In recent days while reflecting on Afghanistan and the US withdrawal, I have thought more and more of Vietnam and what happened there in 1975. I was prompted to revisit the 2014 PBS film Last Days in Vietnam which was aired at the end of April 2015 – the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
I watched the film when it came out but I decided to watch
again. I remember being both moved and put-off by aspects of the film. My
reaction this time was more or less the same. The human stories are compelling
and one cannot but feel compassion for the dilemma they faced. And yet at the
same time there's something repugnant about the presentation – the fact that
the film was directed by Robert Kennedy's daughter is also probably worthy of
some reflection.
Veterans involved in the evacuation speak of the 'right and
wrong' of US policy and the film is deservedly unkind to Graham Martin, the US
ambassador who seemed to be in a state of denial right up to the end. Soldiers
were so upset about the pending North Vietnamese capture of the South that they
began to operate independently and disobey orders in order to rescue South Vietnamese
connected with the American-installed regime.
The scenes of fleeing South Vietnamese are horrible and
filled with anguish. There were moments of desperation and even great valour.
And yet the film is disingenuous in that it ignores the
context of April 1975 and the 'right and wrong' of US policy in that country
since 1945. After thirty years of war, millions were dead and uncounted crimes
had been committed. Indochina was (and is) the most bombed region in the
history of the world and given the magnitude of World War II bombing, that's
saying something.
While one can sympathise with individuals and certainly women
and children, the truth is the collaborators had hitched their wagons to not
just an imperialist-colonialist power (the French-American succession) but had
also participated in a highly corrupt and brutal dictatorship formed by the US
in 1955. While many of these people did not pick up guns and fight, they had
more or less placed themselves in alignment with the forces that did – the
Americans and the RVN regime. This is hard for some people to understand but
when you ally with a violent force and benefit from it – then you're part of
it. You can delude yourself into thinking you're not but in truth you're living
by the sword – its sword. This is no less true today of those in a country like
the United States who may not join the military and yet nevertheless are part
of the Wall Street-Washington machine that drives American policy abroad and is
guilty of theft, exploitation, and mass murder.*
Who cannot feel sympathy for babies being dropped from
helicopters by their desperate mothers attempting to escape a regime that will
certainly imprison if not execute them?
And yet no one takes into consideration what the US did to
North Vietnam, Vietnam in general, or Indochina as a whole. The NVA soldiers
marching on Saigon were also filled with moral outrage. Their parents, wives,
children, and friends had been killed by American bombs. For the NLF (or Viet
Cong) they were fighting a regime (and its collaborators) who had stolen their
land, subjugated them to imperialist control, forced their families into
concentration camps, bombed them and trampled on their culture. They too were
morally outraged.
Western commentary always focuses on communism. It was
present but it was in most cases a vehicle not for internationalist Marxism but
for peasant nationalism. The record is quite clear in this regard as is the
record of US misunderstanding of communism in Asia and the relationship between
the Eastern Bloc nations in general. For years American strategists
misunderstood the nature of the Beijing-Moscow relationship as well as the
dynamics between Hanoi and China as well as Hanoi and Moscow.
The film consistently portrays the advancing NVA as dark and
menacing, leaving massacres in its wake. It's true. They were brutal but thirty
years of war had made them so and the film completely ignores and glosses over
American crimes which were heinous and of great magnitude – certainly far
greater than anything ever perpetrated by Hanoi.
The NVA advance was a case of lex talionis, the law of retaliation. And we know that those who
live by the sword will die by it. Whether you were the tip of the sword, the
blade, handle, or even scabbard – you were part of it and run the risk that
comes with it. Those who in this life refuse to take up the sword may also die
by it, but the difference is this – they have moral standing.
And this brings us to Afghanistan where a similar scene will
probably play out in the near future. The US has once again lost its war – its
war based at least in part on lex
talionis, a burning (if disingenuous and misplaced) desire for revenge
after 9/11. But that wasn't the first case of the US applying lex talionis in Afghanistan. The first
time was in July of 1979 when the Carter Administration armed the mujahideen in
an attempt to provoke a Soviet invasion which came in December. The goal was to
give the Soviets their own Vietnam. I thought of this during the film as I
endured the bloviations of Henry Kissinger speaking of US officials wanting to 'do
the right thing' and not viewing the Vietnamese as mere pawns. The record tells
otherwise including Kissinger's own bloody and deceitful legacy. But in 1979 it
was his close associate Zbigniew Brzezinski who was guiding US policy. His
actions would spark a war that at present has surpassed the forty year mark and
has resulted in around two million deaths.
The US walked away in the early 1990's and left Afghanistan
to degenerate into a brutal civil war – resulting in the Taliban. Like Vietnam,
the war has spread and impacted neighbouring nations. Pakistan was heavily
involved and sponsored the Taliban as a means of stability.
After 9/11 the US once more sought revenge but this time
(ostensibly) on the Taliban regime which harboured al Qaeda fighters. By the end
of 2001 that phase of the war was over. One of my sons was born at the time of
the Battle of Tora Bora. Little did I imagine that he could have (in theory)
fought in the same war eighteen or twenty years later. It only testifies to
just how far the project has lost its way.
But the US stayed in Afghanistan and this is because the
conflict was never merely about the Taliban or al Qaeda. There were
geo-strategic goals connected to Central Asia and Eurasia in general as well as
questions of resources and the like.
