Memories of Saigon

Did you hear what the President said last week?
I heard him say that we didn’t kill enough of the enemy in Vietnam.
We didn’t burn enough of their jungles. We didn’t bomb enough of their cities. We didn’t turn enough of their women into whores, their children into orphans, our children into orphans, our soldiers into junkies.
We should have stayed, and killed more.
We should have leveled that country.
We had the opportunity.
We had the weapons.
We were just too timid.
If we had done what we had promised to do, President Bush implied, Vietnam would still be the oppressed colonial possession that it had been for decades before us.
It would only have taken a few more political assassinations.
It would only have taken a few tactical nuclear weapons.
We had the draft, so it would have been easy to add a few hundred thousand troops more, to the half million we had ‘in country’ at one time.
We could have easily added another ‘wing’ to the Vietnam memorial.
But we lost the will to win – at least according to the President, and he should know, because he was one of the first to feel that ‘will’ slipping away. He was a trained fighter pilot in 1970, but instead of fighting in Vietnam.. well, really no one knows what he did in those critical years: his records have been ‘misplaced.
But we do know that President Bush came of age, during that time, so he can speak somewhat authoritatively about how close we were to accomplishing our mission there. And the President knows that with victory come the spoils. With the defeat of the North Vietnamese Army would have come an extended guerilla war – with our troops remaining in Vietnam for years, even decades. And with America’s victory, and the necessity of fighting an insurgency in Vietnam for decades, the Vietnamese would have not been able to make the economic gains that they have made since we left. And with American troops stationed in Hanoi, China would have retained a sufficient level of paranoia about America’s intentions to justify keeping their Maoist form of government – which would have slowed their economic growth, kept Wal-Mart from having a source of cheap toys, and preserved American jobs.
Thirty years after our defeat in Southeast Asia we have to face the grim reality that Vietnam is now an economic power, a tourist destination, and that the so-called Domino Effect was real, in economic terms. Yes, with the loss in Vietnam one Southeast Asian country after another fell – like dominoes, fell to the scourge of capitalism.
That, I think, is what President Bush is warning us about: once we leave Iraq there’ll be regional turmoil, the Ahmadinejad government will lose the support of the Iranian people, and in a decade or so the oil will flow, the people will prosper, and Halliburton’s stock price will plummet.
And once we leave Iraq we will be free to focus our attention on the idiots who lied to get us into this war, didn’t plan beyond the first thirty days, and fought like hell to keep anyone from figuring out what was really going on.
Just like Vietnam, soon after we get our last troops out of there, we’ll get rid of a weak President and the Berlin Wall will fall. No, I’m sorry, I’m told that the Berlin wall is already gone: so maybe it will be the wall we’re building along the Mexican border.
In any case, you can see why President Bush wants to stay in Iraq, for as long as he can: as long as we stay the course, we can’t really get on his case.
So I have a compromise solution: let him run for office again, in Iraq.
George Bush would make a hell of an Iraqi Prime Minister: tough, resolute, and desperately in need of the American voter to keep him and his band of loonies in office.
And with George in office, in Iraq, he could say that he honored his commitment, that he didn’t ‘cut and run’, and that our boys (he could bring a few friends to ‘administrate’) are still there. And George could stay as long as he likes. They’ve got miles and miles of open space, and plenty of brush to cut. It would be like being back in Texas, and this time he might even find a little oil.
Did you hear what the President said?
People say I’ve become too cynical, but I think I heard words of encouragement, where others only heard more babbling.