The Black Commentator

The Bush et al new plan for Iraq that has been announced was as open a secret as Christmas. 20,000 or so more troops (some yanked from Afghanistan--that's good thinking) and a billion dollars for job creation in Iraq. I'm laughing--all of a sudden it is Spring 1975 again, with the same crew now as then, trying once more to pull off another round of crookedness at home to hide their failure in war abroad.

Our creation, the ARVN, recipients of untold billions of US taxpayer largess, trained by tens of thousands of GI trainers, had tottered along since the 1973 Cease-Fire without tripping over its own feet too badly, at least not fatally. March 1975, the PAVN attacked, and ARVN shattered apart on the first blow. TV pictures showed ARVNs throwing down their rifles, shucking their uniforms, and running away in their underwear. Disgraceful scenes of cowardice and panic everywhere, broadcast on every station, every evening, from every corner of South Vietnam. Worst military performance since the French collapse in 1940--one of the very worst in military history ever. It ended quickly enough on April 29, when the helicopters came to evacuate the US embassy in Saigon. The biggest reason it didn't end quicker is that the PAVN couldn't run after the ARVNs fast enough to keep up.

The panic, the failure, the cowardice, the incompetence, the corruption and most of all the complete military hopelessness of the ARVN was all out in the open within a week of the start of the battle. This didn't stop Gerry Ford, Henry Kissinger, and their White House crew (which included Rumsfeld and Cheney) from playing one of the more evil pieces of political gamesmanship in recent history with this fiasco. Ford and Kissinger went in front of the cameras on April 10 (Ford) and 15 (Kissinger), a month after the offensive started, and less than three weeks before it ended, to ask Congress for another $722 million in emergency military aid for the ARVN. (Multiply by four to get a current dollar figure.) There were the usual unctuous pontifications about not abandoning an ally in need, with the clear, unstated threat that the loss of South Vietnam was going to be hung on the necks of the Democrats in Congress (just as China in '49) if they didn't cough up the money. Ford's allies in Congress and the media elites, such as the Alsop brothers, chimed in with their support of the measure. Fortunately it didn't go anywhere. Most people in the country, and even the media elites, had had enough of the war as a political issue by then, and were smart enough to see that three quarters of a billion dollars now, in 1975, wasn't going to do what a half-million GI's couldn't do in 1968. People saw a dishonest attempt to play the blame game for the fall of Saigon, and they didn't buy it. The issue never got any traction, then, or since.

Trying to pull off something that politically dishonest didn't fly. Militarily dishonest or worse, it was plenty obvious, even if nobody commented publicly on it then, that every single piece of that $722 million in military equipment Ford and Kissinger wanted us to hotshot to ARVN was not only going to be uselessly wasted by ARVN but would soon be going straight into Hanoi's army depots. You remember the joke: ARVN M-16's--never fired, only dropped once. Congress stood up and stopped that foolishness from ever happening.

Right now with Iraq, it’s about the same as 1975, again. Iraq has come apart, and so has its army. Our military efforts aren't stopping the insurgency or the civil war, either. Our army's inability to do anything much about either is as obvious as ARVN's uselessness in the spring of 1975 was. Pulling troops out of Afghanistan now for Iraq duty--that's military dishonesty at its worst. A billion dollar jobs program, when working for us is an automatic death sentence? That's worse than insane. These facts are all so obvious, as is the whole political dishonesty of Bush's new plan, which plays the blame and delay game as cynically and evilly as Ford and Kissinger ever did. You have to ask yourself, which is a more obscene effort--then, shipping boatloads of our weapons almost directly to our enemy's arsenals, or now, setting up an Iraqi jobs program, where each job recipient gets a death sentence from their fellow countrymen.

The only question is whether or not Congress has the backbone it did in 1975, and rejects this fraud. I say they don't, and won't. Bush can implement every bit of his plan without Congress' approval, and my bet is Congress, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid don't have it in them to take up the cudgels of defunding the war or impeaching Bush, both of which it will take to stop him. Bush's plan won't work and Congress can't stop him. The only blessing is that his plan is as small and limited and lame as it is--which is inevitable, with our army's manpower weakness. Otherwise I'm sure he'd be anteing up more.

Congress is more institutionally broken than Bush is politically weak. That is the next couple of months. After that, events in Iraq will have a power and life enough of their own to make our efforts there completely obviously irrelevant and meaningless. We will have to dance to their tune. It won't be pretty.