On Max Boot's Rewrite of US Diplomatic History

By PHK

I read Max Boot’s oped “Another Vietnam: President Bush’s analogy to Iraq is not inaccurate, just incomplete” in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

Perhaps not surprising given Boot’s neoconservative credentials, his major assertion was that the consequences of the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 were far worse than W had maintained in his recent Veterans of Foreign Wars convention speech. Namely, that from Boot’s perspective, “the enfeeblement of a super power” had allowed all sorts of awful things to happen - from Iran and Afghanistan to Mozambique and Cambodia - that wouldn’t have happened had we just kept our military in Vietnam and – I suppose by implication - continued to take and inflict more casualties.

Nonsense

When I worked at the US Embassy in Bangkok from 1973-5 and observed the evacuations of our missions from Vietnam and Phnom Penh that final spring, conservative domino theory fingers wagged virulently threatening the imminent onslaught of the future Communist apocalypse.

We were admonished as we left in June that the rest of Indochina and Southeast Asia were fated to be next. They too, we were assured by the right-wing nay-sayers, would shortly succumb to the Communists, e.g. our ignominious departure from Vietnam and Cambodia would result in Communist takeovers of the rest of Southeast Asia post haste. The implication being that Hawaii, then the mainland would follow.

Well, yes, Laos was taken over by the Pathet Lao – but its leader, the “Red” Prince Souphanouvong who became president from 1975 until 1986 was the half brother of royalist Prime Minister Prince Souvanna Phouma so, in effect, a member of the same family continued to retain a hand in the country’s leadership perhaps, in part, as a result of the lengthy internecine warfare that had transpired between two wings of the same family.

Meanwhile, the US has quietly maintained diplomatic relations with the Laotian government – despite its Communist identification - keeping relations alive, but at a low key, over the years.

The “dominos” that weren’t

What about Thailand? This is the next domino that should have fallen if the domino theory had had legs. True there was a Communist insurgency in Thailand’s north and northeast and a Muslim insurgency – which continues – in the south.

But in the post-Vietnam era, Thailand has remained staunchly in the capitalist camp and its monarch revered by the Thai people. Politically, Thailand has alternated between military rule and shaky parliamentary democracy with a very wise king very much behind the scenes, but a Communist government was never in the cards. Besides, Communism’s straight-jacket would never have fit the fun-loving Thai.

Malaysia, too, has prospered economically even more than Thailand despite a lengthy and bitter Communist insurrection in the country’s north which began after the end of World War II. According to the State Department’s background notes, the insurgents were mostly disaffected Chinese who compose a minority of Malaysia’s population. The state of emergency was lifted in 1960 – 15 years before the American departure from Vietnam – and three years after Malaysia gained independence from the UK. That struggle finally ended in a peace accord in1989.

The Communist insurgency in the Philippines began to sputter once the corrupt Marcos dictatorship was overthrown by the 1986 People Power Revolution and the US military bases – the last remaining vestige of early 20th century colonialism – were thrown out by a one vote margin in the Philippine Senate in 1992.

Cambodia, of course, was a tragic and different story. Mr. Boot, however, must have forgotten that the evacuation of the US Embassy from Phnom Penh occurred a few weeks before, not after, the evacuation from Vietnam – or perhaps, given his tender age at the time, he never really understood the sequence of those events.

Boot also ignores the fact that the Khmer Rouge and the Ho Chi Minh’s government in North Vietnam were far from birds of a feather. In fact, there was downright antipathy between the two: the stronger Soviet-supported Vietnamese ultimately dispensed with Pol Pat’s Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge in 1979 and installed a less malignant, pro-Vietnamese leadership in its place – but not in time to stop the worst of the killing fields. If you don’t believe me, here’s the link to a BBC report at the time.

Even to suggest that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan as a result of a display of American weakness in Southeast Asia – as Boot does – is living in fantasy land. The geriatric Soviet leadership at the time ordered the invasion of Afghanistan because it did not want to see the weak Communist regime then in power there fail - or worse - its then shaky leader Amin move in an American direction. This had all to do with a generations’ old entrenched Russian fear of revealing the Russian Empire’s weaknesses for fear of its unraveling and little, if anything, to do with any perceived US chinks in its armor. I witnessed the Afghanistan invasion while I was worked at the US Embassy in Moscow – Boot, born in Moscow in 1969, however, was no more than a kid at the time.

Independent sleuthing might help

Finally, Boot should do some independent sleuthing before categorically concluding that W has not “authorized ‘hot pursuit’ of terrorists by American forces over the Iraqi border” into Syria and Iran. What makes Boot so sure? I wouldn’t just take the word of a White House that has demonstrated major credibility problems for years. How gullible can he be?

Concrete, operational, agreed-upon plans for Iraqi refugees are imperative now not just before wings up

I applaud, however, Boot’s final observation – namely the imperative of making plans to come to the aid of several thousand Iraqi refugees “should the US pull all or even a substantial portion of its forces out of the country” although I’d replace the conditional “should” with “when.”

