Viet Duh?

"We'll win unless we quit."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is the lesson learned from Viet Nam by George W. Bush, that great freedom fighter who saved Alabama dental offices from the scourge of communism.

No one ever said he was a quick study. There are of course many obvious lessons to be learned from that painful era (even The Princess Bride gave us "Ha ha.. you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is: Never get involved in a land war in Asia.")Those lessons tend to revolve around the limits of American military power, the crucial role of nationalism and ethnicity as motivational forces and the inability to impose unpopular western-style regimes on cultures we don't understand. Somehow I don't see winning unless quitting, a simple-minded cousin of "stay the course," on that list of lessons learned.

And then there is Dennis Byrne, one of the dimmer bulbs that for reasons that pass all understanding is allowed to bloviate on the op-ed page of a major newspaper:

The folks who believe the Iraq war looks increasingly like the Vietnam War are right. At least the part where the United States pulls out and leaves millions of people hanging out to dry. That part where the war comes to a dishonorable, murderous end. Like on the day, April 30, 1975, that America broke its promises to millions of South Vietnamese and jumped ship. The day on which hysterical Vietnamese civilians and officials were crowding a ladder to the top of the U.S. Embassy, pleading for a seat on the last American helicopter out. The day that crowds of Vietnamese swarmed the embassy gate, crying for escape or protection, as North Vietnamese tanks approached. The day that uncounted thousands turned into freedom-seeking boat people. We abandoned millions of people to be stripped of their freedoms, imprisoned for their beliefs or slaughtered by a monstrous, tyrannical regime. It was one of the most shameful days in American history. It was our own day of infamy. Blame public opinion for bringing shame on ourselves. Public opinion demanded a Congress that simply decided to choke the life out of the South Vietnamese. Yes, the Iraq war is beginning to look a whole lot like the Vietnam War.

No, Denny, that day was not the day of shame. The shameful days were those of more than a decade past when, like today, we fought an unnecessary, misbegotten war conceived of hubris, deceit and a fatally flawed ideology.

We did not leave "millions of people hanging out to dry" that day, we left Viet Nam to determine its own destiny. No doubt the course of that process was made more painful by generations of western imperialism and war, buty the process was Vietnamese. The "government" of South Viet Nam was horrifically corrupt, and was peopled by holdovers from French imperialism, priviled and Catholic, known as the "whites" in an agrarian, Buddhist nation. No matter how many American bodies were sacrificed on the altar of the domino theory, this regime never commanded the respect and loyalty of the people.

There were many lost opportunities in the Viet Nam saga. Ho Chi Minh was at Versailles in 1919 seeking inclusion of Asian peoples within Woodrow Wilson's vision of self-determination. During World War II, Ho used the words of Jefferson to declare Vietnamese independence, yet FDR returned his people to the French to enlist DeGaulle's help in post-war Europe. Dien Bien Phu in 1954 should have allowed us to see this as a post-colonial contest for the soul of a small, distant nation rather than the central front in the war on terror sorry, the struggle against global communism.

In The March of Folly, popular historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that America "betrayed" itself in Viet Nam, and how right she was. Unfortunately, another lesson, apparently unlearned, of the Viet Nam era is how willing American leaders are to engage in those same acts of betrayal, and how willing the betrayed nation is to allow them to do it.