80s. Instead of getting prosecuted for their crimes against humanity, they enjoyed international power and represented in the international community the people they had so cruelly oppressed. How is that possible, you might wonder. For the simple reason that Cambodia was freed by the hated Vietnamese, the United States decided to support the Khmer Rouge despite the fact that they, too, were communists. And with Russia and China not opposing the Khmer Rouge for obvious reasons, for more than a decade they represented in front of the United Nations the interests of the country they had so horribly scarred.
These days, the remaining senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge are finally tried. Those trials, however, might soon get suspended due to international pressure. A few countries including the US and Britain are worried that some nasty details might be revealed that they had hoped to be forgotten.
Now, that is the past. We learn from it what unpredictable effects any military meddling with foreign countries can have, especially when you consider only your own interests and not those of the people you are meddling with.
Let’s look at today’s battlefields and see if we can see any parallels. Again, of course, we need to start at the beginning, need to look at when the meddling started. And we will see that a lot of the problems we see in the world today could have been avoided.
It all started, again, with the communists. Russia showed some interest in Iran, which, in the early 1950s, was led by a democratically elected, liberal regime. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, showed some great political understanding and was cruising on his way to turn Iran from a third world country controlled by British neo-imperialism into a thriving economical power.
It was again President Eisenhower who, in 1953, did not believe that Iran under Mossadegh would be strong enough to stand up against Russia. The US needed a puppet in the Iranian government, and therefore plotted a coup that brought down the democratic regime and put the Shah back in power. Once his reign started, the Shah then didn’t lose any time establishing a Gestapo-like secret police to suppress the freedom of his people.
Naturally, the Iranians didn’t like that, which gave fundamentalists fertile fields to find supporters. You need to understand that the regime the US ousted was the first and to this day only democratically elected one in the Iran. Instead of enjoying freedom and prosperity, the Persian people were once again oppressed by a dictator, during whose rule their hatred against the US grew steadily. In 1979 a revolution put an end to the Shah’s cruel regime and installed an Islamic theocracy under the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini.
Uncle Sam, however, was not done yet. Unhappy about losing his puppet, he started looking about for someone who could oppose Iran, this new enemy that had, under the Shah’s rule, grown strong with American money and American weapons. A personable guy named Saddam Hussein seemed to be just the man to do the job. He grew so popular in America, that he was even named honorary citizen of the city of Detroit in 1980.
During the First Gulf War from 1980 – 1988, in which Iraq invaded Iran after being encouraged to do so by the US, America supported Iraq vastly with money, intelligence, and weapons. The latter included chemical ones like mustard gas, and biological ones like anthrax and bubonic plague (I need not mention that all of those are banned by the Hague Conventions).
Despite the great support from the US, the Iraqis eventually had to withdraw and accept the old borders, leaving Iran a sovereign country, its hatred towards America understandably fueled. Eventually, Saddam Hussein lost a marble or two, he invaded Kuwait, (that’s the one with the oil), and I suppose the rest is recent enough for everyone to remember.
But the inexplicable American fear of communism required fighting on more than one front. At the same time, on December 24th, 1979, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Reason enough for the meddle-loving and communism-hating United States to arm the Taliban, a strong group of Mujahidin or “Holy Warriors”. Yes, for those who forgot: the United States armed and trained the Taliban with advanced weapons. Among those trained by the CIA at that time is one individual whose name stands out from the rest: Osama bin Laden. With American help, the Mujahidin managed to put up enough of a fight for Russia to lose its interest.
And what did the US do? They withdrew and “left the problems of a well-equipped, fundamentalist, ideological and religious group that had been battle hardened to the Afghans and the Pakistanis”, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it on October 7th, 2009.
Now, my question is: does anybody remember radical fundamental Islamic terrorists from 40 years ago? I don’t. And are they really against the non-believers in general, or rather against the United States in particular? Well, I sure haven’t seen them bomb the Vatican yet, so I suppose the latter might be the case.
A lot of Americans think that Islamic regimes hate the US because its freedom and happiness makes their own people jealous and want to stand up for more rights. Unfortunately, this explanation is based on one of the greatest flaws in character Americans tend to show: arrogance. They hate us because we are the freest and best country in the world and everybody is jealous.
Consider this: there are other free and wealthy countries on this planet and many of them enjoy a higher standard of living than the US. Muslim extremists show little interest in attacking them, however. Thus I do not believe in the jealousy theory. I believe that America inflicted all the hate the Arabian world feels against them upon themselves by excessive meddling with other cultures, sovereign countries, and different political ideas. Their arrogance and constant striving for hegemony is what enrages people—not the freedom that they praise so highly, and that is at the same time so strongly restricted by the various domestic secret service agencies, the FBI being the first to mention.
Therefore, only a sign of peace from the original aggressor can put the problems in the region to an end.
I do not at all agree with the take on human rights in a lot of countries of the Near and Middle East, especially the status of women. But again, no one has the right to attack a sovereign country for that, and someone who supports cruel dictators over democratic governments the least of all. I also believe that all those countries were actually on a decent path to more human rights before being set back by American actions. It may now take a few decades, sadly, for them to get back on track.
By meddling around, imposing their codes of ethics onto people who don’t understand them, people with a completely different cultural background, trying to make everyone similar to them, the US has driven a lot of rather liberal Muslims into radicalism. They have given peaceful people a hated enemy and turned people that were on the verge of revolution into strong supporters of their respective regimes because these, however cruel they are, represent the interest of their people against the common enemy.
The next step is, inevitably, that hatred builds up on the other side as well, and the whole situation escalates. There has been a horrible trend in the USA over the past decade. Many Americans have begun demonizing the whole religion of Islam. When I tried to find a book on Islam on amazon.com, the first ten hits I got were either about learning to love our Muslim brothers so we can more effectively convert them to Christianity, or how we must stop the violent and gruesome religion of Islam in order to save the “free world”. These days, everybody with a long beard is considered a possible terrorist in the US. Every project to build a mosque faces great opposition because the land of the free in which every man is equal is free only to conformists.
Overgeneralization is the worst enemy of peace and intercultural understanding, a strong helper for propaganda, and a potent instrument of the right wing. However, we only need to look at Indonesia, the world’s most populated Islamic country, to see that Islam itself is not an oppressive religion. More than 300 million Muslims live there, and there is no opposition to the recent redefining of the role of women. Despite the fact that societies historically are patriarchic, women these days are becoming more and more independent without facing any oppression. We should not forget that women in the United States actually had a harder time liberating themselves. There are no forced marriages in Indonesia and men are not allowed to swap jail for a marriage with their rape victim. Many countries in the Arabian world are the same way, a fact of which few people are aware simply because these countries are not mentioned daily on Fox News.
Naturally, if you want to oppress your women you can find a part in the Quran that will, with proper interpretation, support you in your doing. You can interpret any text in a way that suits you. There are enough nutjobs in the United States that think the bible forbids homosexuality or abortion. What kind of a religion would Christianity be if that really were the case?
On the other hand, it’s barely even worth debating about the whole human rights issue, seeing that it is but a charade to justify wars that are led to protect economic interests. If the United States were serious about it, they should probably start in their own country, where the many secret services and investigation agencies pile one human rights violation onto another on a daily basis.
Concluding, I shall state that I believe President Obama has taken a big step towards peace and sent a great message of willingness to compromise to the Islamic world by pulling US troops out of Iraq and putting the departure from Afghanistan into motion. The wars did set back the human rights movements in those countries by decades, giving the fundamentalists more power and supporters than they ever had. The earlier the wars stop, the earlier those movements can start over again.
