The Iraq situation seems not to be improving. Personally, I feel that the US shouldn’t have invaded Iraq. Since it has, I feel the best way to stabilize the region is with massive, huge, overly overwhelming troop deployment – no point in doing things half-heartedly with a handful of soldiers.
And the selfish foreign-imported b*stards who keep attacking/bombing/riling-up the locals should stop being so damn prideful, and let the poor Iraqis have a decent chance at rebuilding. So America is wrong to invade Iraq… Does it mean you have to kill more Iraqis and ruin their lives to prove your point?! Who is the aggressor now?
As the US invasion and occupation of Iraq drags on, grim and bloody, the critical media delights in comparing it to the Vietnam War – a conflict entrenched in popular culture as America’s most shameful failure that should never have been undertaken.
A little background: The Vietnam War lasted from 1959 to 1975. Basically, the North Vietnamese Communist regime attempted to conquer and assimilate Southern Vietnam. The US sought to stem the spread of Communism and sent its troops into Vietnam.
After many long, hard years of fighting and many casualties, the US finally decided to pull out. The Communists soon took over all of Vietnam. The US media was said to be instrumental in influencing the US government to retreat – the war was portrayed as meddling in the affairs of a foreign country and sending young Americans to die for no reason.
But was it really such a needless conflict and a tragic disaster? Should the US just have kept its nose out of sovereign Vietnamese affairs? I for one don’t think so. We of Southeast Asia should be exceedingly thankful and grateful to the Americans who sacrificed their time, resources and blood in Vietnam. Here’s why…
The North Vietnamese attempt to take over South Vietnam was just one of the many Communist movements during the height of the Communist Era. One of America’s reasons for intervening in that ‘civil conflict’ was to stem the tide and spread of Communism in the region.
Which region? Our Southeast Asia.
Imagine if the US had not gotten involved in Vietnam and there was no Vietnam War. The South Vietnamese would have been overrun much sooner. What would the Communist Vietcong have done then? They would have continued their expansion by aggression to neighbouring countries. That means Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.
In fact, that what’s Communist Vietnam actually did immediately after uniting Vietnam, they invaded and occupied Laos in 1978 after tension with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Another infamous bunch of mass murderers, btw.
If Communist Vietnam had been successful and no outside forces intervened, then they would have launched their brutal campaign a decade earlier. After Thailand it would be on to Malaysia and Singapore. Even if it didn’t manage to totally conquer the northern Southeast Asian countries, that doesn’t mean we in the south would be safe and unaffected.
We all remember the Malayan Emergency and how much grief the Communist insurgents caused Malaya. Meanwhile, Singapore had to deal with a Communist Party that was competing for mass popular support. Indonesia almost fell to a Communist coup in 1965.
If Communist Vietnam had emerged victorious over non-Communist South Vietnam and gone on, unopposed, to attack the neighboring states, Communist movements in Southeast Asia would have been given a tremendoes boost. Communism would have been seen as the way of the future.
Communist supporters would be inspired and encouraged to keep up the insurgency in Malaya, prolonging the Emergency. Singaporeans who had been non-committal would have been drawn to the Communist party which had the winning ideology. Indonesia might have never have had a successful counter-coup by the non-Communists.
We would be Communist or surrounded by Communist regimes today.
Hmm… Would that be bad? Well, just compare North and South Korea today. North Korea has been ruled by iron-fisted Communism from 1945 and is one of the most backward and underdeveloped nations today. South Korea grew in democracy and freedom and produces some of the best computer-gamers in the world (woot!).
Looking to history, North Korea launched an attack on the South in 1950, which became the Korean War. The US aided South Korea in repulsing this attack – had it not, there would only be one single, Communist Korea today. That would mean no gosu Starcraft champions to compete against.
And make no mistake – Modern day Vietnam is still recovering from its ill-fated affair with Communism. But because America intervened to stop (or at least slow down) the Communist ravagers for decades, the rest of us were given a chance to develop our economies and modernize.
Where would Malaysia’s Wawasan 2020 be if we had gotten mired in our own Cultural Revolution? How could Singapore have reached First-World status if its population had been decimated by a Great Leap Forward? How would the region fare with an expansionist Indonesian version of the USSR? Konfrontasi and East Timor would have been just the beginning.
The same could be said of the Invasion of Iraq. Ann Coulter states her view in this article that the US occupation of Iraq has diverted most of the terrorist efforts to that region. One effect of this is that there have been no terror attacks on American soil since 9-11. The troops in Iraq are drawing all the flak.
