David A. Mittell Jr.: Looking at Iraq through Vietnam

[Barrett808]

BOSTON -- The Vietnam War was a civil war, though not primarily among Vietnamese. Truly, it was a civil war among Americans, and in 1975, after 10 long years, it was finally won by the American antiwar movement.

In 1975, the unelected President Gerald Ford, up against the post-Watergate Congress elected in 1974, was unable to secure an appropriation of a few hundred million dollars for supplies for the government of South Vietnam, which was facing one more in a series of spring offensives by North Vietnam. This was the last straw: The South Vietnamese, who had been defending themselves reasonably well since the "peace" agreement of 1973, panicked and gave up, and the somewhat surprised North Vietnamese rolled into Saigon in less than a month.

These final defeats of the South Vietnamese by the North Vietnamese, and of the "hawks" by the "doves" in the United States, left South Vietnam to religious persecution, re-education camps, boat people, and "Ho Chi Minh City" -- the official name for Saigon, faithfully used today by old doves but not by most Vietnamese.

...

Those who have opposed President Bush on the Iraq war, or for his tax cuts, energy plans, environmental policies, or what-have-you -- but particularly on the war -- so hate the man that, like the conscientious objector in 1975, many of them want the United States to lose in Iraq. Their own essentially narcissistic war is against George W. Bush, and just to defeat and humiliate him they would happily reprise the spectacle of the evacuation of Saigon.

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http://www.projo.com/opinion/columnists/content/projo_20051117_17mitt.16b39518.html