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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 24-Aug-07
Antiwar Democrats are freaking out over Bush's Vietnam - Iraq war comparison.

Web Log - August, 2007

Antiwar Democrats are freaking out over Bush's Vietnam - Iraq war comparison.

The same people who have been comparing Iraq to Vietnam for years are now babbling incoherently, because of President Bush's comparing the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

Thanks to the economic news, it's been a long time since I've commented on the clown circus in Washington, and this story provides an interesting opportunity.

The lead headline, in big, bold letters at the top-right of Page One of Thursday's Boston Globe was: "President compares Vietnam, Iraq wars".

Wow! That must have been some speech to make it far and away the most important news story in the world! Where's Paris Hilton when you need her?

As usual, almost everything said by both sides was completely wrong, since the Vietnam and Iraq wars have nothing in common except that they're both wars, but it's been a while since I've commented on the clown circus in Washington, so this is an opportunity.

I had expected Bush's speech to be purely political, but when I read the full text of the speech I found it to be VERY interesting because it presents a very good historical summary of the neo-conservative position. I'll get back to it later, but here are the paragraphs that seems to be drawing the most babbling from so-called antiwar Democrats:

"A columnist for The New York Times wrote ... in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: "Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life."

The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.

Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. ... Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."

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Now all of this is perfectly correct. In fact, at the time of the genocidal massacre in Cambodia, leftists like Jane Fonda and William Kunstler were cheering the massacre on because the massacre was being perpetrated by their beloved Communists. "I would never criticize anything that a Socialist government did," said Kunstler. And earlier, Fonda had visited Hanoi and sided with the Communists against America.

So President Bush is shoving all this back in their faces, as well he should. These people have been anti-American jackasses most of their lives, and still are today.

However, it isn't true that Bush has "rejected the comparison" for years, as the Globe article claimed.

Last October, President Bush compared what al-Qaeda in Iraq was doing to the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War. That comparison caused a press tizzy similar to the one going on right now, but see that article for a Generational Dynamics analysis of why that comparison fails.

Furthermore, the antiwar Democrats have been comparing the Iraq war to the Vietnam war all along.

For example, Senator Ted Kennedy compared the Iraq war to Vietnam War in a January speech demanding total withdrawal. Kennedy said the following:

"Some will disagree. Listen to this comment from a high-ranking American official.

'It became clear that if we were prepared to stay the course, we could help lay the cornerstone for a diverse and independent region.

If we faltered, the forces of chaos would smell victory, and decades of strife and aggression would stretch endlessly before us. The choice was clear. We would stay the course, and we shall stay the course.'

That's not President Bush speaking; it's Lyndon Johnson speaking, 40 years ago, ordering 100,000 more American soldiers to Vietnam."

This is an interesting comparison. What Kennedy didn't mention is the point that Bush just made: After America withdrew, there was a huge genocidal war engulfing the entire region, with millions of people killed in Vietnam, and then in the "killing fields" of Cambodia.

So the question arises: Will a similar genocide occur if America withdraws from Iraq? I've answered this question many times, and won't repeat the whole thing here; there's a good summary in the article on Ted Kennedy's speech from which I just quoted.

There are some importants to remember with the Iraq war versus Vietnam war:

During the Vietnam war, America was in a generational Awakening era, so the population fought the war half-heartedly. But it was a crisis war for the Vietnamese and Cambodians, so they fought it genocidally. The Cambodian genocide would have occurred irrespective of American involvement in the Vietnam war. Their previous crisis war was the French conquest of Indochina in 1868-1885.

The Iraq war began in 1990, with American involvement beginning in 1991, and continuing ever since. It escalated sharply in 1999 with almost daily bombing of no-fly zones. The 2003 ground war was another escalation, but if we hadn't done it, we'd still be bombing no-fly zones with completely unpredictable results. Iraq today is in a generational Awakening era, so the Iraqi people are fighting half-heartedly; America is in a Crisis era, and is not going to give anywhere nearly as easily as we did in Vietnam.

The Iraq war is NOT a civil war; it's a proxy war between America and foreigners from al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as Iran. The Vietnam War WAS a civil war.

The defining situation in the Mideast is the coming crisis war between Jews and Arabs, and a related crisis war between Sunnis and Arabs. This war will be genocidal, it will pull in the U.S. and every other country in the region. All kinds of weapons will be used, including WMDs. The Iraqi people will try to stay out of it, but probably won't have much luck in doing so.

When you look at the long history of Vietnam from the point of view of Generational Dynamics, it's easy to see how the 1960s-70s war had to do with events that were launched centuries ago.

North and South Vietnam have had different ethnic origins, with North Vietnam (Vietnamese Kingdom) originally populated by ethnic Chinese, and South Vietnam (Champa Kingdom) populated by Polynesian settlers from Indonesia and Malaysia. These ethnic differences have resulted in one crisis war after another over the centuries.

