By Seth Lipsky, Haaretz
As to the question of why the Iraqi army has been failing to stand and fight as the Islamic State advances, I have a theory. It’s not that the Iraqis are any less courageous than other soldiers around the globe. It’s not that the government is corrupt. It’s that they have read a long-ago editorial in the New York Times called “Commitment?”
Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters monitor the area from their front line position in Bashiqa, a town 13 kilometres north-east of Mosul on August 12, 2014. Photo by AFP
Not literally, of course, but they’ve divined the point. The editorial began with the sentence: “What, if anything, do the people and Government of the United States now owe to the people and government of South Vietnam?” The question, it went on to assert, “does not admit of an easy answer.” It reckoned the question was “entangled” in considerations of “ethical responsibility, political commitment, and strategic self-interest.”
Plus, it added, there were also the “ambiguities” of a “shared history between a very powerful nation and a very weak one.” It didn’t specify which — America or Vietnam — was the “weak one” (one could argue it round or argue it flat, as a wise old editor once put it). But the Times did then proceed to assert that “beyond the clear call of human fellow feeling” there “resides” the “hard and complex political question.”
Never in the history of editorial writing had there been such a plea for perfidy. But then, the Times conceded, “it is never easy to come to terms with failure and disappointment, even if it is the failure of an effort that was mistaken in its basic premises, as America’s involvement in Vietnam was.” It reckoned that America “made a fundamental miscalculation of its own national interests” in going to Vietnam.
The editorial was published on April 6, 1975. By April 15 the Khmer Rouge was in control of Phnom Penh, setting the stage for the death of millions in what became the killing fields of Cambodia. The Free Vietnamese were by then retreating — whole divisions at a time — from the Central Highlands. By the end of April, the communist conquest of South Vietnam was complete. In the subsequent years, millions fled Vietnam by boat or died in re-education camps.
Read the full article by Seth Lipsky, Haaretz.
