Rootless Cosmopolitan – By Tony Karon

You can be sure that Dr. Martin Luther King’s politics will be scrubbed clean of most of its content when President George W. Bush celebrates the public holiday named in his honor on Monday. In order to honor Dr. King’s legacy, Rootless Cosmopolitan invites readers to revisit his April 4, 1967 speech on the Vietnam war. It’s well worth reading and considering in light of contemporary realities.

Extract:

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them too because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1945 after a combined French and Japanese occupation, and before the Communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony.

Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not “ready” for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination, and a government that had been established not by China (for whom the Vietnamese have no great love) but by clearly indigenous forces that included some Communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.

Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of the reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators — our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S. troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictatorships seemed to offer no real change — especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy — and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese –the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go — primarily women and children and the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only non-Communist revolutionary political force — the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on — save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers.

Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front — that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the north” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them — the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again and then shore it up with the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the north, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which would have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again.

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. Also it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind us that they did not begin to send in any large number of supplies or men until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard of the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the north. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.

Read the whole thing. And consider what Dr. King would make of the wars being waged by a government that honors him even as its own actions speak only of contempt for his legacy.

Critics are right to label President Bush’s new Iraq plan an “escalation,” but what was most clear from his speech announcing it is that the object of this escalation is not Iraq, but Iran.

For all the smarmy talk about the Iraq Study Group, Bush bluntly rejected its central premise that the only way the U.S. can salvage anything in Iraq is through a new political agreement both among Iraqis and their neighbors — a process that takes into account the reality that Iran has legitimate interests in Iraq (far more so, quite frankly, than the U.S. does), and envisages a process in which all stakeholders are accommodated. Instead, Bush offered familiar distortions in his description of the reason for failure thus far — al-Qaeda and Iran, were the culprits, the former stoking sectarian violence through terror attacks and the latter ostensibly supporting death squads. Anyone familiar with the current dynamics in the Middle East would have taken President Bush’s outline of the consequences of failure — “radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits” and “would be in a better position to topple moderate governments,” Iran would be emboldened and al-Qaeda would have a new safe haven — as an admission of failure, since all of those consequences are already in play.

But it was the characterization of Iran’s role that was most disturbing. Bush suggested that the Iraqi people had voted for united country at the polls, and seen their dreams dashed by the maneuvering of Iran and Syria and others. That’s a crock. Iran enthusiastically supported those elections, and why wouldn’t they? The Shiite majority voted overwhelmingly in favor of parties far closer to Tehran than they are to Washington. Moreover, while Bush implies that sectarianism was somehow a deviation from what the electorate had chosen, in fact the electorate had voted almost entirely on sectarian and ethnic lines. The sectarian principle is at the heart of the democratically elected government; it’s not some imposition by al-Qaeda or Iran.

Iran and Syria must be addressed, Bush said, but only as a threat — he accused them of offering support to insurgent forces attacking U.S. troops, and vowed to stop them. Almost in the same breath, he added: “We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence sharing ­ and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies. We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border. And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.”

Carrier strike groups and Patriot missile defenses are of no use in the counterinsurgency war in Iraq: They are an attempt to turn up the heat on Iran by preparing for an air strike, and putting in place the means to contain Iran’s response via its missile capability. Bush called for regional support, but only on the basis of his anti-Iran alliance — for the Sunni regimes, support for the U.S. in Iraq was cited as a duty in light of their common purpose in containing Iran.

So, essentially we’re now being asked to believe that the Iraqi government, dominated by Iran-friendly Shiite religious parties, is going to act in concert with Bush’s plan — and even Bush admitted that their support is the critical factor — giving U.S. forces the green light to take control of Sadr City from the Sadrists and so on, even as Washington moves its assets into position for a military strike on Iran. It may be, of course, that Washington is posturing in order to sweat Tehran into believing that a military strike is coming in order to intimidate the Islamic Republic into backing down, but frankly I wouldn’t bet on the collective strategic wisdom of Cheney-Rice and Khamenei-Larijani-Ahmedinajad combining to avoid a confrontation. And if the U.S. is raising the stakes, you can reliably expect Iran to do the same, probably starting in Iraq.

Even within the narrow Iraqi context, no matter what Maliki has told Bush, I wouldn’t bet on him coming through for the U.S. when the battle for Sadr City starts in earnest, and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, appalled by the violence, begins demanding that the U.S. go home.

