From The Economist
People seem to be having trouble figuring out how to commemorate September 11th this year. I spent the morning thinking about George Packer’s piece on the new documentary “Last Days in Vietnam”, in which he reflects on how different America’s response to the near-disintegration of its former client state in Iraq has been from the way it handled the collapse of its client state in South Vietnam. In April 1975 Congress rejected the appeals of president Gerald Ford for a package of last-ditch military aid to the Saigon regime in the face of the advancing North Vietnamese Army. In Iraq, in contrast, Barack Obama just committed to an indefinite military campaign to destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Congress seems likely to approve that intervention if it comes up for a vote. Yet, as Mr Packer writes, in Vietnam America frantically evacuated tens of thousands of locals who had helped during the war as the Communists advanced. In Iraq, however, America has left many collaborating locals to suffer violent retribution. We seem to have retained our will to bomb Iraq longer, but have done far less to save the people who helped us. Why the difference?
Remember 9/11. (Photo credit: JOHN ANGELILLO / POOL / AFP)
Iraq needs further intervention, argues Mr Packer, because “unlike Vietnam, ISIS is an irreconcilable enemy and a metastasising threat.” This contrast seems to benefit from a bit of hindsight. In 1975 there was no way to know whether Communist Vietnam would become a larger problem, and indeed the Communist victory in Saigon quickly metastasised to Laos and Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia that followed America’s retreat was more horrific than anything yet seen in Syria or Iraq. ISIS seems much more irreconcilable than Vietnam was, but the case isn’t open-and-shut, and we certainly didn’t foresee reconciliation with Vietnam at the time.
If America is deciding, despite its war-weariness, to take on ISIS now, several other factors seem important. For one thing, while Communist Vietnam was backed by the Soviet Union, ISIS lacks a state sponsor. And unlike the Communist Vietnamese, ISIS has so provoked every other regional power that a wide variety of allies are eager to confront it. ISIS threatens economically important pro-American states including Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states and Turkey; whereas the only American ally Vietnam truly threatened was Thailand. And finally, by 1975, many Americans had come to feel that the Vietnamese Communist Party was a legitimate political representative of the Vietnamese nation. Virtually no Americans accord that sort of legitimacy to the theocratic genocidaires of ISIS.
The more interesting question is why America has lost the will or the ability to protect the people who take its side when it intervenes abroad. Mr Packer has written eloquently on this subject for years, advocating for America’s responsibility to give asylum to the people who worked for its forces as translators, staffers, drivers, security officers and spies, or who launched civil-society initiatives because they believed in American promises to help them build a liberal democracy—and who ended up targeted by militias for their troubles. Comparing the rooftop heroics of Saigon’s evacuation to the lacklustre efforts of American officials in Baghdad, he writes:
The Vietnam-era Americans came off much better. With a few exceptions, it was hardly possible to imagine Embassy officials or troops in Baghdad taking great risks to get their Iraqi contacts out before we left. Relationships with Iraqis were much more distant, and Americans much more isolated, owing to security restrictions and other factors. Above all, in Baghdad there was a pervasive air of deskbound caution, buck-passing, and ass-covering, in contrast with the Wild West atmosphere that broke out, for better and for worse, in Saigon in April of 1975. It was all too easy for Americans in Iraq not to know what they didn’t want to know.
Read the full aricle HERE.