But after twenty years the US is leaving or at least leaving
in its official capacity. Policymakers and the Pentagon make distinctions on
paper which don't reflect reality. They speak of 'combat' troops or 'support'
troops, logistical support, advisors, special ops support and a host of other
terms. The bottom line is this. The US is pulling out but they're going to try
to bolster the Kabul regime (that they installed) on the cheap. But the US is
no longer willing to invest serious money or manpower (blood and treasure) into
the affair. The war and its objectives have failed. The only remaining goal is
to seek some kind of modus vivendi with
the Taliban spectrum – play them and ISIS off one another, and most
importantly, keep China out. It reminds one of Saigon in the period of
1973-1975.
At present, the US is shifting its attention to Eastern
Europe and East Asia. Like Orwell's Oceania switching its attention from
Eastasia to Eurasia, the US is rapidly moving away from fear of Islamic
terrorism to once more the threat (or pseudo-threat) of Communism. While
neither Russia nor China are communist, it doesn't matter. Oligarchic capitalist
(but increasingly totalitarian) China has retained the communist nomenclature
and there's enough residual fear and bitterness of Soviet Russia that those same
negative energies can be easily channeled toward Putin's authoritarian capitalist
oligarchy.**
In fact there's evidence to suggest the US is engaged in a
campaign of rehabilitating and repackaging Islamic fighters as is seen with
PBS's puff piece regarding a former al Qaeda commander in Syria. This suggests
to me that the US is reverting to its Cold War and 1990's geo-strategic models.
In its struggle with China and Russia, Islamic radicalism is an ally. From the
Tatars and Chechens in Russia to the Uighurs and even Tajiks in China, Islam
provides a vehicle for resistance to the state. The US has utilised these
forces before and while the alliances waned (in part) during the so-called War on Terror epoch, during the present Great Powers Struggle (or Cold War II) they
will almost certainly be used again.
And as the US vacates Afghanistan, it seems likely the
Taliban will at some point re-take Kabul as they did in 1996. And those who
collaborated with the Americans will certainly suffer. There will be
evacuations and the like. There are many similarities to South Vietnam – a
corrupt and criminal regime with Western connections, death squads and
assassination, drug smuggling as a means of finance, war crimes, massacres,
environmental damage, and cover-ups – not the least of which is the continued
obfuscation of al Qaeda's roots and America's relationship with some of its
membership in the 1980's. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan has its secrets and they
bleed over into Pakistan and Central Asia. One immediately thinks of Zia ul-Haq
and figures like Benazir Bhutto – both of whom died in connection to the larger
Afghanistan conflict.
It will be a repeat of 1975 though certainly on a lesser
scale. The spectre of Vietnam always limited US commitment in Afghanistan but
unlike Vietnam the embittered among the American ruling and military class will
have no scapegoat upon which to blame their defeat. The media and the public
were on board with them. There was no anti-war movement they can accuse of a stab
in the back.
But the ghosts of the war will haunt Afghanistan for a long
time. Agent Orange wasn't used but Depleted Uranium was and its legacy is just
as terrible. And then there are the stories, the myriad tales of the Afghan
people who suffered at the hands of the occupying army – narratives that won't
be told in American accountings of the war, legacies the US public isn't
interested in.
The Afghan Wars fought and sponsored by the US are and were
crimes. America is not the only guilty party but it's still guilty and yet
guilt and shame are not what the soldiers and public feel when they realise all
their efforts were for nothing. North Vietnam won. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh
City. The Taliban has won the war in Afghanistan and the US proxies in Kabul will
fall. What was it all for?
The truth is a pill too bitter to swallow. They were
expendable pawns, in the end little different then the lives of the people they
killed on the ground in these countries. Those in power do not care about their
lives. At best they only care about being perceived to care. It's about
treasure and glory. War is a racket. Smedley Butler learned that but decades on
his lessons have not been heeded. And in terms of the apostate Church in the
West, it continues to glorify these wars and honour their deceitful memory. I
was sickened over these past couple of weeks as I drove around. I've lost count
of how many church signs exhorted passersby to remember the fallen, honor the
memory of their sacrifice and other empty, trite, and immoral calls to
idolatry.
History's lessons have not been learned. There is nothing new
under the sun.
----
*This is why Ward Churchill referred to people in the World
Trade Center as Little Eichmann's,
not because he was suggesting they were Nazis but because they were part of the
bureaucratic apparatus that results in theft and death around the world. Though
the analogy is extreme, the point was this – Adolf Eichmann wasn't out pulling
the trigger and pouring Zyklon B into gas chambers. He was a bureaucrat who
orchestrated the trains and the camps and thus he was an essential component to
the Nazi death machine – and to the extent he knew and orchestrated the deeds,
he was guilty.
**Many err in confusing socialism and communism with
totalitarianism. Any system can drift into totalitarianism. Even a capitalist
order can easily (if inevitably) progress into plutocratic oligarchy and once
there, any form of democracy is simply pretense. Totalitarianism may or may not
result and there are different roads to it. There are many factors and variables at play. Obviously at that point
the only 'free enterprise' is within the confines of the oligarchic order.
Those at the bottom have little in the way of choice or opportunity. Such
conditions can exist easily enough in a capitalist regime with or without the
totalitarian overlay.
If one wants to flourish in the system, one must play by its rules.
Whether one finds them oppressive or not depends on the values of that person
and to what extent they believe in the system and are willing to surrender to
it in order to flourish. China may be totalitarian but it's also full of great
wealth and many people living lavish lifestyles. Those who refuse, suffer and
pay a price. The same is true in the West but because the majority of people
believe in the system and its propaganda (and turn a blind eye to its evils)
they do not understand its dissidents and nonconformists, nor can they fathom
that those who refuse to conform also pay a price.