The major one occurred in 1471, when the (North) Vietnamese invaded Champa (in the South), captured its capital of Vijaya and massacred thousands of its people, effectively ending the existence of Champa kingdom. The next crisis war, in 1545, partitioned Vietnam into North and South again, until the Tay-son rebellion of 1771-1790, resulting in a united Vietnam for the first time in 200 years.

During the Awakening era in the early 1800s, cultural development blossomed, making it the high point of literary culture in Vietnamese history. Thanks to the French, Christianity bloomed, with hundreds of thousands of Catholic conversions from Confucianism and Buddhism. However, as the unraveling era arrived (1850s-70s), Ember Tu-Duc relentlessly suppressed Christianity, sanctioning thousands of executions.

This led to the French conquest of Indochina, in a crisis war from 1865-1885.

In the Awakening era that followed, 1904 saw the formation of the Duy Tan Hoi revolutionary (anti-colonial) society. 1908 - student uprising in Hanoi. 1925 Ho Chi Minh forms the Revolutionary Youth League. (In 1920, Ho had been in France, where he took part in the founding of the French Communist Party.) During WW II, Ho formed the Viet Minh political / relief organization, for people starving to death thanks to confiscation of goods by the occupying Japanese.

Thus, what we call the Vietnam War was simply the next step, lasting from 1954-1974. First, human wave assaults defeated a French encampment at Dien Bien Phu caused French to withdraw. America sent advisors to Saigon to help the South Vietnamese. The Americans supported the South Vietnamese through the North-South civil war that finally ended with the North's victory in 1974.

The point is that almost any comparison that can be made is irrelevant unless it recognizes those long-established ethnic fault lines and previous crisis wars between North and South.

So, with that background, let's take a look at excerpts from the text of President Bush's speech. It's a very interesting summary of the neo-conservative position, and once you apply generational theory to it, you see why it's completely wrong.

"The enemy who attacked us despises freedom, and harbors resentment at the slights he believes America and Western nations have inflicted on his people. He fights to establish his rule over an entire region. And over time, he turns to a strategy of suicide attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight.

If this story sounds familiar, it is -- except for one thing. The enemy I have just described is not al Qaeda, and the attack is not 9/11, and the empire is not the radical caliphate envisioned by Osama bin Laden. Instead, what I've described is the war machine of Imperial Japan in the 1940s, its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its attempt to impose its empire throughout East Asia.

This is a very interesting comparison, because it compares two times when America was in a generational Crisis era (WW II and today), and two enemies who were also in a Crisis eras: the Japanese then, and al-Qaeda today.

It's not surprising that the Japanese at that time and al-Qaeda today act similarly, since that's how people in Crisis eras act, especially young people when they hate a certain enemy.

"Ultimately, the United States prevailed in World War II, and we have fought two more land wars in Asia. And many in this hall were veterans of those campaigns. Yet even the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America's strongest and most steadfast allies, or that the South Koreans would recover from enemy invasion to raise up one of the world's most powerful economies, or that Asia would pull itself out of poverty and hopelessness as it embraced markets and freedom.

The lesson from Asia's development is that the heart's desire for liberty will not be denied. Once people even get a small taste of liberty, they're not going to rest until they're free. Today's dynamic and hopeful Asia -- a region that brings us countless benefits -- would not have been possible without America's presence and perseverance.

The view of Bush and the neocons has been that by fighting in Iraq, the country will be tranformed into a free democracy, as happened in Japan, South Korea and other Asian countries. (They would also point to Germany and Italy for the same purpose.)

I've briefly reviewed the history of Vietnam in this article, but I don't have time today to do the same for all the other countries mentioned. Each country has its own fault lines, its own hatreds, and its own blossomings. When you try to create historical analogies between different countries, it's almost impossible unless you know what you're doing.

What ties all these countries and all other countries together is generational timelines. Each country has a genocidal crisis war every 70-90 years, and Awakening eras halfway between the crisis wars.

This happens whether or not the country's government is a democracy, a monarchy, a dictatorship, or some other form of government.

However, there's another important point: Dictatorships and controlled economies don't work for long. It's easy to prove, using the mathematics of Computation and Complexity Theory, that controlled, regulated economies only work for relatively small populations. As the population grows, the number of "regulators" grows exponentially faster than the population, and so either the government regulates less or it collapses. That's why the countries of North Korea, Cuba, East Germany and Russia were all stuck in the 1950s for decades under communism. Capitalism and freedom are not so much ideologies as mathematical imperatives. (24-Aug-07) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 24-Aug-07 Antiwar Democrats are freaking out over Bush's Vietnam - Iraq war comparison.

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 24-Aug-07
Antiwar Democrats are freaking out over Bush's Vietnam - Iraq war comparison.