Equally important, though, the new Bush moves give Iran no incentive to cooperate, and plenty of incentive to tie the U.S. up in an increasingly messy situation in Iraq. And my suspicion is that Tehran has hardly begun to exercise its ability to cause chaos in Iraq.

Again, the Bush Administration has failed to grasp the most basic lesson of his failures in Iraq and elsewhere — that military force has its limits, and that power is a more complex thing. Instead of recognizing what the likes of Baker and Scowcroft have emphasized all along — that the basic crisis in the region is political — Bush is going the Cheney lock-and-load route. Perhaps that’s why Bush warned Americans to expect another year of bloodletting. And stupendously reckless adventurism though it may be, I wouldn’t bet against him launching air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. And then he’ll have to learn the same lesson all over again, because the region will be no safer or any more stable. On the contrary, I’d say it’s a safe bet that by the time he leaves the White House, the U.S. position everywhere from Lebanon, Egypt and the Palestinian territories to Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, will be considerably worse than it is now.

You have to wonder what President Bush would have made of the image — had he been shown the tape — of Saddam Hussein being strung up by a bunch of masked toughs, while all around the small crowd in the room could be heard victoriously chanting the name of Moqtada Sadr. (For an excellent description of the events and translation of what was being said, see my friend Nir Rosen’s great post great post at Iraqslogger.com, a daily news and analysis web site covering all things Iraq that he helped found — and is well worth bookmarking. In a symbolic tribute to just what the U.S. has achieved in Iraq, Saddam was essentially killed by a lynch mob of his enemies — indeed, one reason the current Iraqi government was in such a hurry to string him up was that the Sadr-Maliki alliance wanted the credit, over Shiite rivals, for slaying the former tyrant.

Amid all of this, we’re told, the Bush Administration is “making good progress” towards formulating a new Iraq policy. No doubt, although it’s a relatively safe bet that nothing they’re planning to do will reverse the slide. Saddam’s grim end merely confirms what has long been obvious: That sectarianism is the organizing principle of Iraqi society now, and that the United States no longer has any control over political events in Iraq.

No question the Saddam execution is viewed through the sectarian prism, and will only exacerbate the civil war — indeed, the U.S. could not have done a better job of ensuring his lionization in the eyes of Sunni Arabs throughout the region. (Not the first time the U.S. has given Saddam a leg-up, of course — Juan Cole offers an excellent summary of the long history of U.S. complicity in putting Saddam in power and keeping him there.) But the fact that he was executed now against the wishes of the U.S. is a perfect illustration of what the U.S. has created in Iraq — a political system over which it has no control, in which the leading elements are ultimately hostile to U.S. regional ambitions (although they’re willing and eager to use U.S. military support to their own political and sectarian ends), and which simply cannot be made to conform to U.S. goals and strategies.

Washington has made no secret of its frustration at the refusal of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to authorize a crackdown on the sectarian militia of his ally, Moqtada Sadr, and to marginalize the anti-American rabble-rouser — and also his refusal to do anything meaningful to coax the Baathists in the insurgency back into the fold.

Of course, before that the U.S. was equally frustrated with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and backed (or was it initiated?) efforts to get him removed (which brought Maliki to power, when the U.S. was hoping to get SCIRI’s Adel Abd’el-Mahdi into the job). And so the U.S. has been consorting with all and sundry in the hope of getting SCIRI, ironically the most pro-Iranian of all the Shiite parties but which appeals to the U.S. because it has largely cooperated and shares an enmity for Moqtada Sadr, to either take over the leadership of the Shiite Alliance or else to break with it and set up a new government in alliance with the Kurds and Sunnis. For some reason, the U.S. had convinced itself that they had the support of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for such a move, so when he nixed it and anything else that divides the Shiites, it became clear that the (frankly bizarre) idea of turning the longtime Iranian asset SCIRI into a pliant U.S. client regime in Baghdad quietly collapsed. Just for good measure, two of the Iranian officials arrested last week by U.S. forces in Baghdad accused of plotting attacks on Americans were picked up inside the compound of SCIRI leader Abdulaziz al-Hakim, who was being feted at the White House only two weeks earlier.

While the most likely new course to be announced by Bush in the couple of days is “surging” U.S. troops in Iraq, i.e. sending a few thousand more to help secure Baghdad. But that really is just a case of “staying the course,” because there’s no sign of any change in the political direction of the Iraqi government, without which sending more U.S. troops is pointless, or worse. The Shiite political leadership wants the troops to fight the Sunni insurgents; the Sunni politicians want the troops to protect them from the Shiite death squads — both communities remain sharply antagonistic to the U.S. presence.

