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As Paul Wolfowitz,
deputy secretary of defense, is nominated to head the World Bank —
calling into question President Bush’s foreign policy — I am reminded of
another period in history, during the height of the Việt Nam War, when
the departure to the World Bank of the then-Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara marked a different juncture in the fighting.
Wolfowitz, despite U.S. difficulties in post-war Iraq occupation, seems
to leave his post from a position of strength. In fact, the
administration’s professed stand on democracy seems to be bolstered,
beginning with the election in Iraq, then Saudi Arabia along with Egypt,
and by popular uprisings in Ukraine, Lebanon, and Kyrgzistan of late.
By contrast, McNamara, after seven years on the job, left it following
the 1968 Tết offensive. He walked away embittered and disillusioned with
the happenings on the battlefield. Is Bush successful in carving out
Iraq as a beachhead of democracy in the Middle East sea of trouble?
It’s too early to tell, as the president has only entered his second
term while the four administrations — Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford —
during the war might have learned a different lesson.
What sort of lesson?
In some quarters, people believe America should have grasped by now that
the U.S. applied its arrogance to jump start democracy in Iraq. But in
Viet Nam, after all the Americanization of the war, the end allowed the
influence of a divisive and impatient American public to cut short
American resolve and thus precluded its mission to bring
self-determination and freedom there.
There was another probable course that few people have given much
thought. What if the United States had left Việt Nam to its own device?
One will never know what might have been the outcome for Việt Nam had
President Kennedy survived. He and McNamara were contemplating
withdrawing troops from the battlefields in 1962. Kennedy was visibly
shaken when he heard of the coup that overthrew and killed South
Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother Nhu in November 1963.
Shortly after, JFK was assassinated.
It’s difficult to assess how much of McNamara’s hawkish pragmatism or
how his brilliant mind was forced to fit Johnson’s strategy of a
“winnable war.” But Johnson had a different plan. He was able to use the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) to wage war and the very idea of
self-determination and freedom for South Việt Nam was on a slippery
slope to self-destruction.
On this 30th anniversary of the Vieät Nam tragedy, I am mindful that
sometimes the fate of one’s own country cannot be determined by its own
people or leaders — no matter how representative, brilliant or
undemocratic and inept they are. Diệm might not have been the best guy
that the South could have had, but he and his brother Nhu had
steadfastly refused American military involvement, yet through some
series of missteps (e.g. family-ruled and dictatorial clique, the
Buddhist suppression) his administration had cleared the way for
American intervention.
One may conclude that French colonialism in the late 1800s had given
rise to nationalism and communism to become its offshoot, paving the way
for the Second Indochina conflict (1954-1975). But when the United
States entered Vieät Nam — first on the French side in WWII, then
militarily in 1965 — it changed the nature and course of the war.
America now replaced France as the occupation force, giving more
legitimacy to Communist insurgency to rally people around the cause of
national sovereignty and unification.
The dictates of geopolitics, realpolitik and globalization in a
multipolar world where emerging powers realign themselves (end of World
War II, Nixon’s China trip, European Union, global terrorism) may have
further eroded the lesson of the Việt Nam war and led America to
reshuffle its priorities. But despite the last American debacle,
democracy and self-determination still hold out promise for Việt Nam in
the 21st century and give meaning to the past 30 years.
So today, when the struggle for democracy is waged by many, most
notably, the sons and daughters of the Hà Nội regime, America should
question its role in the world: how to promote those American ideals
without exporting free trade and turn tyrants into corrupt capitalists.
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