5-25-06, 9:11 am

While there are very great differences between the Vietnam War and the Iraq occupation, there is one important similarity. The people of Iraq are the real victims of what is happening and the death and destruction that is devastating their country is what history will remember. In global and U.S. media the reports of the sharp rise in the numbers of Iraqis killed and maimed by the guerillas and their Iraqi and U.S. military and police opponents makes the Bush administration’s comments about the advance of democracy into a cruel joke. As an extensive New York Times story makes clear, militias connected to political parties and individuals, heavily armed government forces heavily infiltrated by guerillas are engaging in an escalating cycle of murder and terror against the Iraqi people, who are caught in the middle of a homicidal dodge ball game while U.S. taxpayers pay and U.S. civilian contractors rake in very big bucks. The Times story highlights a thousand man special force brigade, whose ostensible purpose was to protect the oil pipeline in territory inhabited by the Sunni Muslim population (a minority in Iraq). According to Iraqi government sources, the government armed brigade was infiltrated with guerrillas engaged in wholesale killing of people regarded as government supporters, including the brigade commander. Along with the killing, there was of course the question of oil pipeline security in what most Americans understand has been a war to gain and secure the production and reserves of one of the world’s leading oil nations. The lengthy Times story reports the thousands of killers 'in uniform' wandering the country with bureaucratic sanction, of ministries of government with thousands of armed employees, and of atrocities committed by both 'legitimate' supporters of the present government and guerillas masquerading as government supporters to kill government supporters. What the article doesn’t do is establish a framework to put this together, a framework that would enable readers to have some understanding of likely outcomes. Iraq is disintegrating into warlord rule. To say that this cannot happen because of the value of the oil resources is no answer, because it is happening, as it has in other places at other times. In China after World War I, imperialist powers worked with various warlords who controlled large areas of the country to protect their commercial interests until the Chinese Communist party led the Chinese people in a war of national liberation against the war lords, landlords, reactionary Kuomintang regime, and Japanese imperialist invaders. In the process, many millions of Chinese perished in what was a generation of struggle that concluded with World War II and the postwar revolutionary Chinese Civil War. Had the Soviet revolution not triumphed in the Russian Civil War (1918-1921) it is likely that the former Czarist Generals leading warlord armies supported by the imperialist powers would have divided Russia among themselves the way organized crime groups divide cities, except they would have been the state power. In many nations, imperialists today are in effect creating 'enterprise zones' to harvest raw materials and produce goods while the masses of people live in misery and poverty, strangers in their lands the way the Chinese people were segregated from the districts in their own country under foreign control.

Although they are currently doing a lousy job of it, it is possible that the U.S. and the U.K. can create, exploit, and control oil zones in Iraq while bargaining with regional warlords and propping up a weak central government as they did in China in the late 1920s and early 1930s. For the Iraqi people, this was be a death sentence, with more and more innocent people dying a little at the time while the majority lived in a world of poverty and crime. Unlike the Vietnam War, where the solution was always available, that is a negotiated settlement with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and unification of the country based on some version of the 1954 Geneva agreement which ended the French colonial war (and which the Eisenhower administration sabotaged by creating the South Vietnamese government) the solution isn’t clear in Iraq. What is clear though is that the Anglo U.S. occupation is a disaster and the political structures that the Anglo U.S. occupation has created not only are not working but are being directed by those who are who are intensifying the oppression of the Iraqi people. What can be done for the Iraqi people is for the U.S. and U.K governments to establish a clear timetable to end the occupation, to turn over much of their 'reconstruction' activities to the UN, and to launch through the UN, regional authorities and Iraqi government a crash program of public works to provide jobs for the Iraqi people and repair an infrastructure that was fragile to begin with and has never been repaired This means an end to 'Halliburton’s war,' or the war in which private contractors both do the construction and reconstruction while providing services from meals to latrine cleaning to the occupiers at Military Industrial Complex prices. Without an economic foundation that provides for the security and welfare of the Iraqi people, the political structures will never be anything more than Potemkin Villages established to fool the gullible. Millions perished in Indochina even with the eventual victory of the national liberation forces and unification of the devastated country. Although there are monuments to the 58,000 Americans who lost their lives and endless accounts on the effects of the war on the United States, the U.S. still does not have full diplomatic relations with Vietnam and the reparations that Richard Nixon privately and dishonestly promised as part of his withdrawal package have not even been mentioned for decades.

The situation in Iraq has been very different. In Iraq a brutal right-wing dictatorship rather than the strong and popular socialist government in Vietnam was characterized as the 'enemy.' Iraq possesses natural resources relatively more valuable than Vietnam. The invasion and conquest of Iraq was relatively easier than the failed attempt to create and sustain an artificial South Vietnamese state against an insurgency with clear and positive goals and huge popular support. A clear difference on the domestic front is that a U.S. government of the far right (Bush) has treated the occupation as a gold rush for companies like Halliburton, while liberal governments (Kennedy and Johnson, minus of course Richard Nixon) squandered their support for domestic reforms by fighting the war.

But for the people of Iraq who live in a world where Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, particularly the last two, 'freedom from want and freedom from fear,' are violated every day, these are distinctions without much difference.

Americans though still have a chance to contain the horror by withdrawing and turning over the reconstruction process to United Nations authorities, regional authorities, and Iraqi people committed to a secular federated nation without warlord armies and foreign domination of their natural resources. To do that, the U.S. will need to oust the Bush administration and replace it with a progressive government. That process, hopefully, will begin this fall.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.