Memories of Vietnam
Iraqi resistance leaves Bush isolated
Yet Congress votes 100-0 to fund war—
Only the people united can bring the troops home
By
Fred Goldstein
Published Oct 4, 2006 11:37 PM
Federal budgets are among
the most political of documents. The recent passage by the U.S. Senate of a
record U.S. military budget of $447 billion, including a $70 billion
“bridge” fund for the next six months of bloody occupations in Iraq
and Afghanistan, is a profound political statement about the underlying politics
of both parties of big business in the U.S.
The vote was 100 to
0.
This is not just about the politics
of the Republicans and the Democrats. The Senate is a millionaires’ club.
Its members are well connected to the corporate and financial establishment. As
such it is as good a representation of ruling-class political sentiment in this
country as you can get—particularly when there is complete
unanimity.
The message of the vote is
that, no matter how dissatisfied they are with President George W. Bush, no
matter how much their politicians and their press accuse Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld of arrogance and tactical incompetence, no matter how they
criticize the lies the Bush administration used to go to war in Iraq, their
bottom line is to continue the funding—not only of this war but of future
wars.
No consensus on what to
do
The establishment cannot come to
a consensus on what to do about Iraq.
Some military officers have said that
the war is lost in Anbar province.
Sen.
John McCain represents the military faction that wants more troops.
Sen. Joseph Biden represents a grouping
that wants to partition the country into three separate provinces as a last
resort.
Rep. John Murtha speaks for a
faction that wants to pull back “over the horizon” and remain poised
to provide strategic backup for Iraqi puppet forces.
Retired generals have called for the
resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Then there is the pro-Bush “stay
the course” grouping, apparently represented by Henry Kissinger, who has
become a chief adviser to the White House on the
war.
While the ruling class, the
military and the political establishment are completely fragmented and
distraught over the situation, the one thing they can unite on is to continue
the occupation—and they prove it when both parties continue to fund the
war.
None of them wants to pull out and
let the Iraqi people determine their own destiny. All want to keep from
“losing.” By that they mean losing Iraqi oil; losing the campaign to
recolonize Iraq under U.S. corporate and military domination; losing
Washington’s “strategic” position as overseer of the oil-rich
Middle East.
It says a lot about the
deception of capitalist politics that the little-publicized 100 to 0 bombshell
Senate vote by Republicans and Democrats to continue funding both wars in an
extraordinary act of unity, was taken at the moment that Bob Woodward’s
new book, “State of Denial,” was hitting the bookstores and making
headlines. After writing two sycophantic books praising the Bush administration,
Woodward has turned on them. His latest work holds them up to ridicule and
exposes their lying hypocrisy.
Bush regime held up to
ridicule
He shows that in May 2006,
when Bush gave a speech about the beginning of the “long retreat” of
the resistance in Iraq, military intelligence in that same month was reporting
that attacks on U.S. forces were at an all-time high of 700 to 800 a week. They
rose to 3,500 a month. Furthermore, the report projected that things would get
worse in 2007.
He tells about how Gen.
John Abizaid, commander of Centcom, said it was “critical to lower the
American troop presence” because “it was still the face of an
occupation.” Abizaid, the highest military commander in the region, said,
“We’ve got to get the [expletive] out.” Woodward quotes
Abizaid as saying that “Rumsfeld doesn’t have any credibility
anymore.” (Washington Post, Oct.
1)
Woodward reveals how Andrew Card, the
former White House chief of staff, twice tried to have Rumsfeld removed. How
Bush had to tell Rumsfeld to return Condoleezza Rice’s phone calls when
she was Bush’s national security
adviser.
George Will, a right-wing
columnist for the Washington Post, on Oct. 4 held Vice President Dick Cheney up
to ridicule by recounting how “while leading the hunt for weapons of mass
destruction in the summer of 2003, David Kay received a phone call from
‘Scooter Libby,’ Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, who wanted a
particular place searched: ‘The vice president wanted to know if
you’ve looked at this area. We have indications—and here are the
geocoordinates—that something’s buried there.’ Kay and his
experts located the area on the map. It was in the middle of
Lebanon.”
As for Bush, Woodward
said that in venting his frustration about the Iraqi government, he blurted out,
“Where’s the leader? Where’s George Washington? Where’s
Thomas Jefferson? Where’s John Adams, for crying out
loud?”
Bush turns to
Kissinger
But ridicule aside, one of
the most important revelations of the book is that Henry Kissinger, former
national security adviser and secretary of state for Richard Nixon during the
Vietnam era, “exerts a powerful and largely invisible influence on
Bush’s Iraq policy.”
“Of the outside people that I
talk to on the job,” Vice President Cheney told Woodward in the summer of
2005, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody
else.” Woodward told the talk-show host Charlie Rose that Kissinger, after
the publication of Woodward’s book, said he has met with Bush 15 or 20
times.
Kissinger’s message is that
“the only exit strategy is victory.” Woodward told Mike Wallace on
CBS’s 60 Minutes on Oct. 1 that “Kissinger’s fighting the
Vietnam War again. Because in his view the problem in Vietnam was we lost our
will. That we didn’t stick to
it.”
