Introduction
“Peace with honor,” was the phrase President Richard Nixon used on January 23, 1973 to describe the Paris Peace Accords that ended the Vietnam War. What really happened was a disorderly evacuation, appropriately ending as a CIA officer helped the last, desperate evacuees to get onto the last Air America helicopter to leave the rooftop of the American Embassy in Saigon on April 29th, 1975.
We disgraced ourselves in Vietnam. After promising to lead South Vietnam to freedom and democratization, tens of thousands of real and suspected American sympathizers were tortured and killed by the North Vietnamese after we fled.
We are doing it again in Afghanistan, where we once again promised to lead a country to freedom and democratization. With President Joe Biden saying that he “trusts” the Afghan Army because it is “well trained and well equipped”, once again, thousands of real and suspected American sympathizers will be tortured and killed by the Taliban after we run away.
That is the subject of today’s 10 minute episode.
Continuing
The US goes into various countries, including Vietnam and Afghanistan, promising freedom and democracy. The government calls it nation building: I call it bait and switch. We know full well that we cannot impose democracy on another country; either they want it and are willing to demand it and achieve it on their own, or nothing happens. Yet knowing that, our politicians and military leaders recklessly promised the Afghans democracy, all while wanting to invade for personal and political reasons.
Pop Quiz: Q. Name the one country that had never been a democracy that became one after we invaded. A. Japan. After almost completely destroying Japan in WWII by bombing, including the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, utterly destroying the country economically, getting the Emperor to admit that he was not a god, instituting a complete military occupation and writing a new constitution for the country, it worked. Second Q. Where else are we willing to do all that? Second answer. No where. Not even close.
Going back to the days of Alexander the Great, four powerful armies tried invading Afghanistan before us; all of them failed: the Greeks, Romans, British and the Russians, all at the height of their military powers. We knew that it would take a victory-over-Japan-like-effort to succeed. We knew that going in, yet we are pretending to be surprised that we failed. Now we are leaving, making excuses and happy statements while we run. “Retreat and declare victory,” is hollow and deceitful.
The Taliban will be free to exert cruel, dictatorial control over Afghanistan in exactly the same way that North Vietnam did when we reneged on our promises to South Vietnam. In both countries, the carnage and human suffering will be dramatically worse than if we had never set foot there.
Some lucky ones escaped the communist dictatorship’s terrible retribution in Vietnam. The Vietnamese boat people were the refugees who fled Vietnam by boat and ship following the end of the war in 1975. This migration and humanitarian crisis was at its highest in 1978 and 1979, but continued through the early 1990s. Escaping landlocked Afghanistan will be a touch harder. And none of the surrounding countries, e.g., Pakistan, China and Iran, are all that attractive anyway.
We were right in intervening in South Korea when North Korea attacked, but not in South Vietnam. Q. But Will, weren’t we defending against the spread of communism in both cases? A. No; these are very different examples. Both Germany and Korea were partitioned post WWII; North Korea was administered by the Soviet Union, and South Korea by the US. In 1950, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist (Communist)-aligned Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), North Korea, suddenly attacked the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#Modern_political_definition (West)-aligned First Republic of Korea, South...