April 30, 2008
by Paul Kemp

What We Should Have Learned From Vietnam
 
This is the anniversary we'd rather forget: the hasty and chaotic US retreat from South Vietnam on April 30, 1975.
 
Now, as our brave Commander in Chief and his Neocon desk-commandos prepare us for war on Iran, we should take a few moments to review what the American people might have learned from that disastrous war (if our AHDD would only let us pay closer attention).
 
We are lied into war.  Now we have proof the "Gulf of Tonkin incident" never really happened.  Did you see this?  The Christian Science Monitor has credibility, but they put it a little too kindly, methinks.  Other sources are more blunt, like Infowars.com.
 
Nobody really must go to war.  Back then we had the Draft and threats of prison time if we refused; now it's just large sums of money and/or appeals to the gullible about sinister threats, when all the "enemy" wants is for us to leave them alone and let them live in peace.
 
(Have the propaganda artists gotten smarter? or are we less educated now?  Of course the number of troops in Vietnam was considerably larger, compared to the numbers they're able to pull in now with voluntary enlistment.  However, now we can draw upon professional mercenaries like Blackwater.)
 
Most of the money we spend on "Intelligence" is wasted.  For instance: our intelligence agencies were warned numerous times about the 9/11 attack, yet these warnings were ignored.  Most of the government's efforts are to create justifications for doing what they want to do and then concealing or lying about the really nasty parts, like torture, rigged elections, broken agreements, mass murders, and failed initiatives - rather than learning the customs and how we can encourage the natives to get along with us.
 
And they lie about the "body counts."  A lot of civilians get killed.  In Vietnam our news agencies proclaimed our daily official body counts (which were found to be falsified grossly) but now, we don't even pretend to count civilian deaths that we cause in the Global War on Terror(GWOT). 

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Key Point!
Nothing constructive was accomplished by the Vietnam War - at great cost.  Now we trade with the Vietnamese.  They never took over all of SE Asia, etc.  Communism never took over the world and made us slaves, as was feared.  For our 58,000 lives, we have nothing to show - and obviously, we've learned little about how the American people are stampeded into war repeatedly, to our sorrow.  But there is still time to learn!
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War is essentially a way to scare the taxpayers, who know little about the outside world and thus fear it easily, into parting with their tax money, their sons and daughters, and their freedom.  Now the threat is Islamo-Fascism, but it's the same routine.
 
When Americans got tired enough of the war on Vietnam - and no amount of carpet bombing was able to force the Viet Cong into doing our bidding, we called it off and left.

Wartime is party-time for the Military-Industrial Complex.  It is when they receive Carte Blanche to charge any price, avoid accountability for what was spent.
 
Certain people and agencies (CIA) get involved in, shall we say, "other profit opportunities" while they are going about their business over there.  During 'Nam, a lot of Indochinese heroin mysteriously turned up on the streets of America, just in time to keep the ghettos from boiling over in rage.  Today, Afghanistan has found remarkable success at cornering the world market in heroin, even under US military occupation.  The coincidences are just amazing!

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The average soldier may have varying accounts about what it was really like over there.  Some point out that the natives actually were shooting at them, often it was difficult to distinguish civilians from "the enemy."  Little children approaching soldiers were often shot because "they might be sneaking up to lob a grenade."  The enemy is devious, we are told to justify mass killing of civilians. 
 
Finally, there are those who will claim that we could have won if we were allowed to go all-out, meaning use nuclear weapons like we did on the Japanese.  Several vets from Vietnam and more recent clandestine operations love to opine: "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out!"  Otherwise normal vets now tell me we should "Turn the middle East into a sheet of glass" with nukes, in order to decisively "win."
 
Politically and diplomatically, the US government would rather deal with the worst sort of tyrants and native crooks, rather than let the people elect whom they want.  Any time, anywhere in the world a populist leader is fairly elected, you can bet the CIA is working with authoritarian forces to overthrow the new popular leader.  This is odd, when you think about it.  We are told we want to promote Democracy and legitimately-elected governments, but our history proves otherwise:
 
* We backed Saddam Hussein for years with money, technology, and information while he murdered and terrorized his own people.
 
* We engineered the overthrow of popular elected leader of Iran, to replace him with the Shah who was more agreeable to our oil industry.  Our CIA and Israel's Mossad trained SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, in torture, etc.
 
* We engineered the coup that replaced Allende with Pinochet in Chile.
 
* We backed Somoza in Nicaragua, then tried to overthrow the popular Communists government of Daniel Ortega
 
* Bloody Battista was fine with us in Cuba, but Castro was seen as a threat and a covert, illegal CIA-organized and funded invasion was a massive and embarassing failure.  Read the book - Bay of Pigs.  It is a textbook account of the lies and subterfuge our government will use to clumsily try to make every little thing go our way.  And still fail!
 
* We replaced Arbenz in Guatemala with some rightwing thug to protect "our" banana plantations, etc.
 
* More recently, the Palestinian people legally elected the Hamas government to be their representatives and the US and Israel and our allies hve done everything possible to undermine and even assassinate them.  Starvation and disease are being used, too.
 
The list goes on and on.  Those in power and their supporters will counter that this is the way the real world works.  A calm study of fifty years of the results show that these attempts to control the will of the people don't work very well at all.  At the same time, it is an open secret that - for all our high praise of Democracy and Freedom - that's not what the USA has come to stand for.
 
It is only those who live behind a protective curtain of mainstream American media lies who believe we can do no wrong.  The rest of the world has a more accurate impression of what our country really stands for.
 
We can do a lot better - and if we want to continue to enjoy our prosperity and freedom - we must do better.
 
On this anniversary of the successful reclamation of Vietnam's right to choose its own form of government, April 30, 1975, let us learn and admit our failures, so we can win the friendship of the world's people again.
 
To read about the next war the Bush/Cheney administration is about to start, and who's pushing us into it, go here.
 
Who will stand up to do anything about it, except for Ron Paul? (We can still elect him, you know.)  Where are the protests of the American people?  Or are we frightened into submission by the echos of the shots fired at Kent State?
 
For a little comic relief, here's a musical tribute to the Vienam War that pretty well sums it all up.

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Paul Kemp awoke to the realities of American politics as a Conscientious Objector and war resister during the Vietnam era.  He is an entrepreneur and writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He welcomes feedback through his website, http://defending-your-retirement.blogspot.com/. 

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