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A SENSE OF ASIA

No! Sen. Kerry, Iraq is not Vietnam!


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

June 22, 2006

My old pal, George Tanham, may he rest in peace, probably never forgave me for a book review criticizing “counterinsurgency”. It was pseudoscience, I had written. And George, wherever you are, I still hold the thesis: guerilla warfare is so particularistic, so tied to local conditions, there are no generalizations you can make about it from area to area which are not vapid. For example, the army and police of the government should be kind to the locals.

Vietnam old timers argued there were 35 wars, one in each of South Vietnam provinces. Central Vietnam’s hard scrabble life couldn’t have been more different than the Delta’s lushness. Ho Chi Minh’s native Nghe Ahn province famines, sent him off as a Messageries Maritime cabin boy to France after he knocked up a village girl he did not want to marry. The Delta’s incredible floating wild rice rose in the Mekong’s flood tide, helped solve the guerillas’ logistics..

The alignment of locals in the conflict often derived from old feuds over land, or a village of Northern Catholic refugees against their Buddhist neighbors. Or ancient antagonism of local Khmer Krone, the ethnic Cambodians left over from the relatively recent conquest of old Cochina China, against Vietnamese. South of Route 1 in the Delta there was an old struggle against landlords, but west of it there was plenty of land where President Ngo Dinh Diem – against advice of Dutch hydrologists – had built an expensive canal.

In Cholon, Saigon’s satellite Chinese city, you had to know the schema of regional and linguistic communities, who was pro-Chinese Communist, who pro-Kuomintang, to know who was on first. If you were dealing with the black market changing dollars into piastres to meet inflated prices [and I knew only one foreign correspondent who wasn’t], you had to know whether you were dealing with “The Bank of South India”, Moslems based in Pondicherry, or funding the Communist-run black market [which paid a higher price].

When an elaborate U.S. intelligence unit told Joe Alsop and me their graphics showed Vietcong launched their attacks from French-owned rubber plantations, I and my Vietnamese friends were hardly surprised. They had told me years earlier tappers were recruited in the impoverished North – often Shanghaied. They welcomed their fellow Northern Communist cadre in the “infiltration packets” coming down the Hi Chi Minh Trail. A French pediatrician, diagnosing my malaria, told me infiltrators were bringing malaira to areas where it had not existed. [The mosquito carrying malaria in Southeast Asia breeds on grassy slopes of fast moving streams; why it was limited to the mountains, and why as Vietnamese colonizing down the Peninsular over centuries had stuck to the coastal littoral.] That’s also why the First Mountain Division had immediate heavy casualties from malaria when it located in the foothills..

There is no commonality among the 1960s urban Tupamaro insurgency in sophisticated Uruguay or the mixed Communist-fascist Monteneros of Argentina’s Dirty War and the Moslem Moros in the Southern Philippines whom Gen. “Blackjack” Pershing put down without much regard for human rights in the 1890s [before he went off to win World War I in Europe] and the Maoists who now control much of Nepal.

Confused attempts to put statistics on the insurgency in Vietnam led to ludicrous if sometimes fatal consequences. An American official had no answer when I asked him how many points he would deduct from his total awarded after GIs built a playground for children in infamous Quang Ngai City if, as my Vietnamese friends told me, it was being used as a dispatch center for children used as Vietcong couriers.

In all guerilla conflicts, again by their very nature, estimating who is winning at a given moment is almost impossible. At the very moment a group of young American journalists in the winter of 1963-64 after the Battle of Ap Bac started their campaign to bring down the Ngo government because of its alleged incompetence, we know from an Australian KGB/NKV agent Hanoi was thinking of withdrawing their COSVN headquarters because they thought they were losing. It took Americans [but not my Australian counterinsurgentist Ted Serong] months to understand the 1968 Tet offensive had sacrificed the North’s Southern guerillas, leaving the Communists no option but a set piece conventional war if they were to win. That is what they did in 1975 under conditions Washington facilitated.

I know little about Iraq. And I would assume neither does Sen. Kerry. But I am sure complications on the ground are no less convoluted.

If there is a valid Vietnam analogy, it might well be a hypothetical one: despite all our tragic failures in Vietnam, Washington had won the war there until Henry Kissinger and the Nixon Administration sought favor with their Congressional critics and Moscow in “the era of détente” and cut off military aid after we had created a South Vietnamese army totally dependent on American logistics,.

But, no, Senator, Iraq – whatever else it is – Iraq is not [yet] Vietnam.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

June 22, 2006


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