Kissinger is reported to have
given Bush’s speechwriter his 1969 “salted peanuts memo” on
withdrawal of troops. He warned Nixon at that time that, “Withdrawal of
U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more
U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.” Shortly thereafter Bush
gave his “Strategy for Victory in Iraq”
speech.
It is important to remember that
Kissinger is a war criminal who threatened the Vietnamese with nuclear
annihilation during negotiations. But more important than that, he is the
proponent of ruling class delusions about why liberation struggles win: because
the ruling class in the U.S., under the impact of the media, public opinion and
so on, “loses its
will.”
What Kissinger leaves out
of his rendition of the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam is, first and
foremost, the willingness of the Vietnamese people to fight “10 or 20
years if necessary,” as the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh
put it.
But Kissinger also leaves out
the fact that in the U.S. during that war, the Black people in urban centers all
over the country were rebelling against poverty, racism and repression, and many
of them were Vietnam veterans. Kissinger does not mention that the 82nd Airborne
Division had to be sent to Detroit to put down an armed rebellion in 1967 or
that U.S. troops had to guard the White House and the Capitol building after Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, touching off rebellions in over
100 cities.
Alongside the Black
rebellion were organizations of Chicano resistance in the Southwest and of
Puerto Rican resistance, both on the island and in the U.S. The Black Panther
Party, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, and many other manifestations of
political resistance of the oppressed surged during the Vietnam
era.
Kissinger also leaves out the mass
anti-war movement that was increasingly in a resistance mode. Government
officials could not travel outside Washington, D.C. without sparking protests;
draft boards were burned down; the ROTC and the CIA were driven off campuses
across the country. Attempts were made to stop troop trains; corporations were
targeted; the slogan “Big firms get rich while GIs die” became a
battle cry.
Most importantly, the
rank-and-file soldiers were rebelling against the war and the military command
was suffering disintegration. Troops were refusing to go into battle by the late
1960s and early 1970s. Hundreds of officers were being killed in a practice
called “fragging”—that is, by grenades thrown by their own
troops. Morale was so bad that the high command allowed hard drugs to
proliferate.
Vietnam: why U.S. pulled
out
In short, the decision to pull
troops out of Vietnam was due not merely to a lack of will but to a calculation
of class interests by the main sections of the U.S. ruling class. The social
stability of the system was coming apart in the face of a many-pronged rebellion
at home and the determination of the liberation forces in
Vietnam.
Woodward’s book holds up
a mirror for the ruling class to contemplate, without spin or makeup, the
character of the group that is running the capitalist state. What he has written
is not new. It has been whispered and written about in scattered articles and
books. But he has pulled it all together to present a unified picture. His
switch from cheerleader to devastating critic represents the disillusionment of
the establishment with the Bush administration and the
occupation.
But it is important to point
out that the U.S. ruling class was demoralized about the war in Vietnam quite
early on. Lyndon Johnson was forced out of running for reelection because he
wanted to escalate the war beyond the 500,000 troops already there. Despite this
discontent, the troops were not pulled out until the country and the military
machine were in the early stages of becoming
ungovernable.
Woodward’s book
makes Rumsfeld the principal enemy. But the truth is that there is not now, nor
would there have been, a true “strategy for victory” in Iraq. Each
establishment grouping is looking for the fundamental cause of the problem. But
none of them will acknowledge the simple truth that occupation breeds
resistance—whether that occupation is carried out
“competently” or incompetently. The Iraqi people were colonized by
the Turkish empire, then the British empire. They threw the colonialists out in
1958 and they don’t want a new
colonizer.
As of Oct. 4, the latest news
from Iraq is that nine U.S. soldiers were killed in one day—the highest
number since April. Seventeen have been killed in the last five days, most in
Baghdad. Many were killed in separate attacks, either by roadside bombs or by
small arms fire. There are no reports on the number wounded or on how many
Iraqis have been killed, wounded or brutalized in U.S. military raids and
roundups.
The U.S. high command and the
Iraqi politicians have declared one after another new “security”
plans for Baghdad: neighborhood by neighborhood operations; curfews; digging
trenches around the city; setting up checkpoints; and now the latest plan
announced by puppet Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is local committees.
Each new plan is met with increased
Iraqi resistance. The official number of U.S. soldiers killed in September, when
troops were transferred from Anbar province to Baghdad, is
74.
With each new “strategy for
victory” announced by Bush or the U.S. clients in Baghdad, the resistance
develops new tactics to fight back. With each new act of aggression, each new
atrocity by U.S. and British forces, there is greater hatred and willingness to
fight the occupiers.
No faction in the
ruling class, the military or the political establishment knows how to win or
has any answer to their crisis in Iraq. The only thing they can unite on is not
to “lose” in Iraq, and this means to keep fighting, no matter how
much Iraqi and U.S. blood is spilled, no matter what damage it does to the
economic and social well-being of the workers and oppressed at home, who have to
pay for this war.
The lesson of history
is that a united, mass resistance will get the troops home. Then and only then
will the ruling class “lose its will” to keep funding the war and
fighting for its empire.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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