In a thoughtful analysis of the Iraq Study Group report, the International Crisis Group makes clear the logical conclusion from the evidence presented in the study — although which could not possibly be made explicit in its conclusions without making Bush and Blair sound foolish:

All Iraqi actors who, one way or another, are involved in the country’s internecine violence must be brought to the negotiating table and pressed to accept the necessary compromises. That cannot be done without a concerted effort by all Iraq’s neighbours, which in turn cannot be done if their interests are not reflected in the final outcome. If Iraq can be saved at this late date, it will require three ambitious and interrelated steps:

A new forceful multilateral approach that puts real pressure on all Iraqi parties. The Baker-Hamilton report is right to advocate a broad International Support Group; it should comprise the five permanent Security Council members and Iraq’s six neighbours. But its purpose must not be to support the Iraqi government. It must support Iraq, which means pressing the government, along with all other constituencies, to make necessary compromises. The government and security forces should not be treated as privileged allies to be bolstered. They are but one among many parties to the conflict and not innocent of responsibility for much of the trouble. It also means agreeing on rules of conduct and red-lines for third-party involvement. Sustained multilateral diplomacy, not a one-off international conference is needed.

A conference of all Iraqi and international stakeholders to forge a new political compact. This is not a military challenge in which one side needs to be strengthened and another defeated. It is a political challenge in which new consensual understandings need to be reached. A new, more equitable and inclusive national compact needs to be agreed upon by all relevant actors, including militias and insurgent groups, on issues such as federalism, resource allocation, de-Baathification, the scope of the amnesty and the timetable for a U.S. withdrawal. This can only be done if the International Support Group brings all of them to the negotiating table, and if its members steer their deliberations, deploying a mixture of carrots and sticks to influence those on whom they have particular leverage.

A new U.S. regional strategy, including engagement with Syria and Iran, end of efforts at regime change, revitalisation of the Arab-Israeli peace process and altered strategic goals. Mere engagement of Iraq’s neighbours will not do; Washington must clearly redefine its objectives in the region to enlist regional, and particularly Iranian and Syrian help. The goal is not to bargain with them, but to seek compromise agreement on an end-state for Iraq and the region that is no one’s first choice, but with which all can live.

That’s what the grownups would do. And the Bush Administration has made clear it won’t follow grownup advice. Instead, it plans to send more troops ostensibly to shore up a phantom fledgling democratic national unity government under attack by extremists (many of whom, in reality, are actually part of the government and its security forces).

The moment the U.S. lost control of the process was when it first conceded to democratic elections to choose an Iraqi government. This is often mistakenly attributed to misguided missionary zeal on the part of the president: In reality, it was demanded by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who made clear that J. Paul Bremer’s plans to have a constitution draw up by a government of his own choosing weren’t going to fly, and unless it was an elected government, the Shiites would rebel.

It takes one to know one: My favorite moment of the whole Bush tenure came in this Dec. 2004 Soviet-style awarding of the Medal of Honor to former CIA chief George Tenet, Iraq war commander Gen. Tommy Franks, and former Iraq viceroy J. Paul Bremer for the “pivotal role” they had played in the “great events” in Iraq. Yes, yes, I know, I also wondered whether it was April 1 when I first read it…

Once Iraqis could vote, the leaders the U.S. had attempted to install (from Chalabi to Iyad Allawi) were marginalized, and a number of them moved back to London. Those chosen by the electorate have proven unwilling to implement the U.S. strategy for holding Iraq together. Saddam’s death confirms how little control the U.S. now has over political events in Iraq. And that makes the number of troops it fields on the ground largely irrelevant to the outcome — except, of course, if the U.S. was willing to treble the number of troops it has there now and seize direct political control again. But even if it had the political will, it doesn’t have enough troops to do that.

The problem, I think, in part derives from the fact that Cheney-Bush have not yet reconciled with the inevitability of quitting Iraq — I suspect that they still see those massive permanent bases built in Iraq playing the long-term role originally envisaged in the invasion (Jay Garner compared it to the Phillippines, where the U.S. maintained military bases for a century to fuel its Pacific Fleet; others made clear that Iraq would become the new Saudi Arabia because that country could no longer afford the domestic political cost of hosting massive U.S. bases… either way, it’s clear that Bush went in planning to stay.) I’m not expecting a new strategy from Bush in the coming days; I’m expecting new tactics, and even then, the shifts will be quantitative rather than qualitative.