This means US visas, emergency evacuation and resettlement assistance especially for the Iraqis who have worked for us and whose lives are and will be in danger as a result of their US associations once we leave. This also includes their families who will be equally targeted as collaborationists.

Ambassador Ryan Crocker broached this subject with respect to the US Embassy Iraqi employees in a cable to the State Department in July. Its contents leaked and were reported in a front page story in the Washington Post on July 22.

The administration immediately pooh-poohed Crocker’s appeal – arguing that Baghdad and Saigon were not, and would not, be the same: that there would be no repeat emergency helicopter evacuation from the Embassy roof and suggesting that even contemplating such an idea would be a premature and damaging public admission of failure.

Unfortunately, that’s symptomatic of the dreamland approach to life for those making policy in this administration’s fantasy world. If W’s hallucinatory dreams continue the way they’ve been going, even more personal tragedy will result.

Boot, therefore, is right to express his concern. To will something away, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Contingency plans backed up with operational realities should always be in place and able to be activated quickly for even the most remote emergency in any and every Embassy.

The fact that Crocker’s cable’s contents leaked so rapidly to the media suggests, however, that such plans have not been made or, if so, they are far from adequate. If plans exist - and I hope they do - they are on very close hold, and the fate of our Iraqi employees has all too likely been ignored. This has happened before – and more recently than Vietnam. Somalia is another horrific case in point.

And to make the US appear even more irresponsible in the world’s eyes, we have been accepting – Boot reports - only a “trickle of Iraqi refugees to our shores – a mere 200 in the first six months of the year.” This tiny number itself, however, may be inflated since WaPo reporter Spencer Hsu wrote on July 22 that “The United States has admitted 133 Iraqi refugees since October, despite predicting that it would process 7,000 by the end of September.” Is this yet another example of the faltering of an under-funded and under-staffed State Department or is there something more sinister going on? My guess is the former.

Meanwhile, the numbers of Iraqis refugees swelling the camps in neighboring countries - including and especially - Jordan increase by the day. Even Boot seems to recognize that this is no way to run a railroad – or the government of the most powerful country on earth.

Comments

[Carmen Grayson]

When half the articles from WSJ arrive in my e-mail box courtesy of a relative who disagrees with my view that Iraq is this country's greatest foreign and domestic policy catastrophe -- I generally hit "delete." Unfortunately, Max Boot's predictable gnarling of the truth slipped through my fingers, I read his piece, thus wasting ten minutes of life. Your post fisking Mr. Boot's essay was excellent. It shall be forwarded. (Hope never dies). Thank you for a strong analysis.

[zenpundit]

I'm only a few years older than Boot but the Soviets, particularly their Afghan invasion debacle, were a research interest of mine.

I think you can draw a distinction in the Soviet foreign policy apparatus in that era between the foreign ministry and the foreign intel pros in the KGB on one side and the Party clique from the CC International Department and related fellow apparatchik hacks in the KGB like Kryuchkov, on the other.

The former, under the influence of Gromyko and Dobrynin ( both ambassador to US and a CC member)were far more in the realpolitik vein, concerned about stability in bilateral superpower relations and less interested in the Third World. They weren't our friends but the weren't reckless either.

The ideologues like Suslov, Ponomarev and various hardliners in the MoD and GRU ( whose names escape me at present but the GRU was still headed by an elderly Stalinist who considered Andropov and Ustinov to be too soft) were a lot more aggressive, in charge of Party to Party relations, relations with "progressive" (i.e. terrorist and insurgent groups)forces not in power and in tune with viewing Vietnam as an opportunity to expand Soviet influence abroad. They were also a much more parochial group where their ignorance of foreign societies was compounded by professed true belief ( insincere or not).

Brezhnev's mental and physical deterioration during the late 1970's and his delegation of authority to his personal GenSec secretariat and own (very corrupt) political clan, created a lot of room for the two factions to fight over foreign policy, with the more aggressive winning out or at least pulling the politburo in their direction.

[James]

If fleeing Vietnam led the Soviets to commit suicide in Afghanistan, so much the better. Our only mistake was not doing it sooner.

Honestly, this is a bizarre attempt to rewrite history in the most peculiar way. In the neocon fantasy-land the Vietnam withdrawal led our DEFEAT in the Cold War. Shutting down a losing campaign before you are completely out of resources is common sense to professional strategists, but the neocons are riddled with amateurs that never let the iron logic of limited resources interfere with political calculation. This, of course, is what led Hitler to believe that it was simply "impossible" to abandon Stalingrad; it led Lord North to conclude that making peace with the Continental Congress would destroy the British Empire; it kept the Soviets in Afghanistan until all their strength was gone.

Or maybe, as scientists say, we just shouldn't debate the Flat-Earth Society. We should be so lucky if the catastrophe in Iraq is only as bad as Vietnam. Perhaps they would care to invoke the consequences of getting into Vietnam in the first place: the stagnant economy that permeated the 70's, the debt, the contempt of the civilized world. That might be more instructive to future generations facing "wars of choice."