Similarly, the Vietnam War, American troops in South Korea and other US forces in Southeast Asia to guard against Communist influence (including China and the Soviet Union) kept the Communists busy and drew away their attacks. The US paid the price for this role of big-brother protector with American lives, and received not a single Sen in compensation from us… Only derision and comdemnation.
They paid the price for Southeast Asia.
So for those of us in this corner of the world at least, the Vietnam War was not an unmitigated disaster… But the hope of a peaceful life. And for this, we are thankful.
UPDATE: After having visited the former North Vietnam on vacation, I can attest to how much the country has been impoverished and set back by decades of Communism. Just compare South Korea to North Korea and you can get a pretty good idea of the end results of capitalism vs communism.
See also article at The Diplomat, excerpt:
In his March 13, 1962 column, Burnham identified communist armies in Laos and South Vietnam as proxy forces for the North Vietnamese, Chinese, and Soviet communist regimes. The communist goal was “control of the Southeast Asian peninsula” and an extension of communist power “to the Strait of Malacca [and] the Indonesian archipelago, . . . thus gain[ing] strategic domination of the South Sea passage, and simultaneously threaten[ing] India, Australia and the West’s forward defense line.”
Burnham accepted the logic of the “domino theory,” first propounded, as he noted in his June 2, 1964 column, by OSS Director General William Donovan during the 1947-54 Indochina War. Indochina’s loss to the communists risked the Western position in all of Southeast Asia and beyond. “[T]he first line of defense of our own country – our western strategic frontier – is the great arc, easily traceable on a map,” Burnham explained, “that runs from Alaska down through South Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Formosa, Southeast Asia and the Philippines, and finally, after the dangerous gap now marked by Indonesia, on to a southern anchor in Australia.” If the U.S. loses the war in Vietnam and the dominoes begin to fall, he continued, “our defensive frontier—not at once . . . but soon enough on the historic scale – must and will be drawn back to Hawaii: in fact . . . to our own West Coast . . .” The great danger, he wrote, was that defeat in Vietnam would be followed by a “strategic retreat” in Asia and the Pacific.
In a subsequent column (October 20, 1964), Burnham dismissed the notion that the struggle in Vietnam was a “local” or “brushfire” affair. “It is a critical battle in the war for Asia, the Western Pacific and the South Seas,” he wrote. If the U.S. withdraws from the struggle, “we will have demonstrated our inability as defender. It will become next to certain that the whole vast region, sea and land, will shift into the camp of the enemy.” U.S. forces are in South Vietnam, he wrote in his March 23, 1965 column, because “our own security” was at stake. U.S. interests “would be critically threatened,” he noted, “by the advance of the Communist enterprise into Southeast Asia and the South Seas.”
What was also at stake in the war, Burnham noted in several columns, was U.S. credibility – an essential weapon in the arsenal of a great power with global commitments and responsibilities. “Our national interest is at stake in Southeast Asia,” he wrote in June 1965, “because we . . . have staked it.” “The present conflict in Vietnam,” he continued, “has become, by our acts, a major test of our will.” To fail in Vietnam “would be to suffer a staggering defeat with immense, inescapable and cumulative global repercussions, precisely because it would prove to everyone that our will was the weaker.” In a subsequent column, Burnham further explained the concept of great power credibility by noting that even if America’s national interest was not originally at stake in Vietnam, “the situation has been fundamentally changed by the fact of our large-scale involvement.”
Burnham’s final reflection on America’s defeat in the war appeared in his May 23, 1975 column, a little less than a month after the tragic scene on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon played out. He expressed concern that the Vietnam War might be the first manifestation of U.S. “imperial overstretch,” and worried that America’s psychological reaction to its defeat would lead to a withdrawal from Asia and a retrenchment throughout the world. “Measured quantitatively,” he explained, “our defeat in Indochina is a minor affair.” Its strategic importance will depend on how America reacts in Asia, the Pacific, and other parts of the world. Taking the long view, Burnham noted that withdrawal from Indochina marks the first reversal of a continuous historical U.S. expansion westward. “[A]long a given strategic line,” he wrote, “once you have withdrawn from one outpost the others come under greater pressure.” U.S. withdrawal from Indochina was already “leading toward withdrawal from Southeast Asia generally.” “It is hard to see,” he continued, “how . . . further withdrawals can be indefinitely delayed, unless there is a drastic shift in strategic thrust and national attitude.” Perhaps, he hoped, Vietnam defeat would not have such drastic consequences, but he sensed that it might ultimately mean U.S. withdrawal from Asia.