Forty-year anniversary: Lessons we can learn

As the Democrats wimped out on ending the war in Iraq and, instead, now rely on the imminent failure of the “surge� so to affix blame for the increasing death and maiming rate of our soldiers, several studies allude to a parallel with the Vietnam War. The news analysts speak of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s reluctance to admit that an escalated conflict was a bad idea getting worse. We’re reminded that a week after he took office, he rescinded Kennedy’s plan to withdraw and, instead, sided with the military industrial complex and pushed the communist expansion domino theory and a national security need for an escalation of the conflict.

Some of the parallels do work. For domino theory read weapons of mass destruction. For expansion read “war on terror� which took us from Afghanistan to Iraq to the “surge� which also has parallels to the lottery draft of 1970 and Nixon’s need for more bodies to throw at the problem. But overall, comparing Vietnam and the war in Iraq has one major flaw: the Arab question is real. The “Asian� or “communist� issue was bogus or, at best, temporary (see Vietnam’s booming capitalist economy today).

Iraq is an Arab nation (and please remember that Iran is not, although Muslim). Arabs from Morocco to Syria, from Egypt to the Sudan have one thing in common: They are Arabs. A common religion mostly binds them together, true (although Christian or Jewish Arabs still think of themselves as Arabs).

But being an Arab is having brothers and sisters with a shared ethnic background, a way of tradition and ethic embedded in culture, music, writing and religion. It doesn’t matter if a non-Arab nation is 800 miles away, if someone is annoying your Arab cousins, then they are annoying you. If they threaten them, then they threaten you.

The founding of the non-Arab state of Israel was completed in 1948 amidst the chaos of nomad Arab tribes vying for nationhood, regional instability left over from allied cartographers dicing up the Arab world with pen and ink (regardless of cultural, ethnic, religious or tribal sensitivity), and, not least, the results of the holocaust and the need for all the post-World War II United Nations to find a permanent home for the remains of persecuted Jewry.

The founding of the nation state of Israel was not completed without terrorism (Israeli freedom fighters so labeled by the ruling authority), battles and bloodshed. And matters went downhill from there. It was only the intervention of the United States and our support of this fledgling nation that prevented its annihilation by neighboring states, displaced Arab refugee militias, and geo-politically funded terrorism. For 40 years or more, the Arab world has seen America side with, support and arm the Israelis.

Then, in 1967, came the Six-Day War, on June 4. Believing there was unfinished business in the region (a lot of which was left over from Lawrence of Arabia’s day and World War I), Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, took to the airwaves, whipping up courage and hatred for the lands stolen from Arab brothers.

A call to arms took popular form in surrounding Arab countries and this frightened the populace of Israel. However, these Israelis were a people who had, to a large degree, been through war and horrors that Nasser and other Arab leaders could not comprehend (or believe at the time). The Jews had survived and were not about to blow away with the threat of more conflict. They had been granted and held a homeland, finally devoid of a bigoted overlord or racist regime, and, importantly, they had nowhere else to go. With backs against the wall and a determination bred in concentration camps, a bravery-infected, zealous population prepared for and almost looked forward to the coming conflict.

When the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian attacks came, the fierceness of the Israeli defence — and then surge deep into Arab territory — astounded the whole Arab world. The Arabs looked for someone to blame, saw the U.S.-made tanks, jet planes and weapons and, from that day forward, associated the United States with a day of humiliation at the hands of the United States’  “Zionist brothersâ€� that will forever tie us to Israel, even if that was not, way back then, so assured. Of course, our military industrial complex didn’t mind. Firstly, we were selling more weapons and systems. Secondly, they could be tested and improved in real battle conditions. Many of the systems the U.S. military uses today were vastly improved by testing during Israeli conflicts over the years.

When Israel took Jerusalem, the holy city for Jews, Christians and Muslims, the Arab defeat, morally and geo-politically, was complete. The Egyptians sued for peace through the U.N. Lebanon simply lost and later was forced to take millions of refugee Palestinians. Syria lost the Golan Heights and half its war machinery and retreated to Lebanon’s northern border, determined to use that country as a buffer from then to today, destroying Lebanon in the process. Israel, a nation not accepted to the U.N. at that time, agreed to peace, or at least a cease-fire. And the embers still glow.

Thirty years later, the Vietnam issue is resolved (at a huge human cost). The Israeli issue is resolved insofar as no one can have any doubt about the tiger that lurks there should an Arab nation decide to take action. The Israelis won (to a degree) and are mostly not liked because of it. Perhaps that is the best lesson of Vietnam. By losing we may have lost face, lost lives, but in the end created a peace of sorts.

What we all need to realize is that Iraq presents us with a much less favorable outcome. Even if the surge and our policing action beings peace to that troubled nation and divisive tribes, the United States will be blamed for the past violence (not Sadaam) and the takeover of an Arab nation. Even if we get out and the nation dissolves into civil war or sectarian violence for the foreseeable future, people there will blame the United States for creating the instability — allowing faction to openly oppose faction. I can think of no way the United States will not be blamed, no matter what the outcome now.

Gone are (like the lines on a Lawrence of Arabia map carving up Arabia), the reasons for the conflict in Iraq. The hollow words used to spin public support have evaporated already. What we will be left with is a nation without the will of the Israelis to defend or die, a nation with neighboring Arab states plying their commercial, religious or tribal influences, a United States  tired of a far-off conflict and body bags, and — the worst of all — a weakening of world public opinion about who Americans really are. Unlike the Israelis who were attacked in 1967 and decisively won — and then agreed to peace as quickly as possible — we have no end game to play here, we can’t win decisively or otherwise.

We can only lose now, as with Vietnam, or be faced with the decades of local violence and geo-political hatred that Israel has had to face. Which is better? That is for the will of the American people to say, but unless you know what the options are, you will be left with believing “war on terror,� “domino theory,� or, worst of all nonsense, “mission accomplished.�

The writer lives in Amenia Union.